Personal Jesus - 15th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (White Vinyl)

To mark Nina Hagen’s 70th birthday, her album “Personal Jesus” is being released on vinyl for the first time, including a bonus track – exactly fifteen years after the original release. The bonus track is entitled “I Am Born To Preach The Gospel” and is a cover version by Washington Phillips. With “Personal Jesus”, Nina Hagen dives deep into rock, blues and gospel in 2010. Raw, unpolished and full of intensity, she interprets songs about faith, resistance and redemption – carried by her unmistakable voice, which burns in every line. A passionate, uncompromising work that has endured to this day.

Now, 15 years after its first release – and on Nina Hagen’s 70th birthday – the album produced by Paul Rössler is being reissued – for the first time on vinyl as limited edition as white-colored 180g vinyl in a gatefold artwork. Even back then, “Personal Jesus” was a courageous album – in the name of love, because God is love – which she loves to proclaim! Nina Hagen simply made a friend of the often strict zeitgeist, while pop exhausted itself in self-ironization, she confessed to Jesus Christ, to gospel and to redemption; without cynicism, without distance. And yet – or precisely because of this – with the dazzling radicalism that has always characterized her. Her interpretation of Depeche Mode’s title song – once a gloomy commentary on the appropriation of the divine through private projection – becomes an ecstatic affirmation with Hagen: yes, the personal Jesus is possible. And he sings, shouts and prays in tongues.

You can listen to this album as a curious footnote to an eccentric career. Or you can recognize it for what it really is: a spiritual manifesto in the guise of pop, the testimony of a seeker who has found her God not only in the silence, but also in the noise of this world.