It’s time for cake at Peter van Rooijen. After Love, death & gravity (2018) and Love, Death & Bob Ross (2021) is his latest performance Love, death & cake the dessert, the final piece of what he calls the “love/death trilogy”. It soon becomes clear that cake does not just mean celebration. Even “when you are sad and empty and lonely” it is time for cake, Van Rooijen and four-piece band sing at the beginning and end of the evening.
The cake is a well-found symbol to tie all the songs together. Seemingly superficial, but anything can be hidden behind the different layers. “It is a wonderful mixture of happiness and discomfort, Sunday child and soul mate see each other over cake,” says Peter van Rooijen (39). Such a wonderful mixture of happiness and discomfort is also amply present in Van Rooijen himself, and he sings about it in a strong song program.
For example, Van Rooijen experiences discomfort in his life as a self-employed person. In a witty song, sung monotone and staccato in a Jeroen van Merwijkian manner, we hear about his emotions when he has to “wait for his money, squeezed between work and payment.” In such a song, the nihilist in Van Rooijen is visible: he strikingly expresses the universally recognizable tragedy of something exceptionally banal, from which there is nevertheless no escape.
Also read the interview with Peter van Rooijen: “It’s OK to Live an Insignificant Life”
Strong and entertaining
Van Rooijen can sing easily and cheerfully about these kinds of well-organized problems. Just like about sterilization, the stress of choice when seeing an endless menu or about his annoyance with the many cars on the street. Manageable annoyances, where we hear the cheerful pessimist that Van Rooijen can be so well. Venomous too, in a nicely biting song about the many situations in which he thinks of a certain person (“When someone talks through the news / and a little later asks what it is about / I think of you”).
Most of the songs are very strong and entertaining in their own right, accompanied by a great band. However, it is impressive how Van Rooijen has ensured that these types of songs collectively also represent something bigger: a shield that covers the fact that Van Rooijen finds it a lot more difficult to really sing about himself, let alone talk about it. You may be a razor-sharp observer of everything around you, but applying this to yourself is something completely different, as it turns out.
This theory is depicted in a funny recurring scene, the only moment in which Van Rooijen talks and does not sing. He quickly knows how to answer the most diverse questions from his therapist. What is family to him? “A source of heat and irritation.” Favourite food? “Pasta with salmon chips.” Is he a cheerful person? “Well done.” Yet there is always one really personal question that affects him and to which he is always unable to answer.
In an original way, Van Rooijen makes it clear that even the most persistent cases have a sensitive spot. Him too. A certain “rotten melody” from a city he had initially left sometimes takes him back to places in his heart that he usually prefers to avoid. The band then gives space to Van Rooijen’s guitar strum, which finally opens up. The moody songs he plays, about his last thoughts or about what he says when he stands in front of the mirror (“Good night, fake Javanese”), are compelling and impressive.