MY OWN GHOST Interview for Museboat Live channel

Interview with Julie Rodesch for Museboat Live Channel on Thursday, April 22th in Up In The Alley show with Alison Cowie

My Own Ghost is a hard rock band with modern elements from Luxembourg founded in 2013. The music relies on Julie's warm and powerful voice and on the musicians' different backgrounds, ranging from pop to metal, by adding some electronic tweaks. Within 9 months, the band hit the stages of Luxembourg and already played some shows in the UK. In August 2014, My Own Ghost signed a record deal with Secret Entertainment from Finland who took charge of the distribution and promotion of their upcoming debut album.

Julie Rodesch - Vocals, Fred Brever - Guitar, David Soppelsa - Guitar, Joe May - Bass, Michael Stein - Drums

Band LineUp

After shooting a promo clip of their single ‘Crystal Ball’, My Own Ghost released their first album ‘Love Kills’ in September 2014 to critical acclaim. Song "Bad Love" from this album became very popular in Museboat and was also nominated for a Museboat Musies Award. That's why I took the liberty of asking a few questions to lead singer Julie Rodesch.

Hi Julie!

Hi Alison !

I admit that the music scene in Luxembourg is quite unknown to me but I bet there are a lot of amazing artists there as well. Can you tell us a little more about what the current music scene in Luxembourg looks like?

Considering the small size of our country, we actually have quite a lot of active and also great bands in different genres. We have a large scene of extreme metal bands, especially death metal and hardcore. That’s of course not the scene where we fit in best, but we know a lot of these guys and visit their shows as often as possible. The advantage of a small country is that you know almost every musician as you constantly meet at shows or in bars, so this gives a nice feeling of togetherness. Unfortunately, the disadvantage is that there are not a lot of places, venues and festivals where bands can play, so that the limits are reached quite fast and you find yourself playing the same places over and over again, which of course is not optimal. That’s why we decided early on to play as many shows as possible abroad in order to reach a wider audience. In addition, we already played all these places with other bands before, so from the start there was a great desire to do something else, something new with My Own Ghost.



I believe you had a lot of fun while making music videos. Do you have any particular funny story from any of them?

Yes absolutely, it’s always kind of a big event for us. I think maybe one of the funniest stories was when we filmed short clips for our lyric video to Don’t say you love me. For the album Life On Standby we worked a lot with mannequins and we did so too for these clips. So in the early evening we’d set up the mannequins under a tree, near the woods and a graveyard and suddenly the police turned up, as someone called them, informing them that some weird people were up to no good near the graveyard. Naturally, the police immediately saw that there was no trouble, laughed about the whole incident and let us finish filming our clip.

Where does the title of your second album Life on Standby come from?

One of the first songs we recorded for this album was actually called ‘Life On Standby’. At the end of the recording sessions, it was evident that all of the songs we considered to make it on the album, revolved around all the different aspects of life, so we thought that ‘Life On Standby’ would be a very fitting album title. ‘Life On Standby’ stands for the people who just let life pass them by. They are frustrated and unhappy, but do not have the courage and/or strength to change. On the album there are some really sad tracks, but also songs with an optimistic outlook on life. This contrast was really important to us, as we wanted to show that you should never give up fighting and working to achieve your goals and to make your dreams come true. To us the mannequin on the cover perfectly represents the meaning of the album title as it stands for the listlessness and passiveness of people who are not really taking part in their own life. The bleeding apple symbolizes that there’s nevertheless always life and a small spark of hope in all of us.

This will probably interest our boss Andy (laughs). I found on your website that you have performed in various clubs in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Can you tell me what interested you the most about these music scenes? For understandable reasons, I am especially interested in the Slovak one (laughs).

We really enjoyed our trip to these eastern countries. No one of us had ever been there before, so it was a completely new experience to all of us. Although there are of course some differences to Luxembourg, we did not feel out of the world as we nevertheless encountered a lot of similarities and the people were very nice to us.

We especially like to remember our concert in Slovakia at the U Legionarov club in Kosiče, where they treated us like kings. The audience was amazing and they’d cooked an amazing meal for us after the show.

In Banská Bystrica, we spent the night in a hotel situated in the mountains outside of the city. As we were the only guests that night, we felt a bit like in the movie ‘The Shining’, the hotel even had that end 70’s/beginning 80’s flair and decoration. That was a scary night.

We also spent a day off in Prague, a beautiful city, we loved it there. One year later we played another show in Prague as support for Loudness, so we already knew where to find the best food and beer.




I believe that the lockdown will not last forever, so we would all be interested in what are your next plans for the future?

We also hope that the lockdown will hopefully come to an end, the sooner the better. As for the time being no live shows are possible, for the last year we finished work on our third album and currently we will concentrate more on promotional work. On May 26th, we will be part of the ‘Metal is forever Rockcast Show’ with Ritchie Newton. This is a live chat with Q&A starting at 20pm. It would be awesome if some of you guys would tune in! We will also work on new merch designs for our online shop on Bandcamp. And of course we will rehearse our new songs so that once live shows are possible again we can give a glimpse of what our third album will sound like.



Is there anything you would like to bequeath to Museboat listeners on behalf of your group?

We want to thank all the Museboat listeners who support us and of course Museboat Radio for constantly playing our songs. Especially in these times where we cannot play live and bring our music to the people, we are allthemore grateful for every single person who helps us out on this by spreading our music. -We would also be happy if you guys could give us a like on FB, follow us on Instagram and Youtubeand have a listen to our songs on Spotify.So please, help out the more unknown bands by integrating their songs in your playlists!!!

Thanks for the interview Julie.

Thank you for having us Alison and for supporting bands worldwide with your show! Take care.


This interview was brought to you by
Alison Cowie
host to the Up In The Alley show