André Hazes Jr. has already dumped his lyricist Billy Dans, for whom he left his old team including Bram Koning. And that’s a good thing, according to Bram. “Zero hits!”
A few years ago André Hazes Jr. did a Maantje: he suddenly thought his old folk music was no longer good enough and suddenly wanted to make complicated pop. The singer dumped his old writing team, including Bram Koning, for a collaboration with Billy Dans. Well, not much success came out of that. And now?
No hits
Now André is back with Bram. “He was in Billy Dans’ club and he wrote one hit after another. But for André, not one hit was released in those more than three years,” says Bram in the Weekend. “So then he thought: maybe I should go back to the people I became famous with.”
André’s initial departure led to a media riot at the time. Was the reunion awkward? “It wasn’t that at all. I drove to the studio with André, he picked me up at home.”
Laughter
According to Bram, nothing is wrong anymore. “We had a good old-fashioned laugh in the car and of course talked about music. There was no old grief. He said himself: ‘We have a good time every now and then.'”
“In his eyes I am really an Amsterdammer, but André does not always express his emotions. He also said: ‘Sometimes something happens and then you just say it. Let it go and look ahead.’ And we do that, it’s great again.”
Number 1 hit
Does Bram think he can help André have a number 1 hit? “You never know. You just have to try to make good songs and at a certain point the penny drops and the audience embraces the song. I mean, Marco Schuitmaker with Guardian Angel, no one expected that, right?”
“Eighty million streams! If you had said that in advance, they would have put you in the asylum. If it works in the bars and the radio picks it up, but especially if it is picked up in the country, then you will automatically go back to number 1.”