(Shut Your Trap and) Sell Your Soul is sung by Boyd Small, a friend who happens to be a fantastic singer. He did the voice for ‘Lucifero’ in my animated short Deep Shit.

It’s a given fact famous people sold their soul to the devil, and in this song the devil explains why that isn’t as bad as it seems: ‘effortlessly making waves!’ – and what is your soul worth anyway? (In Deep Shit, God is dead long time, and everybody goes to hell. The devil has a merely ceremonial job and he is really, really tired of it).

Gone Before He Left is an interesting track – i don’t play the piano but i wanted to write a song in the John Barry tradition. I figured he’d probably wrote on the piano and so i tried – the song ‘Gone Before He Left’ is the result.

But the lyric had it’s own incentive: My friends Balder Westein and Patrick Raats, both animation directors had this character, a magician that constantly fails doing his tricks. I think he’s based on Tommy Cooper, but mixed with a dangerous stuntman. They asked me to write an opening track for their film and i thought it needed to be something ‘James Bond-esque’. I thought it would be nice to make a song about a ‘living disaster, who does not understand the consequences of his own failures’ and turn this guy into a mysterious phantom-like personality, as if he is a real bond-like hero. The film never made it, but the song was recorded with the Spinshots and the Red Limo Orchestra backing us up with their strings!

Well, the word ‘Love’ often means ‘Lust’ in Rock & Roll. I thought it was nice to present it as a drug that could give you a hangover and the cure is: love again!

The tricky thing with rock ‘n roll lyrics is that you have a short song, a chorus that usually repeats a part of the lyric and that you are commonly need short sentences that rhyme. If you think you have a bit of an insight and want to express that through a rock and roll lyric, things are way more complicated than they seem.

In ‘Never So Right’ i took a take on the phrase ‘circumstances make the guy’ – an often heard argument in discussions about nature vs nurture. I thought that we don’t have as much of a free will as we like to think and changed quote into: ‘but circumstances do not make the guy, they just reveal him when he waves goodbye’. This way i could write a song about the singer having a broken heart as well as give a little thought provocation.

We can cherish our past but we should not cling to it – and it’s great if we learn through experiences but we should not be defined by our mistakes only.

One of my all time heroes is Ray Davies, singer and song writer for the Kinks. He sings about London in many of his songs and i always wanted to write a song about Amsterdam. But there were 3 complications: one is the Dutch street names that sound ugly in an English song, the second is the risk for ‘campy, or false sentiments’ which i tried to avoid, however much i like sentimental music, and the third is: i have always been so much in love with Amsterdam that i did not really have a problem to write about.

Things changed in the 90’s and 2000’s, with the liberalisation of social renting houses, with general politics that favoured the rich. By 2019, when i wrote this song, there was hardly any squatted house left. Culturally the city became way more shallow, cleaner, less free minded and commercial concepts wan over artistic ideas. It seemed to me the city was rebuild in an amusement park for consumers and tourists, and everything that was foreign, weird, artistic or valuable beyond what money can express seemed to be pushed out.

In Pigeons & People, I wonder about what is left of that city with its attractive dangers, of the free people that designed their own lives and sub cultures to live, of the cultural brewing pot rather than a ground for people who ‘had a job and could afford a house’. Amsterdam used to be called ‘The Magic Centre’ in the 60’s and early 70’s – but what of it is left and where to find it?

‘Angels never Stay’ is about the unfortunate fact that we can never stay together forever, however much we love each other and however much don’t want to be without the other. Our reality is temporarily.

Multiple Reality Disorder was the first song I wrote after I quit my band the Spinshots. I wrote it for the project ‘he Identity Machinery’ which is a collaboration with Laura A Dima, who plays a woman suffering from ‘MRD’. Although she has become somebody else in every reality (her story starts with a schoolgirl and we follow all her possible futures) for the clip of this song, the different ‘avatars’ came together and formed a band.

The idea of a girlband consisting of avatars of the same base identity needed a clip and a song. Laura and i both like early punk rock so it seemed great if the song clearly had references to that. Yes, New York Dolls, Undertones, Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, and you name them.

The title ‘Two Dreams at the Same Time’ comes from my partner Laura A Dima. She woke up one day and asked me ‘Can you have two dreams at the same time?’

I decided to make a lyric out of it because I felt attracted to the dilemma and I experience everyday life like a dream. So dreaming in your sleep is dreaming in a dream. But I also wanted to make a love song dedicated to my dear partner – so i made it about two people having the same kind of dream, completing each other. The singer is dreaming about the partner and the partner is dreaming about the singer, therefore creating each other’s reality.

‘Sugar Skulls’ was a song i wrote with keyboard player Jan Jaap Snellen. It was originally meant as a song for a children;’s programme but the director did not want it. So i rewrote the lyric to be a Halloween party song and recorded it with friends.