Hamel
Hamel's songs are achingly catchy, or sometimes just aching. They often juxtapose deeply sad and even scathing lyrics with happy melodies that sweep you in. Imagine the musical landscape of a lush big band who would play with Frank Sinatra or Peggy Lee set against the emotional palette of Jeff Buckley ...
Hamel is complex, seductive, clever. Hamel is charm itself. His manner is both emotionally attentive and light. His songs reflect subtlety, anxiety, euphoria. His album reflects an artist who is extremely accomplished and way beyond his years. One of his tracks, 'See You Once Again', is the music for the BBC iPlayer ad, although he didn't write it about missing an episode of EastEnders, he wrote it from a much more melodramatic viewpoint about missing a lover who you may never see again.
His face is mesmerizing. He looks both older and younger than his 32 years, wise and fresh, always a one off. He was born in The Hague and lived there until he was 12 and his father's work within the car industry forced the family to move from the city to the middle of Holland, the middle of nowhere. The shock of moving from somewhere cosmopolitan to somewhere slow and small minded was Hamel's first experience of feeling different, separate, alienated. "Twelve is a difficult year to move and it was hard for a city boy like me. Where we lived wasn't rural per se, but kind of hillbilly. The school I went to wasn't so small minded, but I had to bicycle an hour and a half every day, an hour and a quarter if the wind was good."
By 2005 he had a record deal with a Dutch label. "I was exhilarated, especially at the thought of me working and collaborating to write songs." He began to collaborate with Benny Sings, a producer with whom he still works. "I knew about chords and melody, but I didn't know how to make a beat and how to make something work and how to make a sound, but Benny did."
Hamel's sound is unusual, a complex mixture of inspirations. One of his mentors was Jon Hendricks, American jazz legends, and he did workshops with him. "But at the same time I would like to listen to PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley, Peggy Lee, who is very sexy and strict and melancholic, but I also like Prince and Carmen McRae." From his own influences he learnt how contradiction and paradox forms the most powerfully crafted songs. The tunes are uplifting and the words are sad. Curiously that makes the tunes seem even happier and the words sadder. "I have discovered that music is my therapy. Through my writing I have discovered more about my light and my dark sides. Musically it might be called melancholic, a kind of nostalgia for a beautiful place you once had. If I went through my playlist of my favourite songs, lots of them would be melancholic. Sometimes the greatest songs are never the happiest, they are ones that affect you, that make you embrace life with all of its happiness and sadness. "Sometimes the things that make me happy also make me sad. Playing live - it's exciting and terrifying. Music makes me happy." But often musically he's expressing sadness.
How is Hamel in love, happy or excruciated? "Both. I don't believe that love makes you happy. I believe in relationships and being in love, but I think you always keep longing for something you can't explain and perhaps romanticise past relationships. I don't analyse the lyrics when I'm writing them... only after. From my songs you can tell that in love I'm usually the one who is dumped rather than the one who dumps. And although that's true and I might embrace that moment, I'm also very lucky in that now I'm very happy. It seems that I put all my melancholy in my songs."
Hamel is complex, seductive, clever. Hamel is charm itself. His manner is both emotionally attentive and light. His songs reflect subtlety, anxiety, euphoria. His album reflects an artist who is extremely accomplished and way beyond his years. One of his tracks, 'See You Once Again', is the music for the BBC iPlayer ad, although he didn't write it about missing an episode of EastEnders, he wrote it from a much more melodramatic viewpoint about missing a lover who you may never see again.
His face is mesmerizing. He looks both older and younger than his 32 years, wise and fresh, always a one off. He was born in The Hague and lived there until he was 12 and his father's work within the car industry forced the family to move from the city to the middle of Holland, the middle of nowhere. The shock of moving from somewhere cosmopolitan to somewhere slow and small minded was Hamel's first experience of feeling different, separate, alienated. "Twelve is a difficult year to move and it was hard for a city boy like me. Where we lived wasn't rural per se, but kind of hillbilly. The school I went to wasn't so small minded, but I had to bicycle an hour and a half every day, an hour and a quarter if the wind was good."
By 2005 he had a record deal with a Dutch label. "I was exhilarated, especially at the thought of me working and collaborating to write songs." He began to collaborate with Benny Sings, a producer with whom he still works. "I knew about chords and melody, but I didn't know how to make a beat and how to make something work and how to make a sound, but Benny did."
Hamel's sound is unusual, a complex mixture of inspirations. One of his mentors was Jon Hendricks, American jazz legends, and he did workshops with him. "But at the same time I would like to listen to PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley, Peggy Lee, who is very sexy and strict and melancholic, but I also like Prince and Carmen McRae." From his own influences he learnt how contradiction and paradox forms the most powerfully crafted songs. The tunes are uplifting and the words are sad. Curiously that makes the tunes seem even happier and the words sadder. "I have discovered that music is my therapy. Through my writing I have discovered more about my light and my dark sides. Musically it might be called melancholic, a kind of nostalgia for a beautiful place you once had. If I went through my playlist of my favourite songs, lots of them would be melancholic. Sometimes the greatest songs are never the happiest, they are ones that affect you, that make you embrace life with all of its happiness and sadness. "Sometimes the things that make me happy also make me sad. Playing live - it's exciting and terrifying. Music makes me happy." But often musically he's expressing sadness.
How is Hamel in love, happy or excruciated? "Both. I don't believe that love makes you happy. I believe in relationships and being in love, but I think you always keep longing for something you can't explain and perhaps romanticise past relationships. I don't analyse the lyrics when I'm writing them... only after. From my songs you can tell that in love I'm usually the one who is dumped rather than the one who dumps. And although that's true and I might embrace that moment, I'm also very lucky in that now I'm very happy. It seems that I put all my melancholy in my songs."
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