If you’re a regular visitor of The Influences, you’ll have seen our earlier sessions with Dutch indie folk songwriter AWKWARD i. Well, good news, seven years after Kyd, Djurre de Haan has released a new record, and it might be his best yet. Unalaska is out now. Days before its release we gathered at the Vincentiuskerk in Volendam and recorded a cover of Michael Hurley’s I Stole The Right To Live and two songs from Unalaska: One Time Only and Terminal Train.

Organic playfulness

Asked about his cover choice, De Haan explains his love for Michael Hurley. “The sense of organic playfulness that characterizes his music. It is clearly rooted in a tradition, but it also feels new, completely unique. Somehow I also have to think of Daniel Johnston, also a visual artist just like Hurley, also very unique in terms of songs and style. You can hear that Hurley is having fun. I love music that expresses joy in one way or another. This is also possible in sad music, as long as it doesn’t become a lament. I am reminded of Glenn Gould, who talked about how he loved music that ‘bears suffering with a hint of resignation’. I have made that into a rule for myself – I sing it in No Waterfall almost word for word, by the way.”

Will it be a nice birthday?

If you didn’t know about De Haan’s output in other formats, you might think seven years is a long wait for a new AWKWARD i album. “A release is a kind of birth or birthday where I am also very tense whether it will be a nice birthday. There is so much time in the process that precedes it that it is very intense. But in this case it feels very good because we have already gotten a lot of good reactions from The Netherlands and abroad, so that feels very festive.”

“It is also special for me personally because I don’t release a new album every two years, so I try to enjoy it even more. Aside from that, it’s also just hard work. This is the time to reach as many people as possible with your music, so I try to stay focused and not get carried away much by successes or disappointment about what may not work out sometimes.”

Working on so many soundtracks and theatre music feels like an enrichment, he says. “As a result, I am literally and figuratively in other, new places where I would not have been otherwise. Such as for example in Skopje to work with an orchestra for the films Hotel Sinestra and Fabula. In theatre I started writing in Dutch and it’s where I met my fiancée. The buzz that a new experience creates is inspiring for sure.”

One Time Only

One of my favourites off the incredible new AWKWARD i album Unalaska is One Time Only, a song that my 2-year old daughter repeatable claims ‘makes her need to dance’. “It was a song I wrote in a difficult period. It was in the pandemic, lockdown, George Floyd. All things that caused a lot of frustration and pain in society. But it was also spring, my loved ones were healthy, we had enough, and a pleasantly sweet air blew through the window into our living room in twilight and I had a kind of momentary awareness of unlikely happiness that inspired this song.”

A similar inspiration for Djurre de Haan comes from random words or sentences. “Skinny Jeans, Kyd, I even lit a cigarette cos I thought I was dying, and Unalaska are indeed words that came my way and that somehow appealed to the imagination; magnets that other things stick to. I try to be open to the unexpected meaning, or the poetry of it.”

Terminal Train

“For a long time Terminal Train was a song I didn’t understand. I couldn’t get it done, couldn’t find the last piece of the puzzle. Then I arranged it for orchestra for the Hotel Sinestra soundtrack. That worked very well, but in the end there was no place for it in the film. But because I had heard that it worked melodically, I got the self-confidence and the energy to finish the song. It might be one of my favorites now.”

A regular collaborator for De Haan is David Corel, producer and bass player (for among other Alamo Race Track). “David has actually always been by my side for the past ten years with the albums, theatre, TV and film scores that we have made. He is a special musician, and a friend. And he can do all kinds of things – things I can’t do alone. He handles the whole technical range of operations involved when making it. He is a sounding board, and his contribution is difficult to overestimate.”

AWKWARD i will be touring in The Netherlands in the weeks and months to come. Go go go.

Photos

Keep watching

Thank you for watching and enjoying this session. You’ll probably like some other sessions from The Influences’ archive too, like these earlier ones we filmed with AWKWARD i.