Emergency lane, Hallo, Hotel school: you can safely call Antoon a hit machine. Fans don’t seem to hear those songs often enough, but the 21-year-old singer himself got less and less satisfaction from them. That’s why he threw himself into making new music.
“People around me thought it was a stupid choice to take my time, because I had so much commercial success,” says Antoon, who released his new single on Friday Blindly released, in conversation with NU.nl. “But I prefer to focus on the long term. If possible, I want to make music as a job for the rest of my life. Then you can’t milk your success.”
Antoon’s last solo material was released in October 2022 (this was only followed by an EP with Ronnie Flex). “Before that, I felt like I was on a train that just kept going,” says the artist, who achieved many streaming successes with catchy pop choruses and hip-hop productions.
“Every time I released a new EP and it all went very well. I could have done more with that sound, but I was just tired of it. If I no longer get satisfaction from it, the fans will too feel. They say: we know this now.”
It is not the case that Valentijn Verkerk, as Antoon is really called, immediately started looking for a different sound. “I mainly wanted to make music for a while, without releasing it right away.”
Concert at SEA gave Antoon new inspiration
Antoon continues to perform during that period and he appears at the Concert at SEA festival in Zeeland. “I come there with my music, mainly with hip-hop influences, performing between all kinds of bands such as BLØF and Suzan & Freek. I never really sought out that whole band feeling, but at Concert at SEA it suddenly gave me a new spark. I wanted to try that too.”
Antoon works a lot with Twan van Steenhoven (Big2 of The Opposites), who is a mentor to him. “He didn’t feel what I wanted to make. Guitars and tapes are not his thing. For him it should just be synthesizers. He is like a big brother to me and I still speak to him every day, but it was time for me to others to work together.”
This is how Antoon ended up with Arno Krabman, the songwriter who is partly responsible for big hits by Suzan & Freek, S10 and Snelle. “He understands better than anyone else where I want to go. He picked up his guitar and it was as if the music wrote itself. I had a melody in my head and that became the chorus of Blindly. The demo was recorded with just guitar and my voice. I later started dressing it up with beats and harmonies. Really very different from how I worked before.”
In addition to Antoon and Krabman, Paul Sinha and Kevin Bosch also co-wrote. He also made the hit with them Hotel school. “They understood exactly the atmosphere I wanted to go for. We were really jumping with enthusiasm together when the song was finished.”
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‘I’m no Céline Dion, but I’m happy that I can do this now’
Op Blindly we hear Antoon singing more fully than he did on previous albums. The singer himself fully agrees with this. “At first I was mainly a producer who also sang, but I started taking singing much more seriously. I took singing lessons, which helped a lot.”
Antoon doesn’t think so Blindly becomes too much of a challenge live. “I’m no Céline Dion, but I’m happy that I can do this now. I’m practicing a lot, but that has to be done before playing live. I can’t wait to hear the fans sing along.”
2024-01-23 11:08:18
#Antoon #opinion #Didnt #milk #success #Music
