Looking for spaces
That picture you've been painting doesn't look a thing like you. Daan Stuyven alerts us of the dangers of building an image too far from ourselves in his song Icon. His last studio album Manhay (PIAS, 2009) contains this one and many other great songs which have a high success in his own country, Belgium, where DAAN is a leading figure in the music scene. He’s now defending a live acoustic overview of his whole career that goes beyond a simple review. In fact, Simple (PIAS, 2010), is a rereading with novel arrangements and gives his now classic songs a brand new life because You were hungry for some learning and all they gave you was retrograding, as he sings in his Brand new truth. Nothing will ever be the same as it was.
Exes opens Manhay in which DAAN exhibits a powerful pop song with a hymn air despite a very personal lyrics. Like a missile that ain't guided I was following my seed, like a horse that hasn't travelled I took hay for upper weed, I got excomunicated cause I couldn’t play the creep. His love life turned into a vital flag but also a fierce self-criticism. DAAN’s lyrics are always in black humor so nothing is as it seems, or maybe it is. Still, we face a huge pop monument which earns points performed live with its new perspective on the recent Simple.
I can't give you all that I want but I can give everything I have, when looking for love in any wrong place just open yourself to simple days, a little affair for who you can care will make you change all your wicked ways. DAAN’s Your eyes shows us his present, a new horizon, much calmer than remembering his past. But the weight of his great success in Belgium can also be a bad thing and so sings in Icon with Johnny Cash in mind as a clear reference. A great song where he says to himself The guy you know well that's just you and there is nothing you can do just a like a door you can't get thru when there is no one left to fool…Deeply accurate.
Bad boy, bad girl acquires an intimate tone in a certain exorcism way. We're models without roles, we are the curtain just when it folds the party bashing moles. A bigger but also contradictory tenderness appears in The great retriever looking to the past mistakes and admitting that My blood was never cold.
Manhay is an album that represents a higher quality step in the career of an eclectic artist even more with the recent Simple as a perfect complement which has been recorded along with the important collaboration of Isolde Lasoen playing various instruments such as vibraphone, drums, percussion, trumpet and many others, as well as providing her beautiful voice full of nuances. Performing live, DAAN and his band enhance the charm of a repertory that, once discovered, never leaves you.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos courtesy of Daan Music