Roger Stein

There are places that only start to glow in the right light — and sometimes that light is a song, but sometimes it's a neon tube about frozen pizza. In the series “Kultur im Supermarkt”, author, comedian and singer-songwriter Roger Stein tries to shed light on both sides.

In his new program “Ist es nicht schön hier”, Roger Stein transforms the supermarket into a poetic stage — one step at a time. He keeps a close eye on the supposedly banal and discovers entire universes in it.

Stein doesn't draw smooth heroes, but dazzling figures — with all their breaks, contradictions and delicate longings. In “lobbyist tango,” for example, power dances with morality, but instead of pointing fingers, there is winking instead of cynicism — empathy. Roger Stein has a keen sense for nuances and still discovers a spark of warmth in even the coolest characters.

A contemporary panopticon unfolds in these songs: Friendship, lack of skilled workers, survivalists and self-survivalists share the stage, meet each other, clash — and yet all remain part of the same, sometimes weird, sometimes beautiful world, poetically captured with rhymed language.

Musically, Roger Stein works in an exciting mix of Schubert depth, elegant pop charm — but always seasoned with a good dose of Schalk and fine humor. Fast-paced comedy numbers are in lively dialogue with touching ballads and create a program that invites you to laugh as well as listen. A sound between asphalt dust and sunset, between dance hall and bar, between irony and intimacy.

“Isn't it nice here” is more than an album title — it is an invitation to look up, to tilt your perspective, to look for beauty in the crooked.

Roger Stein shows: Beauty is not a place. It is a moment that is noticed.

Roger Stein has long since found his artistic home with his songs on Konstantin Wecker's record label, where he has been releasing his albums since 2013. The question and doubt are the central topics of the program. And so the mischievous song poet asks himself: Is the reality in which we live really the only choice? Are you the owner of your own parallel worlds? And is coincidence even conceivable without logic constructed by us humans?

https://roger-stein.de/