Above the clouds

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Above the clouds
Reinhard Mey
publication 1974
length 3:49
Genre (s) song writer
Author (s) Reinhard Mey
album Like year and day ago

Above the clouds is a song by Reinhard Mey . It dates from 1974 and was first released on the long-playing record Wie vor Jahr und Tag and as the B-side of the single Mann from Alemannia . The first live version (only with guitar accompaniment) was also released in 1974 on the double LP 8 p.m. , recorded in the Philharmonie Berlin .

content

The song describes the thoughts of the protagonist, who stands on an airfield and watches a plane take off. The song is about the Wilhelmshaven-Mariensiel airfield , where Reinhard Mey acquired his flight license . Mey later dedicated the song to the residents of what was then Berlin 's Tempelhof Airport .

reception

For the director Christian Petzold it is "the only good German folk song". It tells us that “we Germans can only breathe freely above the clouds, not on earth, not on the 'wet asphalt' of this song”.

For the Süddeutsche Zeitung it is "a clever and poetically drawn miniature in which the great is reflected in the small and the powerful words freedom, fear and worry come into their own in a feather-light way".

"Just for the jacket / air surveillance barracks pair you would have to give him the Hölderlin Prize."

- Hilmar Klute

In the vote for the 100 best songs of the century on ZDF as part of the program Our Best - Centennial Hits in 2005, Über den Wolken reached 4th place.

Cover versions

Over the years numerous cover versions have been made, including a version by Dieter Thomas Kuhn from 1994, one by Xavier Naidoo from 2002 and an English version from 2005 of Texas Lightning entitled Over the Mountains . In 2017, Die Toten Hosen picked up on motifs of the song in their socially critical song Unter den Wolken .

Mey himself wrote the French adaptation Au-dessus des nuages and the Dutch version Boven de wolken . Mey rewrote the chorus of the song for his Bunte Hund tour in 2008 and used it for the song Männer im Baumarkt, which was newly written for the tour . In 2013, Mey performed on Sesame Street and sang Over the Clouds with Ernie and Bert . The text was repositioned for this purpose. According to Mey, one of the few versions that he was happy about and enjoyed very much. In the fifth Tatortreiniger episode Above the Clouds Bjarne Mädel sang the song with modified lyrics.

literature

  • Ingo Grabowsky, Martin Lücke: The 100 hits of the century . European Publishing House, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 3-434-50619-5 , pp. 99-101.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel: Interview with Reinhard Mey - Gesine Schwan let me copy it , accessed on July 1, 2010
  2. ↑ Anmoderation of the song on the live album 20:00 .
  3. ↑ Christian Petzold: "Uuuuuh, the thing will not only be pleasant." Der Tagesspiegel, September 23, 2014
  4. ↑ a b Süddeutsche Zeitung of December 21, 2012: Poet des Everyday
  5. ↑ Text Men in the Hardware Store ( Memento from January 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.1 MB)
  6. ↑ Reinhard Mey in Sesamstrasse: “Above the Clouds” , accessed on May 1, 2014

Web links