At live concerts, the 43-year-old from Vogtland personally rolls out the cables and is on stage in a comedy as the singing leading actress.
“Come on now, get busy!” That’s how the Italian “Avanti Avanti” could be translated, and appropriately that’s the name of a theater premiere that premieres this Friday at the Rosenthal Theater in Selb and is then to go on a tour of Germany until the end of November. In the leading role: Stefanie Hertel, who is putting another iron in the fire of her career with her first appearance as an actress: Because of her, suitable hit songs from the 50s and 60s were worked into the originally musicless piece. “I still love Schlager,” says Stefanie Hertel.
But she does her musically juicy business in another area: pop-country. Together with her daughter Johanna Mross and her husband Lenny Lanner, she runs the appropriately aligned trio “More Than Words”, which has just presented a new, quite remarkable album with “Today”. With quite ambitious goals, as the three protagonists report in detail in the new episode of the podcast “Something Culture Must Be”: The genre, which as an idiosyncratic combination of traditional bluegrass folk and modern pop rock in the USA, has been around superstars like Taylor Swift for many years forms a successful giant hype, has not really caught on in Germany: Here, people still often think of truck stops when they hear “country”. The Hertel family wants to change that with their band – and has also reorganized itself to do so.
More Than Words (the name was taken after the superhit ballad of the same name by the band Extreme) works, quite unusual in the hit industry, according to the so-called DIY principle, which is particularly common in the punk and indie rock scene. The abbreviation stands for “Do it yourself” and means that the artists take everything into their own hands for the sake of maximum independence. “You can only do that if you’re authentic,” says Lenny Lanner, who wrote, produced and recorded the record, in the podcast: “Everything that you see of us out there comes directly from the three of us. Every poster, every website, even the tour planning. It’s a lot of work, but nobody talks us into it!” Stefanie Hertel, she says, unrolls the cables before the concert and then bundles them up afterwards. And: She enjoys the time with her daughter Johanna, who in turn emphasizes how organically the band works for her. Also exciting: How the three of them secretly tested their project in Bonnie Tyler’s opening act: In Paris – because Stefanie is completely unknown there.
The podcast: In the current episode of “There must be some culture” Stefanie Hertel, Johanna Mross and Lenny Lanner discuss in detail.