«Infectious!» stereogum
«Touching.» spex
«Listen to this.» Perez Hilton
«Bon goût pop.» Liberation
Hello,
My name is Norman Palm. I grew up in a small town in the north where I learned how to sing and play instruments when I was little. When I finished highschool my family decided to send me to artschool because I was so good at painting and drawing. I wanted to become a lawyer but I followed their advice and went to Berlin.
Artschools are relaxed places, so I had enough time to write more songs and play music. Eventually I moved to Paris, where I found out that there was a little microphone inside my laptop which worked perfectly to record my songs. When I came back to Berlin I had a lot of songs recorded and a lot of pictures in my head. I wanted to share these pictures with the listeners of my songs, so I designed a little book which goes along with my record. Every song is illustrated in one chapter.
But my first real record was actually called “Boys and Girls”: Two cover versions of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Boys Don’t Cry”. People especially liked the cover of the record, and I still sometimes hear the songs playing in cosy coffee places. The next single was called Falling. It was requested to be used in a major ice cream commercial, I thought now I'd become famous, but it never happened in the end.
After that we published my debut album via our own little label Ratio Records. It came out as a book-cd combination: 12 songs and 200 pages. We printed 1000 copies, each of them hand-numbered. Luckily these copies were gone pretty quickly.
On stage I felt that people were staring at me a bit too much, so I set up a projection and let the pages of the book flip while I performed the songs live. In Berlin people were clapping a lot, so I was encouraged to take my show to other cities and other countries where people seemed to like it, too.
I was invited to play at art galleries and cultural festivals, took cool pictures of myself, sold a song to MTV and even gave interviews talking about my work. Some radio stations started to play my songs, as well.
Since then we have been talking to a bunch of elderly gentlemen from the music business so that now the album is available in many shops around the world. I also started playing together with Janne, so that now we're a small band.
On a more private note I opened a branch of myself in Mexico City in the meantime and -yes!- I am working on my second album, which will be released some day in 2010. It will sound very different from the first, I promise.
Keep in touch.
Norman
Picture by Jaime Martinez, Mexico