Innocence Meets Adulthood on Berliner Nadine Finsterbusch’s, “My Space”

August 23, 2024

Nadine Finsterbusch is not one to live in the past. She also shrugs-off the expectations that beset women her age. With her first solo album MY SPACE, the 44-year-old Berliner gives herself permission to voice the experiences that have shaped her recent life: decidedly adult themes like early menopause, breaches of trust, and failed friendships. That said, her songs are also spiked with the hopefulness of youth.

Across the ten pensive but energized electropop anthems that comprise MY SPACE, Finsterbusch re-opens the door to aspects of the self that most grownups have buried somewhere between shopping lists and work-life-balance—namely: the freedom to be unabashedly emotional, without any bitterness or the feeling that one has to hide behind a wall of feigned indifference.

STREAM THE SINGLES: “WHY SO SERIOUS” | “NAMES“

In a conscious nod to her earliest and most formative inspiration, Finsterbusch’s bold combination of vehemence and innocence evokes the buoyant spirit of early-’90s Björk. “I secretly watched MTV at night when I was 13,” Finsterbusch recalls. “When I saw Björk for the first time, I knew that this was what I wanted to do, too.”

Having fulfilled her love for the avant-garde side of pop in the band Phinsterbush, Nadine arrived at the juncture where the next logical step was to set off on her own. “I wanted to talk about my life and express myself as directly and honestly as possible,” she explains. “That can be difficult in a ‘band’ setting, where you tend to push each other to be as artistically serious as possible.”

“That has its place,” she continues, “but these songs are way poppier, way more playful, way more free. It was a lot more like my childhood choir days, when I wanted to bring a lot of harmonies into the arrangements and make the songs big. There were times I only understood the meaning of the songs in retrospect, but for where I am in life right now, it’s very important to be able to just tune-in to what I’m feeling and go with it.”

At this stage, of course, women find themselves grappling with mood swings and the finality of childlessness. To convey this range of emotional hues, she found the perfect musical foil in producer and longtime collaborator Ramin Bijan (Die Türen, Robert Forster, Samba, The Burning Hell). “He was so perfect,” Nadine enthuses, “because he gave me the space to trust myself enough to just express—without thinking.”

“And speaking of space,” she says, “the association with the long-antiquated social network was unintentional but something I decided to run with—because it fits-in with the overall mood of not living in the past, but still wanting to preserve certain aspects that served us well. Getting older doesn’t have to mean that we lose our innocence. We may not remember it so well now, but there was a marvelous musical dimension to MySpace. It was a great place to discover different sounds, not to mention for sharing your own. And I made friends there that are still in my life to this day.”

“This music,” she adds, “is my feel good place. When you listen to the album, I’d hope that it feels that way for you too: a special place where listeners also feel they can let their guard down—and, of course, groove along to the way it sounds.”

MY SPACE was mastered by Dave Cooley (Tame Impala, Animal Collective, Paramore, Blood Orange, Madvillain).

Nadine Finsterbusch

MY SPACE

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