We are happy to have the priviledge of welcoming the German musician, composer, lyricist and producer Wolfgang Michels into our publishing house!
The American magazine Hartbeat! called him “one of Germany's finest yet most underrated singer songwriters!” Wolfgang Michels was discovered very young at the age of 15 in 1967 by Alexis Korner the English Rhythm & Blues pioneer who also helped artists like the Rolling Stones.
Michels’ music is primarily acoustic in nature, and he has consistently taken his own musical and lyrical direction. In 1974, after the end of Percewood's Onagram, Michels began a solo career and went to England in 1975 and then to the USA in 1976. He was the first German musician to record an album there: Full Moon California Sunset. The first single from the album Do You Still Dig It became a Top 10 radio hit for his debut album "Full Moon California Sunset" which Michels received the Deutschen Schallplattenpreis (German record award).

The second album, Crazy Enough, also recorded in California (at Music Annex Recording Studios, Menlo Park in October 1978), appeared in 1979. The title song from the LP was presented on Rockpop the popular ZDF (German TV channel 2) music show, where Michels and his band appeared alongside Randy Newman and Jethro Tull.
Michels also worked for various record companies as an independent producer and A&R advisor and so was able to establish the Nature label, which was exclusively for acoustic music and thereby a forerunner of the unplugged 90s wave.
At the beginning of the 80s he turned to the German language and collaborated with Rio Reiser who at that time was still a singer with German band Ton Steine Scherben. The albums were called "Irgendwas stimmt hier nicht" (1981), "Keine Probleme" (1983) and "Bei Mondschein..." (1985). The albums that Michels released from 1976 to 1985 were an important contribution to German Rock history.
The German-language productions between 1981 and 1985 are lyrically and musically excellent. Keine Probleme contained, among others, the song Ich bin müde, written by Michels and Rio Reiser, which was a chart hit in the 2004 cover recorded by Fettes Brot. The friendship between Michels and Ton Steine Scherben resulted in the release of a Ton Steine Scherben Sampler as well as various singles at the beginning of the 1980s by Teldec, a major record company.

In 1990, under the alias Percewood, Michels recorded a single (Dancin’ on the Edge of Life), produced by Armand Volker that made it into the Top-40 German hit parade.In 1995, new and old material appeared on the album Orange Kindergarden, which included both spirited and critical German and English lyrics. For his West Coast single release Bring Me Water, Michels made a video in the California desert under the direction of the wellknown star photographer Jim Rakete. In the mid-nineties, Michels was cited as a trailblazing influence for the New Folk Movement by Pat Thomas from San Francisco.

In 2003, Warner Music published the complete musical work of Wolfgang Michels and Percewood’s Onagram in the form of 11 remastered CDs, including many unpublished bonus titles. Michels then began an extensive tour of Germany, during which a concert at the Harmonie in Bonn was recorded for the WDR television show Rockpalast. Michels was heavily involved in the Rio Reiser Tribute Familienalbum, on which he produced a song he had written, Herzverloren, which was sung by Rio Reiser, and also recorded an unpublished Michels/Reiser ballad Bald zuhause. Familienalbum also contained Fettes Brot with their cover version of Ich bin müde - a song which had appeared 20 years earlier on the Keine Probleme album. Rio Reiser wrote the lyrics and Michels the music for a song whose title comes from what the Indian (Chief Bromden) says in the film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

The Michels/Reiser Song Ich bin müde (in the cover version by Fettes Brot) was the only German song rated - at number 4 - among the top ten best pop songs of 2004 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feuilleton section, alongside The White Stripes, Robbie Williams and Coldplay, among others.

A new album from this exceptional songwriter is planned for 2007.