Name: Odd Beholder aka Daniela Weinmann
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer
Nationality: Swiss
Current release: The new Odd Beholder album Feel Better is out now via Sinnbus.

If you enjoyed this interview with Odd Beholder, visit her official website for more information. She is also on Instagram, Soundcloud, and Facebook.  

For a deeper dive, check out our Odd Beholder interview about her creative process, about Identity, Discrimination and why Privilege sucks, and our 15 Questions interview with Odd Beholder.



Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

My baseline is overstimulation. I am sensitive, a beholder indeed. As such, I need the opposite of stimulants: I need a break to get creative. Whenever I allow myself to rest and withdraw a bit from the world, I start to ooze the colors I have absorbed back into the world.

On that note, we shouldn’t glorify creativity too much. Creativity is great but it’s exhausting. Often, I am busy trying to keep it at bay. If I am creative, it feels like tripping. It’s not a coincidence that many people can’t remember their dreams in the morning. It’s a protection mechanism: We need to keep some kind of intuitive grip on reality. Being an artist can be scary: Artists hear and see stuff that isn’t (yet) there. It’s a thin line you need to walk when you are highly creative. It’s a gift and a condition.

But the good news is: You can train your creativity and this is something that you can keep in check. To master it, you need to limit it occasionally. You can’t navigate the world very well when you’re constantly pregnant and birthing. (On that, read Barbara Adam’s Timescapes of Modernity. The Environment and Invisible Hazards.)

Like fields, we need to be barren once every while and recollect nutrients. Let them insects die on our land. Absorb the bones of mice and birds. Grow some weed. Let some ideas wither unharvested. So, go ahead and enjoy your mind without thinking of your next album. And remember to write the emails you are scared to write. Do the dishes. Pay your bills. Answer the phone. Be nice to your friends and listen to their everyday worries and joys.

I live in Switzerland for god’s sake. It’s real life, not LA.

What do you start with? And, to quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

It gets even weirder. Who creates an idea? How do you discern the creators from their ideas / thought? Aren’t we a simulation that happens in a biochemical process in a protein rich matter that is able to produce electric currents? What are ideas? What are we? Are we an idea? The sum of a billion tiny excitements of a collective of brain cells?

When Michelangelo famously said that his sculpture was already in the marble and he just had to chisel the superfluous away, was he “naturalizing” culture, or rather mystifying himself as a force of nature, a genius?

One could argue that the question is posed wrong. The idea that there are such things as ideas is very Platonian. I would direct the attention more towards practices: Many musicians I know don’t know their output with their heads that much. They DO music, it’s a practice. They don’t know what they do, but they know how to do.

I guess that’s also why interviews with great musicians can be stunningly boring. How do you explain the wonders of a trumpet to someone who can’t play it? You show them what you do, that’s why you play shows instead of holding a lecture.

But how do I start, then? Initially, I wanted to say that start with my body, my hands, my voice – maybe an emotion or intention. But that’s not always true. At the risk of sounding very Platonian, too, I often do start with a thought – I play little what-if games.

What if I wrote a verse that could be played in reverse and sounded just the same? What if I wrote my next album solely on my guitar – and I am not allowed to use the word “I”? Should I completely connoroberst my next album? Should I write my drummer friend to randomly create a set of beats and send them to me, and I must use all of them in my album no matter what?

I guess my head creates loads of these prompts – but only a few haunt me long enough to be put to use.  

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

Show don’t tell. Ambivalence. Gaps. Room for interpretation. Conscious semantics. Contexts worth exploring. Contrasts and surprising combinations. Solid constructions vs. some volatile «je ne sais quoi qu’est-ce que j’ai dit là?» Cuts and cracks when meaning is becoming a corset. The sum is smarter than its parts. The parts are wild, but the big picture is sound.

But frankly, what do I know about writing. Whenever I am asked questions like these, I feel the compulsion to pretend I knew about stuff, but on what basis I believe all these things is not at all clear to me.

Maybe that’s another value I have: I think good writers are on a quest. They don’t dwell on what they safely know. They write what they are only on the cusp of knowing.

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

When you write what you know for people who know the same thing already, then you are entertaining yourself and others – or worse, you are engaging in some kind of propaganda. But if you struggle to wrap your head around something, then writing can create worlds. These worlds might be as new to you than they are for your readers.

When The Dreamer writes a song, it sometimes feels like the writing knows more than the writer and that feels a bit unsettling. The Critic likes control, wouldn’t it be fantastic to control your own perception, the communication with your fellow humans, how your work ages in time? But that is not how it works.

Many artists have faced dire consequences for what they did. Still, in many places of the world, artists face censorship, fees, and prison. Nowadays, a lot of people are very scared of shitstorms (and often, for the wrong reasons). But how to deal with that fear? I think we need to face it and think about it in an engaged way.

A good way to become a courageous artist is to develop your perspective according to values – and these values need to be explored and embodied. What if I blurt out every dark thought I have without reflecting my social positionality? Am I expressing myself honestly or am I just acting out without considering my social responsibilities? I want to own what I have done, but that doesn’t mean I can control the narrative.

Contexts shift and change, and you will be misunderstood, misrepresented, unloved and unliked in many bubbles outside of your own. (Or as the street would say: Haters gonna hate.) I think it is important to sometimes take the risk of being specific and disputable – because that’s how meaning is negotiated, isn’t it?

Being vague and nice and getting lost in the reproduction of well-accepted tropes to sell your music to a vast audience will generate noise that drowns out every conversation. The same goes with virtue signaling and political correctness for the sake of pleasing your own privileged bubble.

I often ask myself: Do I really care? What do I really care about? If making a mistake, being criticized scares me that much, then I probably don’t really care about the people I pretend to care about. I want to stop being good for the sake of being perceived as a good person. I also don’t want to re-enact that trope of the rebel when I don’t even know what I fight for. Rebel without a cause? Get lost, man. Learn how to express your needs.

I have written an album that feels uncomfortable to me – but I stand by it because I have been both Dreamer and Critic while I wrote it. I know that my songs explore dark themes that are a lot to handle; I have been angry with The Dreamer to put me through this.

But in every song, there was an honest quest, a thing that I wanted to explore – and in that intention, I was pure. I aspired to be real about things that are tough and to open the conversation. If I want to honor the latter, I need to hold a space for the discomfort and the perspective of people who don’t like it or feel offended by it to a certain degree. I hope I have the capacity for that.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Before talking about what is expressed, I’d rather talk about what is experienced. Singing is an experience that is comparable to some somatic exercises used in psychology, sport, or spiritual practices. If you ever had to calm yourself down after a nightmare in the night, you might have focused on your breathing. When you sing, you do that, too. You learn how to exhale slowly and with control. It changes your mood. You release a lot of things in that way.

On the level of composing, music as a temporal ordering of sound, I suspect that it is calming because it rewards our need for pattern recognition. Music is a game of prediction and surprise. It is not an instantaneous art form; it can only be experienced in real time. A song takes as long as a song takes. Music is volatile. It vanishes when it is finished, unlike a painting. I don’t know. I think, music is creating time.

Now, expression. I feel like music is expressing emotional states in a sort of abstract, but very physical and immediate way. It emulates heartbeats – if the song is fast, we feel energized or panicky, when it is slow, we relax into it or we feel held back by it. The effect of harmonies on us is a big mystery to me; why do some harmonic constellations feel unresolved, why do some chords make us feel sad while others reassure us? I have no clue what is going on here on a biological or cultural level. But it sure works on me.

I can use music like a medicine, a drug, a mirror, a cocoon. But the most fascinating thing is that many people use it as a soundtrack: It turns their lives into movies. And when I chose a certain soundtrack for a certain moment, I give it a mood. And like a director, I recognize a moment in my life as part of some kind of plot, as part of a narrative. When I pick a song, I might as well wonder: Is this a happy moment? Am I the underdog? Am I in love? Is it fair? Isn’t it all so weird? Am I not the hottest bitch in town?