Released!!!!

From today, July 1, the new Diftong album, Flight no6, is available on Spotify and Apple Music. It is temporarily in a separate Diftong account on Spotify. They will merge the two accounts, but I did not want to let you wait for that.

 

Let me introduce you to the people that play and sing on the Flight no.6 album.

 

Diftong wrote the songs, plays guitar and sings

JeeWee Donkers plays guitars, bass and mandolins

Peter Holen plays keyboard, accordion and harmonica

Remco Hendriksen plays drums and percussion

Jurriaan Westerveld plays the cello on the song Radio Waves

Maya Willemse plays the piano on Radio Waves and sings backing vocals

Jes van Wijngaarden sings backing vocals (and did the artwork)

 

Find out more about them by clicking on their names.

 

It was such a pleasure to work with these people. Work is the wrong word in this case. Work is something you do for food and shelter for the body. Making music is beneficial for the soul. This doesn’t mean we will not accept payment ;-)

 

There is also a CD with beautiful artwork and a booklet with all the lyrics. In due time we will have a presentation party. I will keep you posted.

 

Listen to the album! It will tell you more than a million words.

Bedouins

Despite all casualties, we managed to get past the speed bumps and we were flying. Flight no.6 is the sixth Diftong album and the web release is set for July 1. This album is full of identified flying objects. They appear in most of the ten songs that I wrote for the album. I have no clue why that is so. It just happened.

 

Partly recorded in what appeared to be Bedouin tents, it again has a real “band feel”, but it is a much more acoustic album than A Hell of a Time. We were in a big room and needed some acoustic separation. So we carried in blankets, feather beds and mattresses and built two separate tents with those.

 

I once co-wrote a song in the desert with a guy called Derek James Ritz. It had the following chorus:

 

I bought me a Keffiyeh and I grew me a beard

The boys at the office think I’m acting pretty weird

But they don’t know where I’m coming from

They don’t know where I’ve been

Going back to the desert, gonna be a Bedouin

 

I don’t remember how the rest went and (luckily) there are no recordings of the song. The only thing left is a blurry picture of me singing that song, totally drunk.

 

The CD of Flight no.6  has a great cover and a booklet with all the lyrics, but you will have to wait for that. Given the current state of the world, we don’t know when the release party will take place. Before you ask, I hate the idea of a social distancing audience. To think that you can play live music before an audience that don’t feel or smell each other… Also I don’t like live streams. I won’t mind doing those, but it is not the real thing. It’s like smelling a glass of whisky, without being allowed to take a nip.

Be patient and take care!

Ralentisseur

Flight no 6. My sixth attempt to fly: ten songs, a booklet with lyrics, artwork, the whole shebang. It started on a hike in the south of France in September 2015. My left leg was giving me trouble and I knew something was going to slow me down dramatically. It made me think of a speed bump or ralentisseur in the French language. I typed that word ralentisseur in my phone, not sure what I would do with it. In the time between that hike and the moment I am writing this, I was seriously distracted. By the actual speed bump, by the making of an album called A Hell of a Time, by the loss of two people that were dear to me, by meeting old friends, by many more hikes. And, in the last few months, by a pandemic. So here we are, with a virus and a new album on the shelf. Damn! It has been three and a half years since the release of my last album and now this. I guess we will have to be patient. Ralentissez!