Jan Dettwyler, better known as SEVEN, has been making music since 2002: seventeen albums, more than 1,000 concerts and by now several seasons of «Sing meinen Song». The Aargau native lives for Black American music — and for the live moment. A conversation about drive, aesthetics and writing in German.
MEN: How do you stay so successful for almost 20 years in a business as competitive as music? What drives you?
SEVEN: Thanks for the flowers! For me the secret is not to look for a recipe, because the love of music is greater than any logic. I listen to music constantly and I’m fascinated by every conceivable form of storytelling. I get bored so quickly that repeating myself simply isn’t possible. That’s why I keep taking new paths. And once I have an idea in my head, I see it through with total consistency and the whole cavalry. I love transferring films that first take shape only in my own head into the real world, and bringing the wildest ideas to life on stage with my favourite playmates. I burn for that every day, like a teenager before his first date.
Do you have role models?
My role models are musicians like Prince and Whitney Houston, directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and Christopher Nolan, or athletes like Michael Jordan — all connected, multi-talented people. When you are exceptional in one field and can also scale and multiply it, something great emerges. That fascinates me: uncompromising quality that prevails irresistibly.
Do you feel limited because you live in Switzerland and not in the USA or Germany?
In show business the sender is always hugely decisive from a business point of view. The people closest to you are the first who have to support you if a career is to take off. I never sounded the way my passport described me — often people didn’t even know which category to put me in. On the other hand, being such an alien is an advantage: in Switzerland I always stood out enormously because of it. In the States I would never have managed that with my music. In Switzerland I could carpenter my own genre, but for a clearly limited audience. Elsewhere the genre is huge and lucrative, but a thousand other fish swim in the same pond. Like so much in life, everything has its pros and cons.
Audiences love your live shows. What do concerts mean to you?
The concert in any form is the supreme discipline of music, for me an art form and a sport in its own right. I love turning over and optimising every note and beat a thousand times in the studio. But the live moment is my centre. There I am fully in my element and the world stands still. My greatest talent is receptiveness — sensing and processing everything happening around me. In life that isn’t only positive, it’s also exhausting, but on stage all my qualities are needed as nowhere else. There, I am me.
You’re known as a man of style — how was your sense of aesthetics shaped?
I was always fascinated by artists’ outfits or the sets in film and theatre. I love my art so much that I want to package it worthily, with every effort possible. My wife Zahra is a stylist, and we’ve already created so much together in this area, which has refined my style even further. But honestly, even as a teenager I dressed completely differently from the other kids in my class.
For a long time you sang in English, now you do it in German. Why?
A few years ago, on the German TV show «Sing meinen Song», I covered «99 Luftballons» — in my own way, but in German. I then played the song live, and that directness frightened me at first: I felt incredibly naked. I had to find out whether I could write in German and stay authentic. So for a year I kept working on the same lyrics. Back then I wasn’t even thinking about ever releasing in German.
But then it happened after all?
Yes, because after that first song the dam broke, and ever since the German pen has been writing as if I’d started all over again. Because the language is so direct, the last mask falls, and very personal themes end up in songs that I could never have written that way in English. I’m glad to now have both languages and both pens in my musical case. That way no story slips through my fingers any more.
What dreams do you have for the future?
Honestly, I feel like I’m right at the start of my career, as if I haven’t achieved much yet and so much still lies ahead. There are countless stages I want to play and musicians I want to work with — plus studios I still have to step into and producers I want to work with. I’ll always feel as if I’m nowhere yet. The child in me always stays the boss.
This article appeared in MEN issue 1/21 (November 2021).
