Music • Images
OVER MIJN LIPPEN
In 2005, director Janica Draisma asked me to take part in the (extremely) stylised documentary 'Over My Lips', about stuttering.
She initially approached me as a ‘victim’, but I suggested that I should write the songs for the film instead. And so I did.
A number of people who stutter had written a text beforehand about their experiences. They were then filmed as they took their seats in a dark, carefully lit corridor. At the end of it stood a bright red push-button telephone with a coiled cord. They didn’t really know what to expect. Then suddenly the phone rang. Draisma’s voice came through the receiver, asking them questions about stuttering and their own experiences of it.
One of the participants actually says in the documentary that he hadn’t expected to be interviewed over the telephone, and that it felt impersonal. Watching it now, with the benefit of hindsight, I find the whole setup rather uncomfortable. Putting someone who stutters severely in such an unexpected situation, and then immediately asking them personal questions, seems quite a questionable way of going about it.
But anyway, back to the story...
I set their texts to music. In the film, the participants were to sing their own words live. After the interview, they were given bright red lipstick and asked to dance to the song Klinkerweg.
Below, you can listen to some of the demos I made at the time, performed, of course, by me.
Accepteren
When I read Bart van den Berg’s beautiful text, it soon brought an image to my mind of a dramatic scene with a stuttering little boy, his hair still wet, lying in bed just before going to sleep. His father singing him a bedtime song: “You just have to ac ac cept it.”
LYRICS
Klinkerweg
I find this text by Jelmer Soes just as remarkable, but in a completely different way.
It is associative and almost abstract, and seems to stumble over itself (a metaphor for
stuttering?). What strikes me is that, on paper, the text is neither particularly metrical
nor written as a conventional song lyric. After all, a text is not necessarily a song lyric, right?
And yet it contains a natural rhythm. In the music, that rhythm takes on a jazzy, swinging form. The phrase “platgereden, losgeschoten, klinkerweg” becomes almost percussive: plat-ge-re-den / los-ge-scho-ten / klin-ker-weg.
For this track I deliberately chose not to take a cabaret-like approach, but instead went for a loose, swinging live feel. It fits the image of someone walking down a street, continuing on their way: sometimes purposeful, sometimes searching, sometimes stumbling, but always moving forward.It is no coincidence that Jelmer Soes went on to become an accomplished writer and teacher.
LYRICS
De Spiegel
Maartje Borghuis’s text is very direct and clearly brings out a few things that are part of
the experience of stuttering. For example, the way people try to ‘help’ by filling in words
or calling them out when you get stuck. But also the strange, and at the same time rather remarkable, phenomenon that you often don’t stutter when you’re on your own, in this case in front of a mirror. In my case, after all, I’m something of an expert on stuttering.
For example, I don’t stutter when I’m doing voice-over work. I’ve surprised quite a few people with that: “Whaaaat!!!”
The music is deliberately restrained and intimate, keeping everything small and leaving plenty of room for the words.
LYRICS
Woorden (textwriter unknown)
I deliberately moved the section “Omdat je woorden gekke sprongen maken” to the
beginning of the song. It gives the text something slightly disorienting: we start with
an “because”, without yet knowing what that “because” refers to. Only later does everything fall into place.
The intro starts with an easy groove, disrupted by samples of rhythmic, almost cramped vocal sounds. There are tense, jazzy chords at the beginning, but then, at “Ik heb liefde voor het leven”, the song suddenly turns sentimental, ordinary and folksy (I have a soft spot for Dutch tearjerkers, so I certainly don't feel the need to apologize for that). Oh, ehm, I just did :-)
But later the mood changes. At “Probeer jij eens één dag in m’n schoenen te staan”, an almost unavoidable anger emerges, along with something of a cry for help. It is no longer just about being unable to say what you want to say, but also about the frustration of other people not understanding what that feels like.
