Schawumm! is the name of Georg Ringsgwandl's new album. Schawumm! is the sound made when the busy parcel delivery driver slams the side door of his van shut. On his twelfth studio album (his eighteenth, if you count the live compilation ‘Alte Reißer und verreckte Geschichten’ and the music from his plays), he is still the Bavarian singer-songwriter who stumbles through the world with alert eyes, composting impressions in his brain and setting the resulting lyrics to the musical styles that have shaped him over the decades.
At the 2017 Ruth Awards, Georg Ringsgwandl was described as a bird of paradise with a Bavarian idiom and a seismograph of human sensitivities and abysses. He is also one of the great Bavarian poets who repeatedly manage to bring out the beauty of the Bavarian dialect and incorporate it into magnificent songs. ‘I wui di’ is one of those songs in which lyrics and music merge into a perfect unity and which touches the listener deeply with its dialectal elegance.
Of course, Ringsgwandl has once again turned his attention to the daily madness of our lives and our society, telling of the struggles of our parcel delivery drivers in “Götterbote” (Messenger of the Gods) or of our dependence on precisely these three essential items in "HSP. Handy, Schlüssel, Portemonnaie (Mobile phone, keys, wallet) about our dependence on these three essential items. In ‘Beim Tanzen’ (When dancing), he sings from the perspective of a man who has experienced and seen a lot and no longer has to fight every battle himself.
The work of his band, consisting of Daniel Stelter (guitars, dobro, mandolin), Chrstian Diener (electric and double bass, Moog), Tommy Baldu (drums and percussion), with whom he has played hundreds of concerts and developed many of the ideas on the new album. Together with a clever sound engineer, this album was created in a bright attic above the Staffelsee, which, as he himself says, ‘does not lack a certain freshness’.
No, it's not just a certain freshness, it's great songwriting, which he will once again present to us on stages across Germany. And fans are naturally hoping for more, because you would expect a musician who called his first album ‘Das Letzte’ (The Last) to announce the end of his career with an album called ‘Das Erste’ (The First). In this respect, we look forward to more in the near future and hope that his life's work, for which he was awarded the Bavarian Cabaret Prize 2025 shortly before his 77th birthday, is far from over.