Albumveröffentlichung: Emily Wittbrodt: Wearing Words

On February 3, Emily Wittbrodt will release her long-awaited new album, “Wearing Words”

For cellist Emily Wittbrodt the way lyrics fit within her melodies is nearly as important as the words themselves. When she made her 2023 album Make You Stay most of the lyrics set texts that were meaningful to her—poems by e.e. cummings and Stine Sampers or written fragments by the great bossa nova singer Astrud Gilberto—within gorgeously melodic original music. When it came to “I see you standing,” the song with her own lyrics, she developed the music and words simultaneously, building them one step at a time, in lockstep. It’s a challenging practice, as each of the components progress according to different sets of logic.

Still, Wittbrodt planned to employ the same method when she began writing the songs for Wearing Words. Writing in English, rather than in her native German, presented hurdles even to an artist with a lifelong ardor for playing with language, but in the end she found the process unsatisfying. Instead she decided to write the melodies using a kind of dummy text, laying in words and syllables that fit the shape of the melodic forms she had composed.

“I had this weird empty imprint of a melody without words that was asking to be filled with new life,” she says. After composing the music she spent weeks devoted to finding the right words, crafting texts that made sense and elevated the songs. Wittbrodt had clear ideas for what she wanted each song to express, but she now faced another difficult task.

“I sat down for two weeks without doing anything else but finding new words that fit in the melodic shapes. I didn’t touch the cello in that time and started dreaming about words during the night. During the day I was constantly searching for words, even while cooking or meeting friends. It became like an addiction.”

Her reasons for calling the project Wearing Words stem primarily from the sensation she had while filling in the melodic shapes with new words in a second language. “I constantly felt like wearing clothes that don’t belong to me, a bit like borrowing a sweater from your partner or pants from your sister who is slightly taller than you,” says Wittbrodt. But there’s another darker rationale behind the title, where society can become desensitized to once inflammatory words. “Those people know about the power of language and use it for their goals. They are also wearing words for a reason they don’t show at first glance.”

This new project came about serendipitously when she decided to write, “Lied,” a song for a dear friend who had recently given birth to her first child. She had been thinking about a new set of music in which she wrote all of the lyrics, and creating this sonic gift for her friend opened up that possibility.

In recent years the Cologne-based Wittbrodt has been quietly revealing her versatility and creative range. Although she initially studied classical music, the Bonn-native loved pop music and increasingly enjoyed the act of improvisation, both areas suppressed in her formal education. She eventually pivoted, working increasingly with musicians who straddled different stylistic worlds and who valued the art of improvisation. The cellist has found a growing number of projects to explore all of these interests; her electro-acoustic duo with Edis Ludwig on electronics, Ludwig Wittbrodt, the meticulously plotted chamber-jazz of hilde.  Many of those threads coalesce in the music she wrote and played for Wearing Words.

When she performed an early draft of “Lied” her friend was still pregnant and the singer didn’t feel comfortable singing it. Wittbrodt decided to find a vocalist for the project, enlisting a close friend Sandro Hähnel, a classically-trained opera singer. She designed the vocal lines for the other songs on the album with him in mind. “I wanted his voice to be fragile and genderless, so I wrote all songs in my vocal range, which is a bit too high for Sandro. That forced him to sing quietly and softly, and brought a color I liked, almost like a countertenor.” His vocals are astonishing, articulating Wittbrodt’s vulnerable melodic shapes with precision, humor, and grace, translating an almost baroque sensibility into pop music terrain, with the sort of pathos one expects from Rufus Wainwright or Anohni.

While the cellist enlisted a handful of collaborators to help flesh out the sophisticated arrangements—including the clarinet of Shabnam Parvaresh, the accordion of Tizia Zimmermann, and  the drums and synthesizer playing of Jan Philipp, who produced the new album, to say nothing of some bass and harpsichord parts from David Helm (aka Marek Johnson)—she ended up playing most of the music, adding parts on piano, harpsichord, synthesizer, and guitar. Some of the songs feature arresting flurries of improvisation, embroidering the written arrangements with spontaneous accents and interactions forged in the moment, but most of the work involved working things out at the mixing desk with Philipp, introducing yet another sparkling facet in Wittbrodt’s expanding practice.

About the first single Emily says: “In Cold Shelter I embrace my love for baroque music and the joy of simple chord progressions. I admire the sound of the harpsichord, its sparkling, percussive and sometimes clumsy elegance. This is my version of a cello concerto : the vivid cello lines, arpeggios and the cello orchestra in the end fill me with happiness each time I listen to it.”

The album is available on vinyl and digitally.
Released on February 3, 2026, by Futura Resistenza.

Album Credits

Lyrics, composition & production by Emily Wittbrodt
Recorded, produced, partially co-arranged and mixed by Jan Philipp
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu / Schwebung Mastering
Cover design by Anne Büttner
Cover art on the back by Eleni Wittbrodt

Cover photo front - film still by Janosch Pugnaghi
Artist photos by Ludwig Kuffer

Musicians on Wearing Words:

Emily Wittbrodt - cello, harpsichord, synths, guitar, theremin, piano
Jan Philipp - drums, synths
Sandro Hähnel - voice
Tizia Zimmermann - accordion
Shabnam Parvaresh - clarinet, bass clarinet
David Helm - bass, harpsichord