10 Stories of Women. (6) Sibylle Baier
I Lost Something in the Hills For
@[Taddi] There’s this beautiful woman, in some little house down there in the States. It’s evening, the child is asleep, everything is in its place.
So she picks up her guitar and sings, softly so as not to wake anyone, singing the songs she has written for herself and recording them, with a small tape recorder, in her kitchen.
It’s a way to tell her story, to look inside herself, to take stock of a life that - although not long by any means - has certainly not been trivial: Sibylle was born in Germany, and at a very young age, she was a model and then also an actress. Wim Wenders wanted her in “Alice in the Cities.” Everything seemed to set the stage for Sibylle to follow the path to success.
But then.
No one knows what happened; she never thought she had to tell anyone, but something broke. Her friend Sybille thought it best to take her away, and the two embarked on a long journey, from which Sibylle - in reality - never returned.
She left Europe and the world in which she had taken her first steps toward possible success. She moved to America, got married, settled down, and there she raised her son.
And in the evening, as we saw, she kept her intimate diary in music.
And Robby, her son, slept lulled by that music.
About 30 years pass, Robby has grown up, he frequents the music scene, searching for his path.
One day he decides to transfer onto CD that tape with his mother’s songs, which is now about to deteriorate and be lost forever.
He wants to gift it to some relatives and a few friends.
Sybille knows nothing about it.
Among Robby’s friends, however, there’s also J. Mascis. Now, J. Mascis has a terrible personality but understands music, and he notices that those songs are truly special. That stuff cannot remain unpublished.
So, it’s 2006 and those songs take the shape of an album “Colour Green” for Orange Twin. It’s needless to say that “Colour Green” is a masterpiece, needless to say it won’t make it into any sales charts, needless to say the reviews will be enthusiastic and that the album becomes a little cult object, needless to say that it has also been reviewed here on DeB. It’s needless to say that, nonetheless, it is still talked about far too little.
Sibylle doesn’t even notice and, probably, doesn’t even care.
But you should give it a listen.
