interviews

Tom interviewed by 3voor12

There’s a long interview with Tom on the website of 3voor12. A brief round-up:

  • About the artwork of Keep You Close. “It’s a picture from the newspaper. Like every morning I started my day in the studio with coffee, a cigarette and newspaper. Once I saw that picture, I thought, cover. I got it cut and put on the piano. Sometimes you have a better idea after one week, but in this case, I became increasingly convinced. “”Tom Waits once said recording songs is like trying to photograph ghosts.  That I recognize in that picture. I see love, concentration, patience.  That’s how recording songs works. During the recording of Vantage Point we sometimes ‘lost a song.  When She Comes Down is not as good as the demo. The Vanishing Of Maria Schneider is one of the best songs I have ever written, but it does not sound like it.
  • Keep You Close is written by the whole band. While working on Dark Sets In they namedropped Greg Dulli and one day later he happened to be in Antwerp.
  • “Vantage Point was not a peak period in my life. Not the making, not the tour, not the afterburn. I think it has to do with aging.  The album got a lukewarm response and that’s easier to swallow when you’re 27.
  • About the political crisis in Belgian: “As a musician, I can not do anything with. But I’m getting nervous when I see that some of my French friends in Brussel cannot speak one word in Dutch.”
  • The Final Blast is about his mother. He realises how the war had defined her life.  “I sing, “she likes to know the singer in the band, the attraction of the flame. It’s was not hard to take a moral stand before the Germans came. Every Little Thing’s political, there are different shares or black. Do you ever take it personal, there is love in the attack. “

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