"Good morning 1983, where are your children?" So begins "1983", the title track of the new album by the Swiss singer, Sophie Hunger, the new diva of European alternative music and one of the most popular artists on social networking sites. "I've come back to you for a while, not forever. 1983, show me your fingers, leave me a sign," continues Hunger as she looks back to her past. According to comments she made to the magazine, Café Babel, it is "a conversation between me and the year I was born." Born Émilie Jeanne-Sophie Welti in Bern, she grew up in London and Bonn because of her father's diplomatic postings. A piano student as a child, she ended up playing guitar and singing, and above all writing, which inspired her to record and produce the album, Sketches on Sea. A lot more work was put into the follow-up, Monday's Ghost, albeit still home-produced, which established her as one of the best exponents of European folk-blues, a term that actually belies Hunger's great eclecticism in effortlessly moving from pop to jazz, and which was rewarded with appearances at two iconic events: MIDEM and the Montreux Jazz Festival. Since then her career has been unstoppable. Her concert schedule is fully booked between now and December, and not long ago her MySpace page reached one and a half million hits. "1983, where are your voices, where are your strange mongoloids, where are your poets, your doubts, your prisoners?" Hunger continues before explaining, "I love singing in German because it has much less musical history than the English language. I have to experiment with my voice." English does however dominate 1983, which was released by Two Gentlemen Records and has already been played extensively on GladysPalmera.com's The Insider show. The disc consists of 14 tracks and features a five-piece band that is a perfect example of Hunger's flexibility: a trombonist, a guitarist and flautist, a drummer and percussionist, a guitarist and a bassist. There is also a guest harpist, which would lead you to believe that the content is full of melancholy and intimacy. But that is another story.
