Name: Jérôme Reuter aka ROME
Nationality: Luxembourgian
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer
Current release: ROME's new album Flowers From Exile (Revisited) is out via Trisol.
Recommendations for Luxembourg: We have a quite magical forest called Müllertal. Highly recommended for solemn hiking.
Topic I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: I'm really into European history, but I guess I talk too much about it as it is, I'm afraid. Well, you could insert a song like "How came Beauty Against this Blackness" here. As one of many examples.

If you enjoyed this ROME interview and would like to stay up to date with the band and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram, and Facebook.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

Most certainly, yes. I will always remember sitting in the back seat of the family car listening to my dad's mix tapes with stuff like Dylan, Cohen and the like. Mostly 60s stuff. Some chanson things like Jacques Brel.

Brel, actually made me want to be on stage. I remember falling in love with the way he enunciated the title in the song "Le Plat Pays".



I guess that's the stylistic school of thought behind songs of mine like "L'Assassin".



However, I must assume it was Leonard Cohen more than anyone that got me into writing. I did not understand a word of English back then, really. But still I could totally tell that this was some serious poetry.

He radiated this gravitas that I tried to emulate on songs like "Adamas" about 25 years later - so that certainly set the tone for me regarding what a voice can trigger in your imagination.



I started writing lyrics for my first couple of bands as a teenager ... but that was really quite clumsy business.

It was later ... let's say when I was about 15 or 16, that I started to try and put poetry to music rather than shouting something or other in rock bands.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music and literature have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to writing?

Discovering new ways of thinking, new takes on life, new approaches to getting through it all.

And certainly this fascination for these unique worlds that songwriters can create with their work. Like establishing your own cosmology and hierarchies.

What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

Apart from Cohen and Brel it would have been people like Townes van Zandt who really knew how to tell a story. His work on songs like "Marie" or "Nothin" moves me to tears just by the way he conveys the story.



I hope he shines through in some way on songs of mine like "Slash'n'Burn."



Léo Ferré is a personal favourite, too.



Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of) your life? If so, what do you think, leant them that power?

Yes, hundreds of them. It feels like my whole outlook on life, my whole education was triggered by music. Whether that's punk rock stuff or black metal ...

I played in all kinds of bands and I always gave it my all and tried to be truthful to the respective musical scene. To live it in full, you know.

It is sometimes said that "music begins where words end." What do you make of that?

It certainly helps to get ideas across if you put it to music, yes. Though I believe words could transcribe and illumine everything just fine. But people would not necessarily understand it.

If you express it with the help of music, however, people can understand things more instinctively. And let me add that that which you dare not speak, you can try singing.

I have always considered many forms of music to be a form of poetry as well. Where do you personally see similarities? What can music express which may be out of reach for poetry?

Again, I don't think anything is out of reach for poetry, but when combined with music it is easier to transport one's vision into other people's soul. Music has the ability to let you experience seemingly contradictory feelings at the same time.

Music is also connected to memory in a much stronger way than words are, I believe. If I read a book that positively crushed my soul the first time I read it, and I then re-read it years later ... it won't be the same.

But if you listen to some music that was truly important to you ages ago, the act of listening to it again will bring it all back. All sorts of memories of smells and places and grief and what not ... are all tied up in the music. Anyway, that's how I feel.

As far as my own catalogue goes, there is one song that takes me back to a particular sad break-up every time I hear it: "Skirmishes for Diotima." So I avoid listening to that one.



The relationship between words and music has always intrigued me. How do you see it? In how far can music take you to places with your writing you would possibly not have visited without it?

I like how music takes you to new places, yes! Like "Oh, ROME are playing at this bar tonight ... let's go somewhere else!".

But also from the artist's point of view, yes, of course. ROME has allowed me to travel quite a bit. Both in my mind and physically.

What are areas/themes/topics that you keep returning to in your lyrics?

A glance at our discography will reveal that European literature and the armed conflicts that go with it are a constant source of inspiration.

On the basis of a piece off your most recent release, tell me about how the lyrics grew into their final form and what points of consideration were.

I read the words "Tomorrow we live" somewhere - there are several movies and books with that title actually - and I knew that was gonna be the title and chorus of a song about some of those things I feel every time I leave Ukraine.

So there I am trying to piece it all together with words that somehow would describe that feeling. You cannot express it too directly so you kind of dance around it with hints in different colours ...

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

That really depends. But usually the chorus, yes.

When I came up with the slogan "Uropia O Morte" - which happened rather out of the blue - I knew what a song with that title should sound like in my head ... so I tried to write it.



And these words are the backbone of it all, obviously.

I'd love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

Not necessarily, no. Not consistent, really, but it is always to be seen in the context of the album.

I'm kinda old-school that way, in as much as I actually do write albums rather than just individual songs. I put a lot of effort into combining particular songs in a way to make a whole.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound "good" or "right" to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

Absolutely, yes! It needs to sound "right" in my head. It's essential how the words sound as well as what they mean.

As to singing someone else's words, that is tricky, indeed. If I sing someone else's words, it's ok if that person created the whole song and published his interpretation of it and put all his heartfelt emotions into it - then I can reinterpret it in my own way maybe. I can then try and find my own way of expressing that emotion.

But if I'm in a band and someone writes words for me to sing on a song that is yet to take shape ... it never really works, to be honest. They have to be my own.

And oftentimes in my work, the words actually come first. Or at least very early on in the process.

I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about – have there been "misunderstandings" or did you perhaps even gain new "insights?"

It is hard to think of a specific example now. But generally speaking, I quite enjoy people's discussions on possibly conflicting interpretations of my lyrics.

There have been several instances of people putting forward a particular understanding of my work that was quite new and interesting to me. Sometimes, as the author, you are way too close to the process of creating it to see the bigger picture the outside onlooker will recognize immediately.

There are of course things that bother me. Like when someone mishears some lyrics and puts it online and people randomly copy it ... like with the chorus to “One Fire” - which I borrowed from Shakespeare: “One Fire fights one fire - one nail one nail.“



You'll find someone has misheard it as "one-nil, one-nil" ... like it's some football match I'm singing about. And you'll find that version has been copied too many times online.

So it just saddens my heart - probably more so because I nicked it from Shakespeare.