There Was Something In The Sky

Fifty-one Shapes of Nits: The 31st shape are the shadows created by The Light

Now isn’t the album ALANKOMAAT a music genre all by itself? I love it to bits. Henk Hofstede and Rob Kloet had to reshape the Nits world – together, of course, with their sound expert and advisor Paul Telman – into a new configuration. It ultimately resulted in a very intimate alignment of two boys and two girls who were perfectly in tune with one another. ALANKOMAAT turned out to be a very warm, open and friendly album where the band shows some of its more complex emotions, its fragility and usual discretion and its ability to fall back on itself, on its core identity whatever that might be. In fact the album ALANKOMAAT proved that there is indeed something as a Nits identity that can be tapped into when required throughout all the different formations that they changed into over the years. Nits will always be Nits. In the case of ALANKOMAAT they were Henk, Rob and Paul. And then came the girls.

There was something that changed in Henk Hofstede’s voice with the arrival of Arwen Linnemann and Laetitia van Krieken. Somehow his voice on the album sounded more introvert, calmer and pensive. He became perhaps less of a pop singer and more of a jazz singer or even a crooner bringing a more polished attention to his way of singing – which by the way I like a lot, I like it when the art of singing is practiced in a let’s say more serious and refined way, a more private and confidential manner of singing, and that is exactly what we get here on this album – and, come to think of it, also on WOOL, this same added sophistication to the voice. In fact I found Henk’s voice in a perfect accordance with the sounds of Arwen’s (standing) bass and Laetitia’s reserved handling of the keyboards. It all has the sound of a fancy uptown nightclub where Sinatra could be performing … I love the subtle attentiveness of it all.

Henk Hofstede’s lyrics talk about his insecurities, his fears, feelings of loneliness and emptiness, which are then counterbalanced by the presence in his world of his friends and family and … something else that keeps watch over Nits and their little community, preserving their way of experiencing and feeling the world. This little light that keeps on shining. This might sound a little cheesy, but it is not. Nits don’t do cheesy, nor sentimental. It is all inspired by something as natural as the sunlight … In some of Nits’s most beautiful songs, Henk Hofstede sings his fear of loneliness – as in “Louder and Louder”, “Heart of Mine” – an absolute favourite of mine – and “The Changing Room”.

But my favourite on the ALANKOMAAT album must surely be the song “The Light”. It has everything! It could be a little folk song. It starts off with the words “I had no reason to be so afraid”. This is such a reassuring song; it could be a gospel or a sort of tribal song, at least something that was passed down from one generation to another: just a man and his guitar bringing this confessional song of how he conquered his fears. It’s another one of these secret “Nits spirituals”: “there was something in the air”. Other examples are “Fire in my head” where Henk Hofstede takes us to legendary, far away times to sooth our spirits and the LES NUITS song “The Rising Sun”.

“The Light” brings us courage once more. It is such an uplifting song too! It takes you on a hike to the mountains – real ones, but imaginary ones too I suppose – where you get the most wonderful sight of a sunset. Where your soul can find renewal. Or some new energy or vigour, some rejuvenation. And then the light takes you down to a house and a room … where the sun is pouring down like honey on the ground. The sweetness of the light … This could be an ancestral song … finding its roots in a bygone time. Taking you from the majesty of the mountains into a private family world of a house and a room. Indeed the lyricist encounters his father who passed away. His father holds the light, a light given by those who preceded us in this world, their wisdom shining through. A beautiful hommage as ever there was one in pop music to the light within and to the father figure. As if Nits in their music always hold the past so very dear, so very close. Nits are not an irreverent pop band, quite the contrary: there’s always a lot of respect and admiration shining through their songs, for the world and its beauty, for the challenges it brings. And most of all Nits believe in themselves and their work, it’s almost as if they felt it their mission to express a sense of wonder, optimism and courage through their music and words. To always continue and take heart.

The alternation between Henk’s vocal lines and the rhythmic sequences that echo, guide and sustain his words, almost like a tribal drums progression, is just sublime. It has something very primitive about it. It all sounds like a rhythm that will go on for ever and never stop. An endless renewal. The drum pattern along with the deep and grounded bass sounds, feel like a reverence to the world.

We live in a world of shadows, Plato argued, where we are in the darkness of a cave and never see the light, the real world of truth outside the cave. I prefer to leave Plato’s theory of the allegory of the cave behind and just watch the beauty of the interplay of light and shadow, and the numerous shapes that this reciprocity between light and shadow has drawn throughout the work of Nits. The forms and shapes I detect in their musical world might not be anything close to those of the ideal world of perfect Forms of Plato, but I see in the work of Nits my own idealised portrait of a world that I live in day by day. The shapes I describe have nevertheless this ideal status to me, certainly in the way Nits have arranged them throughout their songs. Each and everyone of them reveals to me a simple, small truth of my experience of world and life. And their music tries to bring those mere shadows of forms into a higher realm of truth and being as philosophers would say. That is the privilege of music in my opinion: it can lift our everyday experience into something much grander and more eloquent as to its disclosure of meaning. Music can shape the soul and lay bare deeper meanings. “Good” music – Plato said – will always express a natural attraction to the good and the beautiful. I will not always follow his ideas on music, but in the case of Nits it is surely a correct statement. I for one have often considered this “natural attraction to the good and the beautiful” to be an essential element of the music philosophy of Nits.

“Her shadow falls on the street – When she left the Tanzschule – Her shadow falls on the street” Henk Hofstede sings in “The Changing Room” … another one of these tender moments where the truth of our world of little shadows is suddenly revealed in the liquid beauty of the light of music.

Joke Roelandt, May 2025