Alin Coen, live at the 2012 XRDS (Crossroads) Festival in Brussels, Belgium. Recorded January 30, 2012 by West German Radio.
Making a racket in Europe, but very little on this side of the Atlantic, Alin Coen (and her band, sometimes referred to as The Alin Coen Band) have been primarily touring Germany of late – getting ready to embark on another tour of Germany which began in June and is slated to end late October of this year.
Alin Coen, born in Hamburg in 1982, grew up bilingual (German and Spanish) and went to Weimar in 2003 to study environmental engineering at the Bauhaus University in Weimar , which she graduated from. There she met the musicians with whom she eventually founded the band in May 2007.
The time came for Coen to reorient herself: “In 2014, I thought: I’m done being a musician. I no longer found it meaningful to make music.” She decided to study for a Master’s degree in Land and Water Management in the Netherlands and interned at Greenpeace in Hamburg.
Her desire to make a musical appearance returned. New songs gradually emerged for the album Nah , released at the end of August 2020. All of the songs on the album were written by Coen, and all are in German. On earlier albums, she also sang in English because those songs were written in Sweden, where she had lived for six months.
Alin Coen is of German-Mexican descent. Her younger sister is the journalist Amrai Coen . Her mother, Marie Coen, is a pediatrician. The drawings for the album “nah” (2020) were created by her father, Amilcar Coen. Her parents live in Hamburg. Alin Coen has a son.
In case you aren’t familiar, this ought to give you a good introduction to this fresh talent. Further evidence that Europe has a lot going on, musically for a number of years now -just gotta keep your ears to the ground and focus on the new stuff.
In the meantime – press Play and relax.
