Mirna Bogdanović
Mirna Bogdanović
There are singers, and then there are singers. Some sing their songs, and that is wonderful. But a select few go far beyond that, not just singing their songs, but living them. Among them is the Berlin-based songwriter and vocal shapeshifter Mirna Bogdanović. Born in Sarajevo and raised in Maribor, she has lived in Berlin since 2012, using all her senses to capture the urban life of the metropolis in her music.
For the title of her third album, she coined the word „Glimmerence“, which she describes as a state between love and illusion — when something feels incredibly real and beautiful, but simultaneously reveals itself to be fragile and fleeting. It is an emotional hybrid of yearning and waiting, anxiety and hope, external control and self-empowerment, disappointment and overcoming. Every song, every line, every single word carries weight on this album. It is a theatre of emotions — monologic on the one hand, as Bogdanović always stages the complex tension of these emotional states from her own perspective, yet dialogic on the other, as she seems to slip into a new role in every song, finding another way in or out, taking her listeners on a journey with an open destination. Yes, these are songs, but they are much more than that. They are subtle self-observations and pointillistic mood pieces within an increasingly anonymous social environment where there is hardly any room left for individual micro-habitats.
In doing so, Bogdanović achieves an extraordinarily intense connection between the instrumental and lyrical functions of her voice. Surrounded by pianist Povel Widestrand, guitarist Peter Meyer, bassist Igor Spallati, drummer Philip Dornbusch, and Wanja Slavin — who not only plays woodwinds and synthesizers but is also responsible for production — she has gathered a who’s who of the current Berlin jazz scene. She succeeds in moulding this select group of bandleaders and exceptional virtuosos into a compact unit where no one plays in the foreground, but where the focus of every single member remains firmly on the song itself. The umbrella under which she unites her musicians spans the space between simplicity and plausibility.
Despite the collective nature of their exploration in sound, the rich colour palette of her own voice remains the defining lead instrument in this collection of touching storytelling songs. Yet this instrument — with which she approaches the other idioms on the album, only in the next moment to draw away from them or dance light-footedly around them — is never an end in itself. She uses her vocal-dramaturgical repertoire to consistently imbue her lyrics with a poetic power that turns every song into a narrative gem.
„I’ve always loved playing with the instrumental side of my voice and creating a riverbed in my arrangements where my singing can flow freely,“ says the adoptive Berliner. „At the start of my career, the music always came first, and the lyrics were an uncomfortable but inevitable side effect. It was also difficult for me to express my feelings outside of my native language. Over time, however, I find much better words. I feel as if I’m moving more and more in this poetic direction, where the lyrics set the tone. It might sound like a contradiction, but in that respect, I feel much stronger as a singer on this new album than before.“
She brilliantly translates the flickering and shimmering suggested by the album title into her songs, reliably aided and abetted by her co-conspirators. Together, they effortlessly convey a sense of uncertainty that never feels lost, but instead comes across as defiant and self-determined. Every one of her new songs possesses an immense mental gravity. The setting often evokes the early films of Godard or Truffaut. With almost psychoanalytic empathy, she describes situations that surely everyone — regardless of gender, age, background, or social status — has lived through. It is unmistakably Mirna Bogdanović facing us on the stage with her songs, yet every line instantly transforms into a memory or an emotional residue for the listener. Thus, she is simultaneously the author, leading actress, and director of her song-theatre. „It’s not so much a conscious decision to go down this path, but rather a desire to work on stories,“ she says, playing down her achievement.
Her high level of credibility stems not least from the fact that she deals very honestly with her emotions, unafraid of the risk of revealing something of her inner life in her songs. It is hardly surprising, then, that she ultimately counterbalances the album with a track that did not originate from her. Her cover version of Chris Isaak’s pop evergreen „Wicked Game“ is zoomed so deeply into her own universe that it is barely recognisable. She succeeds in transforming an ethereal ballad existing in a thousand versions into a powerful track that makes it unmistakably clear: what needed to be said has been said, and this narrative is closed.
“Glimmerence” is the profound song collection of a gifted philosopher of everyday life. But it is much more than that. It is a sensitive snapshot, the musical psychogram of our entire era, and ultimately a cathartic historical document that already allows a glimpse of today from the perspective of the future.
