MY MUSIC MOMENT - Anja Schneider

Anja Schneider is the driving force behind the very successful, Berlin based, mobilee record label. Anja and the label have a huge following around the world and her music takes her on many travels. Here she tells us how one special journey (a road trip across Mexico), proved very inspiring, as directly after this she went into the studio to record her new artist album ‘Beyond The Valley’.

One of the most interesting journeys I ever went on was travelling 5000km through Mexico in my little Renault Clio – it was a total adventure. It was my idea to go – a friend told me at an after-party in Mexico that he would go from Monterey to Los Angeles and that it would take four hours, but he meant the flight, not a drive – however I thought he meant a drive and I thought “that’s not so long”, and I got inspired to drive through Mexico.

So from the beginning we started off on the wrong foot. I was with Diego – my Mexican boyfriend - and he was saying “No no, its much longer than you think”, but I didn’t really listen! We missed two flights because Mexico has totally different roads than I was used to – and I thought I would drive through it in two weeks but it took at least three; I basically estimated the distances completely wrong. We started in Monterey and ended in Baja California, a little island – we also missed the connecting ferry twice – in some ways it was a disaster but it was all so much fun!

It’s so colourful in the Mexican towns and by the coast, but then also driving through the desert was such a crazy experience with all the dust and open spaces.

On this journey I became a big fan of the Mexican Mariachi bands. They are very traditional and historically important in Mexico and yet you still hear them everywhere – the young and old both love them. Usually a mariachi consists of at least three violins, two trumpets, one Mexican guitar, one vihuela (a high-pitched, five-string guitar) and one guitarrón (a small-scaled acoustic bass). They dress in silver studded charro outfits with wide-brimmed hats. The original Mariachi were Mexican street musicians or buskers and they usually sing about drug deals and gangsters and this sort of thing.

As this was exactly the time that I was preparing for my album, I was really inspired and I went to the Mexican flea markets to look for old instruments that the Mariachi bands use. I managed to buy some but when I took them into the studio in Berlin my producer told me I was totally crazy and that he couldn’t use them. They were a bit too old and useless, but still I think I took some of the flavour into my music. The songs on my album Cascabel (which is a Spanish word for a snake) and Safari, were especially inspired by Mexico.
During the whole trip I felt like I was in a road movie or maybe a Tarantino film – and the Mexican Mariachi music was our film soundtrack!

INTERVIEW BY LIZ MCGRATH | FOTO BY BENNO KRAEHAHN