Olaf Koeneman - vocals, guitar, mandoline, organ
Niels Goudswaard - vocals, guitar, harmonica
Herman Gaaff - bass
Bertram Mourits - slide
Léon Geuyen - drums
René van Barneveld - pedalsteel guitar
The Yearlings After All The Party Years – 24 January 2025, Sonic Rendezvous/Lonely Sounds Records
What kind of album can one possibly put out in this day and age? What kind of music would now make sense? We stumbled through covid, watched people start a war in Europe, bird flu has now reached Antarctica where lakes are starting to grow in the most unexpected places, another Trump term is more than we can take, I somehow decided this was the time to put a child onto this fated planet…
...and meanwhile we’re in this country band. Or whatever it is.
Our last – and without exaggeration we can say critically acclaimed – record Skywriting was full of catchy Americana songs. Melancholic yes, but far from ominous. More “we’re getting older” than “we’re all going to die”. It was clear from the early days of working on this follow-up that an attempt to carry on as if nothing had changed had become impossible. There was no Skywriting II in us. And even if deep down there might have been one, it made no sense to try and drag it out into the open. It would simply be too vulnerable under the blistering clouds.
What kind of album can one possibly put out in this day and age? The answer turned out to be simple: the one that you end up making. Instead of trying to craft something that would capture “the current world”, we just did what we have always done: write those songs. And from the first moment of recording to the last mixing day, “the current world” just colored these songs automatically.
With wilder brush strokes than we anticipated. Less gentle, at times more threatening, with bigger contrasts. And with a palette that contained fewer greens and pastels. Some of the songs are colder than anything we have recorded before. Sometimes guitar solos are fighting for attention simultaneously. Sometimes the songs are longer, because the point may be less obvious, but just as important.
What remained, however, is the pursuit of beauty, meaning and timelessness, especially now these are harder to find. If Skywriting could be defined as our definitive Americana record, then After all the party years is perhaps our first indie record. Skywriting was our version of a party record. We’re past the party years now. This is not our covid record, or climate record, or “new dad” record or anti-Trump record. It doesn’t aspire to be any of this, yet it’s all there somehow.
But foremost it is a record that allows us to carry on, with our backs straight and less naive. It’s a record that – and we say this without irony – gives us some hope. It feels right to us, it feels like us, and yet it surprises us. Now it’s for you to listen to. And if there is anything in there that you might recognize, understand or sympathize with, anything that pulls a little string that resonates with how you currently feel, wouldn’t that be something?
Take care,
Olaf, also on behalf of our country band (or whatever it is)
