Songs Of My Life: Andreas Dorau - Girls In Love

Music was very important to me. I feel that the postings in the Songs Of My Life category so far really reflects that – with music taken from a wide range of genres. After the last three episodes took you to Northern Ireland (Lost In The Middle), Italy (Mah Nah Mah Na) and the USA (Picture Postcards from L.A.), this posting takes us to Germany (mainly to Hamburg). Undoubtedly, Andreas Dorau is one of my most favorite artists of my life. His song Girls In Love, released in 1996, was one of the key factors of this musical admiration.

Andreas Dorau – Girls In Love: The Story of The Song

Andreas Dorau was born on 19th January 1964. His father is a protestant pastor, who has been imprisoned by the Nazi regime multiple times just due to his religious conviction. He learned to play the guitar. As part of a school project group, which has taken place out of ordinary school hours, Dorau wrote Fred vom Jupiter (“Fred of Jupiter”) at the age of 15. Even though his teachers wanted to prevent him from doing that, he sent a recording with his backing band Die Marinas to the record label Ata Tak. The song become one of the biggest independent hits of the early 1980’s Neue Deutsche Welle era. The song was in the German charts for 18 weeks and peaked thirteenth in Austria.

Dorau studied at a College for TV and Movie Making in Munich and later has been working as a producer, writer (also for TV music) and video consultant. In parallel, he still published music – between his debut album Blumen and Narzissen (1981) and his very last one so far, Das Wesentliche (2019), he overall published twelve studio albums. Most of the album contain electronic pop songs with a simplistic style reminding of the Neue Deutsche Welle style.

Girls In Love – Andreas Dorau’s Highest Chart Placement

Girls In Love has been released in 1996. I would call it a recording at the first wave of Andreas Dorau’s career. After having a couple of well-reputed songs like Die Welt ist schlecht (“The world is bad”, 1983, with the Marinas) or Demokratie (“Democracy”, 1988), Dorau’s career felt to be fading towards the mid-1990’s a bit. His 1994 album Neu! changed that. The album had two key singles of the album, Stoned Faces Don’t Lie and Das Telefon sagt Du (“The telephone says you”, referencing the dial tone). They weren’t overwhelming sales success, but especially the latter had some airplay and was a very popular party song.

In 1997, he released his sixth album 70 Minuten Musik ungeklärter Herkunft (“70 minutes of music of uncertain origin”). Girls In Love received some airplay and was also popular on the music channels of these times. The song is about an unhappy love. A boy is fooling a girl who is finally committing suicide. Like many Dorau songs, the song is very rhythmic and danceable. It is the highest chart placement the Hamburg resident ever made: the song became ninth in France in 1997 – funnily with the Grungeman Remix, which has been the B-side of the single. The original version of Girls In Love is by far the most popular song of Dorau on Spotify, having some two million streams.

Some Break After this song

Andreas Dorau took a hiatus after his 1997 album. His following album was published in 2005 (Ich bin der eine von uns beiden). Starting with his 2011 album Todesmelodien, he is publishing more regularly again. Since his 50th birthday album Aus der Bibliotheque, Dorau is recording and touring with a band, Die Liga der gewöhnlichen Gentlemen. Since 2017, there are also scattered shows with the Marinas again.

Andreas Dorau – Girls In Love: My Story of The Song

I had slight interest in the music of Andreas Dorau and his songs with Stoned Faces Don’t Lie and Das Telefon sagt Du. Girls in Love, however, was the real change in my admiration to his music. It is a song, which I heard for the first time when I was at the end of twelfth grade in high school. But still today, it is one of my absolutely favorite songs. It was part of the “soundtrack” of my life in so many situations. The first concert I saw of Andreas Dorau was the 90 Minuten ungeklärte Musik tour in Essen. It has been the first stage of his tour and Andreas did not have a band touring with him at that time. He traveled with an Atari ST instead, which broke down several times during a 70 minute show.

The most special Andreas Dorau concerts I had were definitely the shows with band and with the Marinas, for sure. The most personal moment was definitely when I saw Andreas in Stuttgart on 25th November 2017, just a few days after the funeral of my father. First row and just forgetting the tough days which were behind. Girls in Love is still my Andreas Dorau favorite, even though I nowadays also love songs like Ossi mit Schwan or Flaschenpfand. Ain’t it amazing that I am following this guy (almost) 25 years now? Hope there are a lot of shows to come soon.

Andreas Dorau – Girls In Love: Spotify / Lyrics

Here is the Spotify widget to Girls In Love:

You can find the lyrics here.

Songs Of My Life Playlist

I felt that the Songs Of My Life category would not be appropriate without a playlist of all these songs. Thus, I decided to start this collection of songs with Girls In Love, which will be updated with any additional posting: