As a solo artist I mainly do the more melodic less raunchy stuff.
But that doesn’t mean I am free of raunchyness! Hey, I’m as raunchy as the next guy! 
So there. I have two great musician friends that I love playing with. One of them is Hilmar Leujes, bassplayer – the other one is Ian Rijksen, drummer. Together we can be raunchy as raunchy can be!
And these days we are. We have formed a band called The Rodberries. The Rodberries are all about energy and catchiness. Hilmar writes about 50% of the songs for the band. And I write the other 50%, I co-write the lyrics to a bunch of them together with Charline van Deth.
We are now in the process of rehearsing (and still writing!) for our first gig ever as a band, on May 9th starting at 20.00 hours at the free open air festival during the Giro D’Italia in Amsterdam (organized by the beautifully nice people and great organizers of Feest in de Pijp). It’s at the crossroad of the Eerste Sweelinckstraat, de Tweede Jacob van Campenstraat and the Gerard Doustraat, in De Pijp in Amsterdam. Everybody please drop by to catch us do our show, if you’re in the neighbourhood!
It’s all so very fresh, The Rodberries have nothing seriously recorded yet, but here are five demos of songs written we are certainly going to play:
The Kind Of Sugar I Like (demo) - music: Andrew Vroomans / lyrics: Charline van Deth & Andrew Vroomans [2:04m]:
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Get Out Of My Life (demo) - music: Andrew Vroomans / lyrics: Charline van Deth & Andrew Vroomans [2:23m]:
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She Used To Mean Nothing To Me (demo) - - music: Andrew Vroomans / lyrics: Andrew Vroomans [2:18m]:
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Testosterone (demo) - music: Andrew Vroomans / lyrics: Charline van Deth & Andrew Vroomans [3:38m]:
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You're Gonna Be Mine (demo) - - music: Andrew Vroomans / lyrics: Andrew Vroomans [2:50m]:
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It was forty years ago today, on August 8th of 1969 at 11.30 in the morning, that The Beatles walked the zebra crossing – very close to the Abbey Road Studios in which they have recorded almost all of their songs. One of the six photos taken while they did that, became the front cover of their album Abbey Road, the most famous album cover in the history of pop music.
For forty years since that day, people have been replicating those famous couple of footsteps while having themselves photographed. Every single day. The Abbey Road Studios even have a live webcam pointed at the crossing 24 hours a day. Really remarkable that one album cover can do that. I mean, for instance, you don’t see people replicating the Nirvana ‘Nevermind’-cover each time you visit the swimming pool…..
I visited Abbey Road last year and of course I intended to walk the crossing myself. But when I got there I saw several groups of Beatles’ pilgrim fans swarming the Abbey Road crossing. I decided I wouldn’t look cool doing the same thing as everybody else, but being the rebel I am, I did it anyway.
It felt like walking any other crossing… (I later learned that the crossing has been moved a bit since 1969, for traffic safety reasons, and it has been repainted a couple of times on top of that, so maybe that’s why the energy of the crossing had changed to average zebra crossing-level? ). And apart from that, the famous ubercool Abbey Road Studios were actually just a mansion behind a fence….
But still, I found Abbey Road to be a magical place: so much of the greatest music has been recorded and conceived there. Hard to find other buildings in the world where so many creative masterpieces were made.
Anyway, I wrote and recorded a song as a tribute. A very Beatlesque song, just how I like my songs. I called it ‘Abbey Road’ in a burst of creativity of my own…. I released it about two months ago on my album ‘Frequently Flying Music Chairs’.
Here it is, hope you like it:
If you should like it, you could of course buy it (or the whole album) at CD Baby, iTunes or Amazon.
Yeah! The master of the new CD is finished! Carl Saff did a great job on the mastering. So now I’m writing the text for the CD booklet and working on the artwork. Then it’s on to the pressing plant…. It won’t be long now before the actual CD will be available. Hopefully in the course of next month it’ll be here.
I’ll put up the four songs that I haven’t posted before in separate posts.
My first ever solo-album-cd-collection-of-songs will be released soon! The title of the CD will remain a secret for now, mainly because I myself am not sure about it yet…..
I just finished mixing the last songs (except for the song ‘Abbey Road’ that was mixed by Deron Daum at MagicMix Studio in Seattle) and right now this minute it is being mastered by Carl Saff (in Chicago, it will be a global effort, this CD .
I will announce the actual release-date and the whereabouts of the obligatory release-party soon. The CD will be available with me at shows, at CD Baby and in the various online music stores, such as iTunes, Amazon, Napster. You know.
For those who have followed me and my band Cry Ugly through the years: yes, you’ve spotted it well, this is ‘Monica’, the same song that we’ve released on our first album ‘Book Of Dreams’. The song that once went straight to number one in the Westpop Top 10, and stayed there for weeks on end. The same song.
Except, this version is a remake. I was never really happy with my lead vocals on the old version and with the fact that it started too slow to my liking and then only further on started to get the right amount of energy. Oh well. Not a lot of other people seemed to bother with it. Just me.
But anyway, I redid the whole thing, if only for myself. I only used, in a sliced-up-kind-of-way, the organ-part old-Cry Ugly bandmember Erwin once played on a rehearsal recording, because I really liked the sounds.
It’s a rocking song I still think. Hope you like it too….
Monica (new and improved) [3:45m]:
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This one kinda goes together with ‘Loneliness Means Freedom Now’.
The Hardest Day [1:55m]:
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Sometimes love stops being love…..
Loneliness Means Freedom Now [2:51m]:
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