Yvonne Catterfield is on the phone. She lies comfortably on the sofa in her home on the outskirts of Berlin, lights a candle and looks out at the green. Her cat purring in the background. It’s not always like this: “Otherwise I’ll be driving across town like a wild man, in and out of town,” says Catterfield, who releases his new album “Change” on Friday. But it’s not just music that is currently making a name for itself.
The first of two new thriller films “Wolfsland” will be shown on TV on Thursday. There Caterfield can be seen as Detective Viola Delbrück alongside Gotze Schubert as her colleague Burkhard “Butch” Schulze at 8:15 PM on ARD. More than five million tunes regularly in Germany.
Alone at home, this is how the first eponymous song on the album was created on First Lock. Unlike the usual, the singer-songwriter sings no longer in German, but in English about changes, farewells, fears and dangers. “I already had new German songs, but I no longer wanted to write in German.” Rather, it was a “desperate search for songs, trying them, and then throwing them away”.
“I remember, I translated a song into German and got really frustrated at the end of the day. Because it didn’t work. It sounded different, it sounded corny,” that is, cheesy. She is convinced: “I couldn’t make the album in German like that.” Now it’s a very solid and powerful album. “I think it gives me the courage to take new steps.”
Despite his fame with German songs like “Für dich”, it’s not new for the 41-year-old to sing in English. In fact, Caterfield was only performing in English for the first twenty years of her life in Erfurt, Thuringia – and she just wanted to sing in that language. Often based on the model of American singer Lauren Hill, to the rhythms of hip-hop. “And now I’m back at it, so to speak.”
In her private life, too, she could imagine a change shortly before her birthday on December 2nd. “I think 42 is getting really crazy now. So everything is still good, but 42 just looks different,” says Catterfield. “And that’s why I was imagining moving again.” Could this also lead to Erfurt? “There’s already been some deliberation, actually. Because I really enjoy being in Erfurt, and being there a lot – and it also pulls me emotionally again,” says Catterfield.
“There is simply a connection to the city. But it is also connected to my parents. The feeling of being home,” she says. She tries to be in town every two months and especially loves to walk the streets in the evenings. It is unlikely that Erfurt will be the home of the old and the new: “I am simply more concentrated, I cannot roam the city as freely as in Berlin.”
Currently it does not pass through Erfurt or Berlin, but through Saxon-Gorlitz and the surrounding area. More films about detective duo ARD are already being filmed before watching “Böses Blut” and “Sad Sisters” at the beginning of December. “I found both of them to be very powerful.” It is particularly interesting that the quality of relations between the commissioners is constantly changing. But they also need it – a certain change in the texts.
“Otherwise I’d be bored,” says Catterfield. “If the scripts weren’t constantly evolving and I had nothing different to play, new aspects were possible or a new psychological abyss was tackled, I think I would have stopped long ago.”
In a career spanning more than 20 years, Caterfield has constantly changed, including evolving from interpreter to songwriter, from actress in early evening series to leading role in prime-time major films. I became a mom, I started a company. She also loves it very much when everything remains the same. “But sometimes there have to be changes in life.”
She finds it upsetting that despite all the developments in the past, “it’s been pointed out over and over again, a former GZSZ star. And she thinks: Man, that was 15 or more years ago. It just means you don’t care what you did.” She would like more appreciation. “Ultimately, everyone wants to be seen for what they’re doing or doing.”
(Service – www.yvonnecatterfeld.com)
