Blue eyes

“I love the [middle eastern / Indian] sample very much. We felt it’s a good song, but not good enough to be on the album, so we chose to use it as a B-side.”

Hand of sorrow

“We were searching for a certain kind of atmosphere. It was actually one of our weird songs, it’s a strange song. There is a bit of a contrast of what the song is about and the feeling of the song. The song doesn’t feel that sad.”

Ice queen

“They [the fans] harrased the video-channel The Box with requests for that clip, and because of that there was a market for the single.”

Mother earth

“I wrote this song the day my cat died.”

Our solemn hour

“It’s about when the World War 2 starts, Winston Churchill’s on the radio and announcing, that the war has come to start, that something bad has come out. Our solemn hour means actually the hour before something bad happens.”

Sounds of freedom

“It’s almost like a fairy tale song. It’s more a Mother Earth kind of a song.”

The cross

“It’s one of my favorites. It almost did not make the album because of the fact that I wrote it together with Martijn in a different tempo but it was too quick, you couldn’t really play guitar to it. So, I wanted it to be really heavy, slow, dramatic, and really an angry kind of song, but it didn’t work out. It took me a year to get the right rhythm and right atmosphere and it finally made it to the album in the last few weeks of the recording. So, I finally got to say “Yay!”. It took a year to get it to the final way it became. It had a totally different rhythm. It was much faster, it had the same atmosphere but it was much faster before. But, you couldn’t play guitar to it the way it was before, so I had to make it much slower and find the right rhythm. So, I heard a song on the radio and I recorded a piece of it and handed it to the producer and said, “ok, this is the rhythm I want to have more or less.â€� He totally understood what I meant and then everything began to fall into place and then we finished it.”

The heart of everything

“To us, what is important, is to be critical to yourself. You know sometimes you want something so much that it becomes the truth for you, but it’s not.”
” I sing with a heavier kind of way, a little bit more aggressive, and I thought I could never do it. If you play a certain song in a certain tonality like this very low and very heavy then I can’t sing it like I sang on Mother Earth apply a very high vocal because it doesn’t come across then. It needs balls and I had to search for mine a little bit.”

The truth beneath the rose

“This song was inspired by the Da Vinci code, and by the meaning of the movie and the book: do you believe something because people ask you to do so, or do you really want to believe? Is it really our nature to believe in God or in a religion?”

What have you done

“It’s the best song from The heart of everything. But it’s also special because we had never done duets in the past.”