I’ve been told I’m a lot of things.
A salesman, a heart breaker, a fearless paladin battering the Gates of Hell©, an Oscar winning lead actor and, surprisingly, a musician.
Admittedly, it’s mostly the latter. And thank god for that.
I was born on the October 3 1981 in Arnhem, being the youngest of three sons. Although I loved my time there, my parents, my brothers and I would move away when I was five to Deventer, where I spent the bulk of my life so far.
If you would ask me as a kid what I wanted to become, I’d never have a clear vision. I loved acting and writing, but would always answer police detective for some reason. I wasn’t that interested in music either. In class I wouldn’t really pay a lot of attention to it, instead enjoying dreaming away with historic stories.
When I turned ten, however, things changed. New neighbors moved in next door and soon we figured out our next door neighbor owned a drum kit. I was intrigued by the idea of hitting things and creating patterns, and after having tried out playing his drum kit, I was sold. My father gave me his pair of drum sticks that he used during his time in the navy and that set it off really.
I became increasingly frustrated at the fact, however, that I was unable to write any melodies by just knowing to play the drums. At the age of twelve, my parents gave me a little keyboard which set me off in the right path, paving the way to me writing my first songs. Fast forward into the future, at the age of sixteen I began to learn how to play guitar and bass, after finding I wanted to know how to pluck the strings.
I kept finding my songs were horrible, pieces of music that lacked a soul, that were just a body without any proper content. I wanted the music to emotional, instead I found I had been playing standard chords on my synthesizer. I was appalled by this, as I was listening more and more by this time to progressive rock and metal, music that I felt was ingenious, original and full of power; something my songs by then had always lacked. I then made a decision that would impact greatly on my life as a musician so far: I threw away my old songs.
I took a new and fresh notebook and made the mental note that if I could not write a song with a proper hook, a solid riff and a lyric that was about something that mattered to me, I would give up writing and just focus on playing drums again.
This became a defining moment in my life, as I wrote ‘Driving With Open Eyes’ a song where I focused on the fact that, no matter how well you know you’re doing things the wrong way, you still keep on doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Since then, I have written dozens of other songs and recorded several demo’s. But now the time has come to finalize my ambitions and make my first album, which will be aptly titled “Shifting Mirrors”.
Shifting The Mirrors 