Tajna Tanovic
Issue: Section: 
photograph by Paul Maria Bachmann
"Turn around so you don’t see me
‘cause we’re not supposed to be"
The day my feet carried me to the guitar shop on the Lower East Side I had no idea it would come to this. Intuitively I felt I had something more to say than with just words or by interpreting someone else’s words. There the dots started connecting: voice, guitar, poetry, performance, theater. My colorful past, spent on the stages of Sarajevo, Slovenia, Germany... caught up with me and melted with my new (York) self into the songwriter.
At age 9 I was touring all of Germany (for a total period of 2 years) playing Beckett in a language I didn’t know, facing sometimes a couple of hundred witnesses to my performance and our story about women of all generations and the war - a semi-autobiographical tale. At that time I had lived in and out of a van, traveling from theater to theater, given absence from school to be able to tour. Even back then for me it was a job, there was nothing glamorous about it, it was survival. But whenever the curtain went up, I felt at home and my heart wouldn’t stop racing until they brought the curtain down. This goes back to playing Gertrude in “Hamlet” at age 6 and that feeling is still very present. Whenever I’m on stage, I’m home.
The feeling of being at home combined with the outcry of song when I performed my music, it seemed to form a great platform to express both my too sensitive and my too intense self.
Then there was poetry. I’ve always felt a need to write down my experiences and feelings. But not just write them down in prose or diary form, something more melodic, which I guess was also an indication of my need for musical expression.
In New York (or the gates to Inferno as I like to call it - inspiring, touching, burning, cutting, aching) - where you feel the fire so close, you and all the masses around you - it all came together: theater, poetry, music. The loneliness and isolation I got to experience in this metropolis for the first time in my life were some of the most inspiring feelings and contributed significantly to my songwriting.
However in that loneliness you are not completely alone, for you share it with a big family of great inspiring artists, in my case: Ingeborg Bachmann, Scott Walker, Van den Budenmayer, my mother, just to name a few.
I am grateful for my journey.
I THINK OF YOU
Black lace
Black days
I think of you
Black lace
To cover my face
I think of you
If love was a religion
If love was a religion
If love was a religion
We would be saints
If love was a religion
We would be saints
Black lace
Black days
I think of you
Black lace
To cover my face
I think of you
