A breakfast date with Jaschu: Everything you need to know about his EP “Vielleicht”, his inspirations and upcoming plans
Jaschu is a German artist based in Hamburg who is about to put out his first EP titled “Vielleicht”. Upon the release, we got the chance to meet up with him in Berlin to chat about his upcoming project set to be released on Friday, 4 April 2025.
To give you a clearer picture of Jaschu, you can check out “Schnee von Morgen”, “4 Uhr” & “Nachtbus” which are part of the EP.
The first question during our meeting came from Jaschu himself, asking us how we were doing and offering us one of the many snacks presented on the table in front of us. He himself chose a banana, probably as his breakfast, since we were his first appointment that day. Alongside a Club Mate as his drink. After a quick bite of his snack of choice, the interview starts.
Andy: How would you describe yourself and especially your music to people who might not know you yet?
Jaschu: I would say my music is definitely a bit special, but still, in a way, pop. It's unique but still accessible and a mix of mostly electronic and indie. Jaschu: That's pretty much it regarding the sound. My lyrics are quite Singer-Songwriter-like, because that's where I come from. I used to listen a lot to Ed Sheeran and Adele, which are pretty much classic Singer-Songwriters, right? That's why my songs have those kinds of Singer-Songwriter structures.
The content of the lyrics is usually autobiographical in a way. It's all somehow based on real experiences—either a story someone told me, something I witnessed, or something I've personally gone through. With my music, I try to describe that feeling as precisely as possible, and also the environment in which that feeling takes place.
Andy: Your artist name is "Jaschu" - How did you come up with that name? Is it just an abbreviation of your real name, or is there more to it?
Jaschu: Good question. Jaschu stands for Jannis Schulte, which is my real name. I used to release music under that name, but it started to feel a bit too serious and also too personal. I wanted to have more of an artist identity. It felt like I was signing off every song with "JANNIS SCHULTE" and boldly putting my signature underneath it. It created this vibe that I had to stand behind every song I released under my real name for the rest of my life. That was the biggest reason I decided to go with "Jaschu."
And there's a nice side effect to it. On my chess app, Chess.com, I’m actually also "Jaschu." That comes from my dad, Michael Schulte, and my uncle, Karsten Schulte. They've been called "Kaschu" and "Mischu" since childhood. So for me, it just felt natural to use "Jaschu" on the chess app. I then used that name for Spotify as well.
Andy: That's really cool. So your friends and family still call you Jannis, right?
Jaschu: Yeah, but sometimes, as a joke, they also call me "Jaschu."
Andy: You're from Hamburg, so am I! Where are your secret spots in the city? Where can people find you when you're out and about in Hamburg?
Jaschu: Good question. I think you’ll mostly find me in my studio. I live in Barmbek because it’s affordable and I can live well there. I have a little studio where I also live, and I’m there most of the time. But when I go out, I like to head towards Schanze and Altona. I just enjoy the vibe there, with so many open-minded people. I think that's really nice. And I also like the way it looks there. I just love the aesthetics of those places.
And secret spots... I can't really say, because then they wouldn't be secret anymore! But I think I like places like Schanzenpark, where you can just chill. I also like being in places with a view. I love being able to see far. That's why I also enjoy being on rooftops and places like that.
Andy: Similar like "Übel und Gefährlich." That's on the bunker with an observation deck. You’ll be playing your release concert there in April, right?
Jaschu: That's right.
Andy: Have you checked out the view there yet?
Jaschu: No, I haven’t, but I have been in the bunker. Have you been up there?
Andy: I was there for a concert recently, but I didn’t go up to the observation deck because it was too late and it had already closed...You can check it out when you’re there next time!
Jaschu: I’ll do that, yeah.
Andy: Speaking of performances, how does it feel to play a release concert in your hometown? Are there more concerts planned? Maybe even a tour?
Jaschu: I’m not a native Hamburg resident, I’ve only lived there since 2013. My heart is there, though. 2013 was already 12 years ago… so it's not exactly my birthplace, but it feels like home, which is why it feels great to play there.
Andy: Are you planning any other shows? Maybe a tour or something?
Jaschu: Well, we're soon going to be a support act for another artist's tour. I can’t say who yet. We’ll also be playing a few festivals this year. Like [ Line-up is not out yet ;) ] – ooh, I’m not sure if I can say that.
I’ll also be at the Norden Festival. The lineup for that one is already out. And in Hamburg, we’re playing as part of... Ah, I can't say that either. I can’t say anything yet, but there are a few concerts coming up this year. Things are really kicking off with live shows, which is super exciting, and yeah, a tour isn’t planned yet. Maybe next year... my own tour.
Pauline (Photo): That would definitely be cool, yeah!
Jaschu: That’s true, that would be really cool.
Andy: You do quite a lot yourself. You write a lot yourself, you sing, you produce. How would you rank all of that? What do you enjoy most? What’s your favorite activity in your job?
Jaschu: I think it’s the variety in the job that I enjoy the most. Now that I’ve finished my EP, I’m entering a phase of my work where I’m very creative again. So, I can say: I enjoy life and gather beautiful experiences along the way. I read books and take in some input because that’s when the best songs come out of it.
The more input I have, the more output I seem to have, so I really enjoy this part of the work. Right now, I can just be a full-on artist in my daily life, which is great. I also love getting completely into mixing, mastering, and production. Those are such exciting topics for me, and it’s so technical, even though mixing is also very artistic.
But yeah, also the technical side of making sure the song sounds great everywhere, whether it’s on the radio or on a phone, making sure it translates well and sounds good, and everything is measured correctly. I love that part too.
I’ve had a lot of the technical side lately, because I’ve been finishing my EP, but now the creative side is coming back, and I love both equally. I also, filming content. When I’m with my people on the rooftop filming and hear the song for the first time out there, over the rooftops of Hamburg, and then seeing that a team is working on my music, I totally love that too.
Doing interviews is fun as well, because it makes you realize things you weren’t aware of before, as soon as you start talking about them. So... everything really. I enjoy pretty much everything
Andy: Before the interview, I of course checked out your socials a bit, and I came across a post from your sister. A few years ago, she wrote about how proud she is of you, and she reminisced about the times when you used to play music together on the balcony. She mentioned that she would sing and you played the instruments.
So, I wanted to ask you how this shift happened, where you started singing more. Did your sister have any influence on the EP or even collaborate on it?
Jaschu: First of all, great research! Exactly, my sister loved singing along to Kika Tanzalarm back in the day. Do you guys remember that?
Andy: Yes! *whispers* A-E-I-O-U
Jaschu: *sings* “A-E-I-O-U, du gehörst auch mit dazu.” (A-E-I-O-U, you belong too” - a famous German tune for kids)
She used to sing that a lot, and I also liked singing in my room. Back then, it was Peter Fox. Funny enough, she was always like - “Dude, Jannis, you can’t sing – just stop.”
It was so funny, I used to think –“Yeah, one day, I’ll show you!”– That’s what I thought as a kid.
At this point, I couldn’t care less what she thinks. She’s actually my biggest fan now, I have to say that. She knows all my lyrics by heart and listens to them everywhere, up and down. But back then, she was the singer, and I just played drums for fun because my stepdad had a drum set. Eventually, though, I started singing more and more. Even though she thought I wasn’t a great singer, it slowly shifted. I haven’t made music with my sister in a long time, actually. The last time was in 2019, when we just did a couple of covers together. But she hasn’t really been involved in my music, except that she supports me a lot and gives me a lot of encouragement.
Andy: That’s really sweet!
Our magazine is all about belonging, and that’s also a bit of what I think your EP is about. I wanted to ask what helped you feel that sense of belonging.
Jaschu: Belonging...I would almost say the EP is more about arrival.
Yeah, it’s about finding inner peace and coming to terms with yourself, building self-confidence. That’s more the message of the EP. What helped me get there was actually a lot of work on myself, I’d say, by diving into psychology, listening to a lot of podcasts, and also working through a book called “Das Kind in dir muss Heimat finden” (The Child in You Must Find a Home).
It’s a book that’s all about working through your emotional conditioning and understanding why you might be afraid of certain things that others aren’t, and then trying to reverse some of that. Working through that book was a huge inspiration for me because I realized that I could actually work on how I feel and influence how I feel. And all these insights then transformed into wanting to bring out a beautiful, hopeful message. So, funny enough, this book really helped me with that. It gave me both inspiration and a lot of hope, as well as helping me find inner peace.
Andy: While analyzing the tracklist, I noticed that you’re telling a story almost chronologically. You mentioned earlier that the EP was a process of self-discovery for you. On the EP you reference events that were mentioned earlier in other songs. In “Nachtbus”, for example, it seemed to me like it’s about the same night as in “4 Uhr”.
So, I wanted to ask how the EP came together and whether it is, in fact, a chronology?
Jaschu: Yeah, you are completely right. The first track, “Unbequem”, is sort of this starting-feeling, something that keeps recurring—feelings of aimlessness, loneliness in the big city, and fear, and so on.
Then, over the next tracks — ”4 Uhr”, “Nachtbus”, and “Schnee von morgen” — I move toward a feeling of abundance, like everything is already right and good. I’m going in the opposite direction compared to the first song.
In the first song, I say, “Irgendwas in meiner Brust tut weh, Oh Herrjemine, wie unbequem.” (Something in my chest hurts, how uncomfortable) And then in the last song of the EP titled “Vielleicht” I say, “Vielleicht war ja dieser Druck in meiner Brust, nur auf Zwischenreise und jetzt bin ich heile.” (Maybe this pressure in my chest was just passing through, and now I'm healed). So that’s kind of the answer to the first song.
The journey starts in the first song, which takes a lot of inspiration from my city, Hamburg. It moves through great experiences where I feel alive and in love, like in “4 Uhr”. In “Nachtbus”, I have this feeling of– “Fuck, it’s going to be okay, I don’t need to be so afraid. And if something happens, I’ll fight my way through it.”--
And “Schnee von morgen” is about the very inspiring story of a close friend of mine who really inspired me to live in the moment, to just do things, until I reached this feeling of not being broken anymore. So, that’s the journey, which then leads to a happy ending. At the same time, the EP for me is also a cycle, because it’s clear to me that this feeling won’t last forever. I’ll sometimes go back to that “Unbequem”-feeling, but I also know that it will eventually lead back to the good feeling like in “Vielleicht”.
So, for me, the last song isn’t a conclusion, it’s part of a cycle.
Andy: Would you say it was a concept album for you, or did it just come together spontaneously and you realized, “Oh, this is a cycle,” as you were creating it? Or did you already have that idea in mind from the start?
Jaschu: Exactly what you said. I was just making songs, putting them together, and in the end, I realized that it was chronological and a cycle. So, it wasn’t really a concept.
Andy: What was particularly difficult for you while creating the EP, and what was the opposite? What part was especially easy for you?
Jaschu: I need to think about that for a moment... *thinks deeply about the question*
Pauline: *takes photos and breaks the silence with camera noises* – The camera is super loud *laughs*
Jaschu: *laughs and mimics camera noises* - I can’t really say. I’d say they all went through equally difficult and easy phases. Sometimes it takes me three days to find a single line, and sometimes I write it really quickly. And I had that with every song.
“Nachtbus” had been lying around for a long time, but then I finalized it by changing a bit of the lyrics and doing some work in the production and mixing. With “Schnee von morgen”, it was more like I had the whole text, and I felt it all worked, with just one line needing to be changed.
It used to be: “Vom Abend bis zum Morgenlicht fühlt sie sich, als gäbe es morgen nicht.” (From evening to morning light, she feels like there’s no tomorrow.) And then I realized, wait, that sounds like she’s staying up all night. But what I actually wanted to say was that she always feels good. So, I changed it to: “Jeden Tag ab Morgenlicht fühlt sie sich, als gäbe es morgen nicht.” (Every day from morning light, she feels like there’s no tomorrow.) And that’s the only change regarding the lyrics that I made.
But then I reworked the whole production of the song. There was a demo but I realized I didn’t like the instrumental. So I threw it out and tried to work on a new beat with friends and another producer, but it just didn’t work for me. Until I eventually decided to make a completely new version myself. So, there was a lot of focus and work on the instrumental, which I didn’t have with the other songs. With those, I focused more on the lyrics.
So, everything kind of took the same amount of effort, and that’s why I can’t say exactly which was harder or easier.
Andy: When you have a song idea, do you tend to work on it until it’s finished, or do you work a bit on one song, then switch to another and come back to it later? How do you approach it?
Jaschu: Well, how I do it changes all the time. But right now, my daily routine includes making a demo, meaning I’ll give myself, for example, two days to work on a song idea, then export it and put it in a demo folder. Then, in the next two days, I’ll work on a new demo. I end up with a lot of different song ideas, and then I go through them and pick the ones I like the most, and I focus on finishing those. For the EP, it was like this. I had these demos, and then I picked five songs that I knew I wanted to finish because I felt like they represented where I was at the moment.
Once I know which song is going to be released next, I focus entirely on that song. I’ll put in hundreds of hours, and I get into this cycle where, every morning, as soon as I wake up, I work on it for 45 minutes. Then I export it, put it in my Dropbox, go for a walk, take notes, come back, and work on it for another 45 minutes. It’s kind of this loop until I feel like I’ve done my best and gave everything I could. If nothing stands out to me as being wrong, and I’m happy with how it sounds, then I consider the song finished.
Interestingly, I’ve never actually had that feeling that a song is fully done, but I always get very close to it. You know, people say art is never finished, and I agree - it can never be perfect because we’re always evolving. So, I think it can never truly be perfect, but I get very close to that feeling.
When I submit my mix — because I always have mix and master deadlines — I still have a week to submit the master after the mix is done. But during that week, there’s still a lot happening, and other artists might say, “Okay, this is finished, I’ve submitted the mix.” But for me, it’s like, “Okay, now it’s getting serious, I need to finish this properly,” and that’s when I put in that extra work. But in the future, I’d like to make it a bit more balanced. I want to be less of a perfectionist and approach it with a bit more ease, not being too critical of myself.
I’m not even sure if it has to be that way. You think, “Okay, I put so much time into “Schnee von Morgen” , I worked on it until the last minute, and that’s why it worked so well.” But at the same time, you can’t really say if it would have worked just as well if I had worked on it for two weeks less, and it was more about the essence of the song.
So, I want to try making it a bit easier for myself in the future, not being so hard on myself.
Andy: Could you, despite your self-criticism, name a favorite from the EP or maybe a song you're most proud of? Would that be two songs—your favorite and the one you're most proud of?
Jaschu: I think the song I’m most proud of is "4 Uhr," because it really captures my own sound world, in terms of sound aesthetics. I had this idea of a sound in my head, and I worked on it for a long time to bring it to life. But it was really hard to make it work the way I wanted it to. It was like... it was teasing me. I really wanted to reach that idea. It took a long time to figure out what it actually was. With "4 Uhr," I feel like I nailed it, and that's why I’m so proud of it.
– Unexpectedly the next topic comes up when I read out the next question. I wanted to ask Jaschu about specific songs or albums that significantly influenced the creation of the EP when we suddenly talk about nervousness. –
Jaschu: I think we’re similar in that way. I also tend to overthink things a lot. I had that feeling yesterday, for example, during (something Jaschu did the day before), I probably shouldn’t say this yet – but anyway, I felt that way yesterday too. I was so incredibly nervous, no matter what I did. But then I realized, it’s actually kind of awesome that you get nervous, because it keeps you super focused. And eventually, you reach a point where you feel so confident that you can just do it naturally, right? It's actually really nice – it’s kind of sweet of the body to make you feel that way.
To answer your question, I’d definitely say that Tom Odell’s album Black Friday really inspired me, because it sounds so raw and imperfect, and in a way, it feels so real compared to pop music, which often sounds so polished and clean.
But in Tom’s album you can hear the creaking of the piano stool, and they leave that in the track. Or the breath sounds, or even the mic cracking. I think that gives the music such an authentic vibe. That really inspired me to create a similar sound in my own work. Though there’s still more to explore in my music. Because, being a perfectionist, I tend to try to cut out everything that isn’t perfect, but that’s actually what inspires me.
Provinz also inspired me a lot... So there are inspirations from all sorts of areas.
When it comes to sound, mixing, and mastering, Miksu and Macloud, the producer duo, are big inspirations for me. Their sound to me is cool but still very pop. It’s this fine line, I think. You’re working within the pop framework, so it can still get played on the radio, but it should still feel cool and authentic in a way.
Finding that sweet spot…Miksu and Macloud are amazing at that, both in terms of sound and production. That’s why they’re such an inspiration for me when it comes to production.
Majan is also a huge inspiration to me, especially when it comes to lyrics. And Tom Odell as well. Both of them tackle themes I can really relate to, and I believe those themes are real, autobiographical. And I’m all about that.
Andy: We’re getting close to the end: I wanted to ask if you have any goals you’re aiming for that you want to check off soon?
Jaschu: Yeah, one immediately comes to mind, and that is… not being so nervous anymore. *laughs*
Especially with live performances. When I play live, like yesterday or at my first live concert, I get so incredibly nervous that I can’t enjoy it at all. At that moment, I’m just thinking, “Don’t make a mistake, don’t make a mistake,” so I can’t really enjoy performing. On one hand, it’s great because my shows are pretty much flawless, I get good feedback, and everyone’s like, “That was amazing,” but I’m still almost in a constant state of panic.
What I really want is to be on stage to connect with the audience, to enjoy performing live, and to get through those nervous moments. I want to be able to say to myself, “It’s okay,” and know that it will help me enjoy it more in the future. So yeah, that’s my goal.
Andy: I’m rooting for you, you’ve got this!
Jaschu: Thanks!
Andy: Okay, I have one last question for you: We from Unseen Magazine have a playlist with suggestions from our favorite artists, and of course, you’re included. What would be your three picks of songs to add to this playlist?
Jaschu: One song I really love is “Jeder meiner Abis” by Majan.
*scrolls through his Spotify* Let me go through this a bit.
Then “Spring” by Provinz. It’s a bit older, but I still love it. And lastly “Flying” by Tom Odell. That one would fit well in the playlist too.
THE UNSEEN loved talking with the talented and charismatic Newcomer Jaschu. Be sure to check out his first EP 'Vielleicht' as it drops in a few days (Friday)! We are sure his songs will find their way onto your playlists, they certainly are already on ours.
FIND JASCHU'S SONGS ON OUR "ARTIST RECS - PLAYLIST" ON SPOTIFY:
INTERVIEW BY
Andy
(Live) music is one of my biggest passions, which is why I enjoy exploring pop culture in my writings. From analyzing albums to reviewing concerts. I'm especially interested in fandom culture, which often comes through in my work.
VIEW ALL PHOTOS OF THE INTERVIEW HERE:
PHOTOS BY
Pauline
I’ve loved photography since I was a kid and (live) music has always been such an important part of my life, getting to combine both of those things is a dream come true. I also love urban and street photography, especially while traveling. Any of my friends can tell tales about having to wait for me while i take pictures wherever we go haha. So: if you’re ever looking for me, chances are you’ll find me and my camera at a concert or out somewhere traveling (or at a concert while traveling).
