I am a rather introverted person and quite impressionable, so it is really helpful to live with people who are able to be still.’ Summer Is Not that Simpleīack when we met, summer was still far away. It is overwhelming to be in a new place again with nothing to fall back onto. ‘ It takes quite a while to build up stability. When moving to a foreign city, not speaking the language, not knowing the culture, it can be especially challenging to acclimate. In Winter people walk past each other in a different way – not looking up,’ Lucy tells me. ‘I remember people speaking about this kind of Winter depression in Germany and how it catches up with you. Moving on to summery days in Berlin, staying indoors and socially isolated becomes a harder burden to carry. ‘ South Africa in the Summer has, at times, felt quite claustrophobic to me.’’ Well, writing this in Mid-March due to current events it seems sadly prophetic that we spoke about isolation and restricted freedom of movement. Ironically now, we are getting a taste of how crippling a restriction of our, usually taken for granted, freedom of movement is. ‘ I don’t feel as much freedom of movement as I do here’. ‘South Africa is quite different’, she reminisces. Lucy, who came here to make music has to keep making a living in her field to keep her visa going, forcing her, in a good way, to work harder on her creative output than others might (don’t look at me). It’s helpful in the way that it forces me to focus on something, as opposed to constantly contemplating alternative choices.’ I agree, the choices you are confronted with – the luxury of choice – is overwhelming in both the positive and negative way. ‘I think because of that I don’t leave too much room for questioning whether or not I want to be here anymore. ‘It was quite a challenge to get here,’ she looks at me with fierce determination. The process of getting a visa, especially as an artist, is hard and she is still struggling to meet the means. Arriving here from South Africa was quite the transformation, she tells me. The musician moved to Berlin around a year and a half ago directly after she recorded her solo debut Sleeping Tapes For Some Girls. When thinking back today, I remember how carefully she worked to choose the words she used, gazing almost through the walls of her room and into another world entirely, before she opens her lips to speak. She speaks the way she sings in tender contemplative sentences just on the brink of turning into a whisper. Lucy Kruger’s voice is exactly what I expected it to be. And, after I am done going on about how cool the Gibson guitar on her bed is, she answers my question with patience. The artist leans back on the retro style couch, knee drawn up to the chin, and takes a sip of her beer. I feel honored by the fact that Lucy opened her private home up to allow this special interview to happen. The setting for our second Late Night Talk is even more intimate than the last. The cold beer in my still frozen fingers wakes me up a little. Mattress on the floor, scribbles on the nightstand, and several guitars leaning against the wall next to a keyboard – it is just what you would expect the home of a Berliner musician to look like. One minute before our appointed time, I ring the doorbell and Lucy invites me into her home.īoth of us are a little tired when we sit down on the couch in the artist’s cozy room. My fingers are reddened by the icy winds that haunt the streets in early March. I hang around the front door of Lucy Kruger, for a minute, drawing one last drag from my almost burned to a butt cigarette.
In the middle of the night sometime before the outbreak of Corona when you could still stroll over to someone else’s house to have a beer, I cross the busy streets of Berlin’s Neukölln – two beers in my bag – on the way to find the doorbell labeled, Kruger.
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