Whenever I visit Holland (which I do regularly), I always combine visiting friends and family with working on The Mycah Principle with Remco. Last week was a particularly busy week. Since I have shows with Dreaming of Kate every weekend this month, my timeframe was restricted.
I flew in on the 6am flight on Monday morning and headed straight to The Hague for rehearsals, recording and writing with Remco. With the try outs of our house concerts approaching, we needed the rehearsal time. We also needed to experiment with keyboards and sounds. I am more of a pianist than a keyboard player, and I couldn’t bring my (electric) piano with me this time. Remco had borrowed a keyboard from Martin, our friend and occasional bass player. Unfortunately, the adapter hadn’t come with the keyboard, and for some reason Roland keyboards don’t work with any universal adapters that we had at hand. For the time being, we decided to rehearse with another keyboard.
Sometime in the afternoon, I decided to head to my mother’s house for some socializing. I don’t know if we could call it socializing really, because meanwhile I was still going over songs behind the piano, dragged into a Skype call with our producer Francis, emailing back and forth about Dreaming of Kate stuff and trying to make some more progress with the script of the house concerts. Oh, and I was tired.
The next morning I drove to Martin’s house to pick up the adapter. I hadn’t seen him in a while and we had coffee over a conversation about how incredibly small Holland is, about seizing opportunities, developing the things you believe in and about the progress we have made with The Mycah Principle so far. On my way back, I stopped at my former neighbor’s house for coffee. She has always been convinced this is my time to shine and that this will be a success. It was only noon and I had already had so much positive energy I couldn’t believe it.
I went back to The Hague for another rehearsal, including the storyline. Unfortunately, I hadn’t saved the script and when I clicked the wrong button, my work so far had disappeared beyond repair. Can Apple please create a “CTRL-Z”-like button on iPads?? Devastated, I decided to go to my room for a little bit and try to restore whatever part of the script I had memorized. I sat down on the bed and made the mistake of opening my email (force of habit I guess). And there I found a message from Francis suggesting to rewrite my lyics.
If I hadn’t been devastated about losing my script to start with, I might have been able to handle that message better. And if I look at the message now, it doesn’t actually say I have to rewrite everything (only to try and replace some things), but at that very moment it felt like I had lost everything I had written for this project so far. I went out for a walk, utterly upset.
That evening, we had our first try outs at Delft Fringe Festival. It is a lovely festival where all sorts of beautiful locations in the beautiful historic city of Delft are turned into small venues for the duration of the festivals. You can find theatre and musical acts in locations like people’s houses, art galleries, windmills, boats or simply on the street.
A last minute adjustment had not just changed our location from the room of the theatre to the foyer, but had also changed our show times in a way that made us have to finish our performance at the time that would initially be the starting time of our last performance of the evening. We asked to add another performance that night, so that people who actually came to see us would actually have the chance to do so.
In the foyer, there were two pianos set up for us, because somewhere in the lines of communication our statement that we would bring two pianos was jotted down as just “two pianos”, confusing the technicians whether we would bring two pianos or need two pianos. We decided to use the pianos and not set up the electric ones.
Performing is a good way of making progress with your musical skills. Throughout that first night we could already feel our songs getting tighter, more confident and playful at the same time. And it was obviously good to get a good response from the audience. For me, it is new to sit down and actually talk to the audience. For the past couple of years, I have been in a Kate Bush show where I don’t say a word throughout the whole show. I was happy to hear people loved it when I spoke too!
The next day I decided to reply to Francis that I wasn’t sure I agreed with what he said (still thinking he meant I had to rewrite everything). Remco and I had coffee, a chat and then decided to start with finishing some of the missing lyrics. I was still a bit wiped out from the emotional rollercoaster of the day before, and Francis’ reply to my email didn’t help. Still not seeing what he meant, his reply felt like an attack and I didn’t know how to get out of that state of mind. After a chat with Remco I decided to see if I could do some more recording, get myself together and just sing, even though I felt blocked in every way. Now when I am tired or emotional like I was at that time, I tend to get clumsy, and when that happens I should just stop and sit down for a while. I picked up the headphones, but when I pulled the earpieces apart to put them on, I let go of one. It slipped and knocked me on the lip, causing my lip to bleed and swell up. With another night of performing ahead of us, we decided it might be better if I just relaxed for a bit (while sucking on some ice cubes, hoping the swelling would go away in time for the performances).
The second night of performances was in a beautiful house, situated in an old soap factory. Many of the old details were still there, and the design of the house was just stunning. The people who hosted the night were lovely and kind, and so were the people in the audience. It may have helped that I had a bunch of friends and my mum seizing the opportunity of seeing me perform in Holland, but there were still plenty people we didn’t know who were equally enthousiastic about our show.
After our second performance of the night, we went out for a meeting with my friend Isabel, who was interested in helping us out. We had a chat about how we want this thing to grow, how we can reach people, because we may think it’s great what we’re doing here, but if people don’t know what we’re doing it won’t help us grow. Remco and I were both happy to welcome Isabel on board.
The next morning, we still had a tonne of work to do. We made a plan to finish everything. By the time we had finished our breakfast and coffee, we had about fifteen minutes for me to record the lyrics and new vocal line on “Golden days” I had written the day before. Then we would have to buy flowers (because that’s what the Dutch bring if they visit people) and drive to the house of Melou, the lady who wants to help us out with writing things like press releases. I took my laptop, paper and pen with me in the car, so I could write a first draft of the lyrics to a new song carrying the work title “Flabbergasted”. I also had to go over the lyrics Remco had written to another new song called “Where we are”.
When we got back from our lovely lunch with Melou in her beautiful garden, we quickly recorded both “Flabbergasted” and “Where we are”. “Flabbergasted” was partially improvisation, but I thought it would at least give an indication of where I wanted to go with the song. I recorded “Where we are” basically one line at a time, because Remco had written the whole thing and I didn’t know the song well enough to record a whole take yet. I prefer singing whole takes, to have a more natural flow in dynamics, but there was just no way I could finish it in time.
Our venue for the evening was another living room, situated in another historic building that has had several functions in the past. We had to carry our equipment up to the second floor, then over a bridge-like set of stairs, into the actual apartment, and then up the stairs. Luckily, we travel kind of light.
This evening too, we had some familiar faces in the audience. One of them was Martin, and we had a drink with him in between our two sets. We discussed things like moving your audience and building a community. To us it became clearer and clearer: house concerts are an amazing thing!
At 7am the next morning I had to rush back to Liverpool, where other rehearsals and shows needed my attention. By now, Francis and I have spoke to each other and cleared the air about the lyrics. I no longer feel like I’m under attack, and we’re going to make a great record!
