It is unusual for a rapper who could be driven to an interview to, firstly, come in his own car and, secondly, call ahead to apologize for being a few minutes late because of the congestion in the city.
For Luca Manuel Montesinos Gargallo, 28, both seem self-evident.
And they even take it from him.
At 18 on the splash - and then in the hole
Gargallo, better known in Germany by his stage name Montez, is one of the country's most successful rappers.
His song "Auf & Ab" has been streamed more than a hundred million times on Spotify alone since last summer, and it is heard there more often than arrest warrant, Herbert Grönemeyer or the Toten Hosen.
He was certified platinum in January for »Auf & Ab«, 400,000 records sold.
"Yeah, that's awesome," Montez says on the podcast.
Especially because he has been in the business for what feels like an eternity at the age of 28.
Inspired by Eminem, he started rapping when he was 13.
At 16 he won hiphop.de's »Newcomer of the Year« contest and »Juice«, went on tour with Kool Savas and at 18 played for US rapper Kendrick Lamar on the main stage of Splash, hip-hop's biggest Festivals in Germany.
"As if intoxicated" was this time, says Montez in the podcast.
A rush that slowly swallowed him.
That was too much for a young adult who, between constant moves in his homeland of East Westphalia, actually only wanted one thing: make music.
Montez suffered from anxiety, writer's block, depression.
"Sometimes it happened in the strangest situations, in the morning at breakfast, in the hotel lobby." It took him a long time to find a daily structure again through odd jobs;
worked in a betting shop, as a pizza delivery boy and parcel deliverer.
With the structure, the music slowly came back to life.
During this time, he "crammed himself into two albums," he says.
He didn't make any money from it.
But there was no thought of that at the time.
130 songs, a billion streams
In 2018, he and his close friend, the producer Aside, moved from Bielefeld to a shared flat in Berlin “overnight, with zero euros”.
It was to be a turning point in Gargallo's life.
He gained a foothold as a songwriter, wrote his first lyrics for Katja Krasavice, and later for Helene Fischer, Pietro Lombardi and Wincent Weiss, among others.
“Then it spread like wildfire.
As a songwriter, I'm now involved in around 130 songs with around a billion streams," says Montez.
In January 2021, he founded the Paradyse label together with Sony to help young artists avoid making the same mistakes he did: »Especially the beginning can be very frustrating.
They shouldn't put themselves under the same pressure as I did.« In 2018, Gargallo also founded a company for product placement in German rap videos.
»Nevertheless, I want to be perceived primarily as an artist.
My life is music, art.
Nevertheless, I must also be a businessman.«
Montez tells the podcast how he manages to dance on all stages at the same time, what he earns the most from and why he thinks he may have already written his most successful song.
Listen to the current episode here: