As life-long Hasselhoff fans, CUESTACK (Martin Kames, Bernth Brodträger) developed the vision for this unique project in 2018. After months of planning, meetings, songwriting and sketching out different ideas, they invited Hasselhoff to join them for a music and video recording session in Vienna.
After CUESTACK’s Martin Kames contacted and briefed Hasselhoff, they worked tirelessly to create an efficient schedule to pull all of this off on just one day. Meanwhile, CUESTACK’s Bernth Brodträger got to work on different demos and ideas for the song itself. “Through the Night” was an idea written on the very first day of gathering material for the project. It already resembled the final result quite a bit but in regular CUESTACK fashion, many additional songs were created, exploring different artistic possibilities. Kames and Brodträger eventually settled on the very first idea and demo and showed it to Hasselhoff.
Hasselhoff liked the song right away but wasn’t fond of the first set of lyrics. The song originally told the story of a lone wanderer in a dystopian future scenario, with intentions of capturing the entire journey in the music video, turning it into an epic short film. Without the images and story of the video in mind, the lyrics were too abstract for Hasselhoff ‘s taste. So Brodträger started from scratch to create the final lyrics, keeping only the original chorus. ‘Through The Night” is now about pushing through dark times with hope and courage, fighting your way towards the light at the ending of the tunnel. This resonated with Hasselhoff immediately and still made it possible to work themes of darkness and struggle into the lyrics, while keeping the focus on a positive message.
Both the song and music video were recorded in April 2019 and Hasselhoff went back to California as CUESTACK and their team put together this vision during the following months. Due to the very limited timeframe of the music video shooting, CUESTACKturned the multiple basic sets into impressive, surreal and dystopian digital worlds afterwards. Brodträger ‘s background and previous experience as a graphic designer came in very handy for creating the digital sets, while Kames handled the extensive cutting process, editing and post-production of the final music video. With this quickly evolving workflow, they could turn those basic two-dimensional sets into vivid images and futuristic landscapes that further express the atmosphere and sound of the song.
Photo: Maximilian Lottmann