From Reise, Reise · 2004 · Track 11
Amour
«Love»
More from the album · Reise, Reise
In context
Love as a wild animal, held for almost five minutes without letting go of the image. A behavioural profile of a predator.
- Love
- Predation
- Definition
- Origin
- Closes “Reise, Reise” (2004), an album that opens with the sound of a plane crashing and moves through cannibalism, mass suicide, Moscow, the United States and a man who walls in his partner.
- The German key
- The title is French, as in “Adieu”, and the German lyrics circle it without translating it: the word stays a foreign body inside the language, just like the thing it names.
- What the band has said
- The band has not offered a public reading.
- Live
- Rarely performed live.
Our reading
There is no couple, no story, no city — it is sung with the calm of someone who has already been hunted, and the chorus repeats that everyone wants to tame it, with the unspoken certainty that no one ever has. After everything the album brings, it doesn't end with a blow: it ends with a definition. It pairs with “Ohne dich”, two tracks earlier: that one is love as absence, this one as physical presence, and neither is kind.
The archive's interpretation, not an official account.
Original (German)
Die Liebe ist ein wildes Tier Sie atmet dich, sie sucht nach dir
Translation
Love is a wild animal it breathes you, it looks for you
Verse cited for the purpose of analysis.
A beast, not a feeling
The song holds a single image for almost five minutes and never lets it go: love is a wild animal. It breathes you, it hunts you, it nests in broken hearts, it goes out hunting among kisses. It fastens onto your lips, digs tunnels through your ribs, falls soft as snow. First it burns, then it turns cold, in the end it hurts.
There is no couple, no story, no city. It is a behavioural profile of a predator, sung with the calm of someone who has already been caught. The chorus repeats that everyone wants to tame it, with the implicit certainty that nobody has.
Where it falls
“Amour” closes Reise, Reise, a record that begins with the sound of a plane crashing and passes through cannibalism, mass suicide, Moscow, the United States and a man walling his partner into a house. After all that, the album does not end with a blow: it ends with a definition.
It is also the last piece of a pair: “Ohne dich”, two tracks earlier, is love as absence; “Amour” is love as physical presence, and neither one is kind.
Live, almost never
Paul Landers described it as one of the hardest songs to play live. It debuted on 30 September 2004 and was played for the last time on 1 November of the same year: five times in total, the lowest count on the record. Its working title was “Amore”.
Context
Eleventh and final track on Reise, Reise (27 September 2004), recorded at El Cortijo studio in Málaga.
Translation and notes by Rammstein Colombia, for the purpose of analysis. The full original lyrics belong to their authors.