(July 29, 2026) Roman Schleischitz, the Austrian keyboardist, composer, producer and creative force behind the international band Soul de Vienne, didn’t try to change the world with the band’s new album World Gone Mad. He simply wanted to create a musical piece of work that allowed listeners to explore the range of emotions – hope, fear, anger, compassion loneliness and belonging – that people experience.
Each song takes one of those emotions and crafts a story around it. For example, the funky and brassy “Like a Piece of Dirt” explores how it feels to spend a life devoting yourself to a person or cause only to be discarded when those in charge feel you have outlived your usefulness.
Then, there is the “The Love of Frida Kahlo,” a jazz infused mid-tempo R&B tune that explores the complicated and heartbreaking relationship between the legendary Mexican painter and her husband and fellow painter Diego Rivera. Rivera was emotionally distant, habitually unfaithful, but unwilling to separate. Power-packed vocalist Gwen Rakotomalala captures this complicated relationship with the line “You loved me/not enough to say it/but too much to let me go/Inside you said you burned/but you never let is show.”
Much has been made of the physical pain that Frida Kahlo endured due to suffering from polio as a child to the traffic accident that left her with permanent injuries. Through “The Love of Frida Kahlo,” Schleischitz Rakotomalala and Soul de Vienne make it clear that Rivera had invisible emotional injuries that caused harm to the woman he loved. Check out “The Love of Frida Kahlo” here.
By Howard Dukes
