Friday interview with Peter and Nele... part 2

If you haven't read Part 1, please read it here

Please ignore the phone in the corner!

Me: Are there themes that keep reoccurring in your songs?
Nele: I think I theme that keeps coming back is the difference between who you are and who you are trying to be - my attempts to be a pop star, for example, I have a song called 'When I Drink I Always Think That I'm Beyonce'. Love is something that keeps coming back, and love sickness - it's such a constant thing in life. So, that, and trying to be somebody else...
Peter: My album 'Six Strings... keep me sane' was themed around moving from full-time teaching to becoming a full-time musician. There are other themes within it - there are songs about love, and about arguments, and about drinking whiskey - Straight JD - which strangely enough I don't drink. I'm actually struggling at the moment over what the theme of my next album will be, but rather than worry about that, I think I'll just write the songs and see what they're about.
Nele: Yeah, I gave up on album themes. Maybe I'll do it one day, but right now I'm just writing songs. But organically they fit together because they are all my songs and they have something in common.
Peter: It does happen like that. I've got a good example - if you listen to Frank Turner's back catalogue, his first album is about 'screw the system, f*** the man, we're going to have a revolution'; the second album is 'hmm, this isn't quite working out the way I thought it was going to'; and the third album is 'I'm too old for this shit'. And you can tell he's just growing up as a song-writer. So maybe that's the way it goes, you just write what's current and what you're feeling at the time, and it's a document of that.

Me: So you mentioned Frank Turner, who are your other song-writing influences?
Nele: In early 2000, when I was about 13, there was this genre called anti-folk... it's not against folk, let me say that first - it's an American genre, New York actually, with people like Kimi Dawson and Jeffrey Lewis who are really obscure names, they never really made it. Something really valuable that they were trying to do was writing about daily life - sometimes it goes too far, sometimes you can hear lyrics like 'Oh I lost my shoe, I don't know what to do'. There's a song by Jeffrey Lewis that goes 'I saw a hippy girl on 8th Avenue, she barely looked at me for a second or two, and I suddenly realised I no longer look much like a hippy'. But for some reason, one day when I was 13, someone was playing a song on Belgian radio, and I kept on listening to it. Daniel Johnson, as well. I really like 60s melodies, close harmonies like the Beach Boys or anything from Phil Spectre. I have a band back home, and that's what we try to do in that. My dream would be to get a sound that's between anti-folk and 60s girls pop.
Peter: My influences are Frank Turner and Ryan Adams, a sort of country-folk. The most pleasing comment I got was at a festival in Saltash last year when a guy came up to me and said I really reminded him of Crowded House, because Neil Finn is my song-writing god. It's fairly obvious, that if he's a major influence I am going to sound a bit like him, but it was really nice that somebody recognised that. I think one of my biggest influences at the moment is Vince Freeman, purely because he's shown me the way forward in becoming a full-time musician - I saw him play, I saw how he used the guitar and it showed me a way of playing it differently. He's also given me a lot of advice. I got to know him as a fan, but the first time I went to his house he picked up his guitar and said 'Look, I've written a new song', and it was a moment of clarity that   that was now my life. Not that a copy any of those four.

Me: Just one more question, what's next? What are your new projects?
Nele: I have a lot of songs I've written and want to record properly. I have an EP out, but I want to record a full album - the problem is I play very simply live (Nele has a great variety of humorous songs) and it works because people laugh and you can see my face. But the album needs to be more, arranged propely - I'm still working on how to do that. I actually have a ten-year plan - I'd love to bring out an album in English and in Dutch for the Belgian market. There's a television programme next year, where I'll write a song every week about things going on in Belgium. And then in a year or three, I'd like to write a musical, in my style - so there would be characters, but they would all be me. It's going to be about love. I still have to live a little to write it, though. One day I hope I can write songs about what's going on in the world, to change the world, to say something, but I feel I'm not ready for that yet.
Me: I feel the same way about my writing - it's very similar. I write about very small things, every day things. But it's those big world-changing events that the big authors write about... I'm not there yet.
Nele: I would love to change the world with my songs. And I want to have a sit-com about my life! And travelling around - I wrote a song called 'I'm Not Famous, But I'm Free' - the way I'm living now I can play my music and see the world.
Peter: For me, it's taking my music around the country, touring different cities. And then we're organising a European tour for next year. We did a gig at a National Trust property last night, so it would be great to tour around National Trust houses. Maybe there'll be another album next year - maybe record that in Germany. And we've just decided on America - land in New York, down to New Orleans, and then drive across and end up in California. And maybe even Australia...

Me: Thank you for your time. (Although they didn't have much choice, they were both sitting in the same room as me and I nabbed them. And at least I discovered I'm going to be a music widow next year... So if you're ever unsure about what's going on in your hubby/wife's head, just interview them, apparently!)

Here are the links again for Peter Crawford and Nele Needs a Holiday.

Friday interview with Peter and Nele... part 1

I don't know about you, but whenever I have a Belgian singer-songwriter staying at my house, I have to interview them!

So, please welcome Peter Crawford (Hubby) and Nele Van den Broeck to my blog. (Nele is pronounced Ney-la, and is known as Nele Needs a Holiday when she's performing!.) They are touring Cornwall and West Devon until Friday 20th July. Check out their Facebook event page for more information.







Me: How old were you when you started playing musical instruments?
Nele: I started at 10 with the clarinet which I gave up after two years. I played the violin for a while, the drums. But the only thing I kept on playing was the piano. I taught myself - I was in music school for singing, but you had to take an extra theory lesson and I learnt how chords work, and knowing that I just taught myself the piano, and ukelele. I'm not really good at it, but it doesn't matter to my music whether I'm a virtuoso piano player or not, the lyrics and story are the most important.

Peter: I started playing guitar when I was 12. I had a few official lessons, but didn't get on with the silly dots and squiggles, so I taught myself, using music books - strumming chords and singing. But I also play the mandocello, I'm learning the piano - hopefully Nele will give me some lessons. And I'm inventing instruments...

And here it gets far to technical, but basically he's putting different strings onto a Cuatro de Puerto Rico, and... um...

>Me: How long was it before you started writing your own songs?
Nele: I remember I wrote my first lyric when I was 13, but I didn't know how people would get music to the lyric - it was something so mysterious. How would anyone be able to write a song? I wanted it so badly. Recently I re-read that lyric and it was terrible. And when I was 16 I was in a band, a punk bad with guys from school, and we started making music by jamming - they would play some chords, and I would hum, and put some lyrics to that. And I thought, oh yes, this is how you write a song. It's just the melody in your head... once you've got the trick, the melodies just keep on coming. My first actual song, I was 21 - Red Dress Song was my first song... it took me half a year to write it, because I had a very repetitive melody in my head, and bits of lyrics would just pop into my mind so it took so long. Now I'm writing songs in two hours.


Peter: I think I was about 15 or 16. The first one I remember writing was for a band I was in during A-levels - I think at the time we were called Valentine's Failure.

Me: Which one was it?


Peter: It was the one I wrote for you, I think. (Yes, folks, that's how you get girls when you're a musician!) There might have been one or two before that, but not written for a full band. But when you're 17, 18 and you decide you want to be the next Velvet Underground, you don't half write some crap. Looking back on the lyrics, it's just painful, but out of the dozen or so songs we wrote together two made it on to my first album. But those are the two commercial ones that I wrote, but they weren't typical of what we were writing at the time - we wanted to be Bowie and Lou Reed, and didn't have half the talent to be able to do it.

Me: So how has your style changed over time?
Nele: The most important change was when I realised I'm writing song about me and my life. Before, when I was a teenager, I wanted to write a rock song how it was supposed to be, about the rock life or about cool things. But when I realised I'd never driven on Highway 66, or whatever... I'm a girl in my twenties, living in Belgium, I have my own subjects to write about. I don't have to invent cool topics... I can of course - I like singer-songwriters who use beautiful metaphors, but I'm still at the stage where I write songs about my life, and I try to do that as honest as possible. I write literally what happens to me. I don't use a lot of metaphors - when I got kicked out of theatre school, I wrote 'I got kicked out of theatre school'. And when I boyfriend dumped me, I sing 'this boyfriend dumped me'. And people come up to me and say they recognise themselves in my lyrics, so I think there's something in the cliche that if you write something personal it becomes universal.


Peter: Looking at the stuff I've written recently and the stuff I recorded for my albums, it hasn't changed massively, I don't think. It's more the delivery, learning to use the acoustic guitar properly. I don't have a system for writing songs, it's purely if the lyric hits me, or a chord progression - a day later, there's a song there.


Me: Do you want to share the 'Blood on Strings' anecdote? (If you've been to a gig, you'll have heard this one!)

Peter: It was one of my first professional gigs, and I was strumming away, and I looked down and noticed my guitar was changing colour, and I couldn't work out why. And then I realised I'd split the ends of my fingers and was bleeding all over the place. So, it gave me the lyric 'blood on strings'...

Part 2 - here!