House of Jacob: An Autobiography in Music

When the ringing of the doorbell coincides with a few strokes on the guitar, you know that you are in Nitsland. 
Upon watching the “House of Jacob” video for the first time – only a few weeks ago – my immediate response was an emotional one. I was very moved by this guided tour Henk gives us of the family house where his mother lived for so long and of the Amsterdam neighbourhood he grew up in. In fact it is not really Hofstede showing us around ; it is the hybrid character formed by the frontman of Nits and his alter ego Vogelman – often wearing a Magritte like bowler hat – who roams through the house and streets. In the typical Vogelman fashion of speeded up movements and dance. Vogelman is Henk’s filmic cinema-persona, free as a bird, like music is: he is symbolising the movements through time and place which the camera usually captures so well on screen. The music of Nits tells the story of a life through these very same images of movement in time. “House of Jacob” is the work of a cineast playing the guitar and singing about his world. Henk Hofstede is as much a man of the moving image as the moving sound. The language of Nits is based on a natural syntax of sound and image. In fact this seems like the simplest of ideas – writing songs about what is just literally in front of our nose and where we spend most of our quotidianity,  a most evident one, yet it is a formula not many pop artists have tried out. Probably too simple; many see it bigger and want to take the whole world into their songs and all that goes wrong in it. Nits stayed close and in the instant of closeness and immediacy reached moments of universality. Without judging, telling an innocent story as if seen through the eyes of a child, the way a young person would remember his or her childhood world. Doors are opened and shut, there’s a constant coming and going, Vogelman is circling and spinning around his axis, time moves on in the progression of music. A family spirals through time, rooms where time is passing through, it’s just such an emotional theme often returning as a motif in their songs of movement, like in the spiralling images of “Cars & Cars”, but Nits bring it with candour and lightness. 
Where a big brown building is just that. Nits have never shunned mimesis in their work, the imitative representation of the real world. Nits are not afraid of being literal, their figurative way of speech is only just that: it needs to be taken literally. When the music of Nits sings about a big brown building, that’s just what you’ll see in the video: the big brown building. Water is blue in their songs just as it is in the real world. It is a refreshing way of writing which suits pop music so wonderfully well in my opinion. This McCartney-esque world of Penny Lane: the barber is still there, he will always be there. Nits’ world is not a far away mythological one, it has the immediacy of the here and now where pop is feeling like a fish in water, so blue. It is clear and limpid, a poetry with the transparency of water. 
The poetics of Henk Hofstede are never hermetic. He always allows for the air, the wind and water to move through them. The art of the imagination is never a difficult one; it is straightforward and never abstruse. It has the immediacy of a childlike playfulness. Even in their latest video “The Tree”, everything is what it is. The tree in full bloom is green. And on the album “Tree House Fire” the image of the big brown building is returning for one last time. It is one of these essential Nits forms that keeps on coming back. The third shape is the big brown building.

Life is a dance in colours. More and more during the live concerts, Henk is turning into a dancer on stage. And the hat makes an entrance. Little by little signs of Vogelman are appearing on stage. The free, improvised movements of a music man; and to me the little dances of Henk are quite significant, they make the whole performance of Nits more complete and add this whimsical spirit of spontaneity and improvisation so typical of their world of music, to their concerts. The movements of someone who is feeling at home in his music, of someone who is feeling happy at home, happy in the here and now of music. It is a feeling I experienced often during their live shows and I must admit it grew stronger with the years. The beginning of their trilogy – to which the album “Tree House Fire” forms a sort of “unwanted” addendum, forced in a way by tragic personal events, the trilogy which started off by the drama unfolding on a bigger scale of a world war and ended with this very personal misfortune in the destruction of the big brown building – brought on this more improvised way of Henk moving around and dancing on the stage. On the Knot tour he behaved like a music magician and voodoo player enacting a music spell on his audience, not in the way of something unnatural, but more as if music and musician created this world of a reality in music, which is just that, a reality in music. Being arrived on stage. In the form of music. Three pop musicians impersonating a life in music. With Neon the music spell of a recent past triumphed in the wonderful play with different rhythms – as if they were different eras somehow coming together – that is the basis of the song Beromünster. The same trick was performed on “The Ghost Ranch” by means of a radio, a prototype of which is present in the kitchen of Jacob’s house. The show is gone; by the end of this trilogy – which turned into a tetralogy – the house has become centre stage, together with the shape of a tree and the shape of fire. The forms of a life accompany the music on stage. As if the big brown building were watching its former residents play the music it inspired. In the world of Nits things are watching us too, the gaze is reciprocal. The world is alive with forms, shapes and colours, just like music is. That is what Nits have achieved in their musical art. This oneness. 
Sounds of everyday life are part of the music in this video: doorbells and shopbells ring like the bicycle bells of “In the Dutch Mountains”, doors are shut with a banging noise, the movements emphasised as if Vogelman wandered around like Charlie Chaplin in a silent movie. But the music is never silent. It makes time appear as that which flies away from us and remains ungraspable. In music we become most aware of time passing. And in our houses and homes too. My father is also very dedicated to the house where I grew up. We moved there when I was 5 years old and while we lived there my dad constantly made improvements to it, adding a garden room and doing various building jobs with the help of my uncles Eric, Daniël and André and my granddad Marcel. I fondly remember these times of activity in and around the house, my uncles behind wheelbarrows, filled with sand and all sorts of materials. And chicken being prepared by my mum in the kitchen. The times we build a home resemble the way Nits are building their music oeuvre in oh so many ways. From concrete materials they assemble a home of music.

Greetings from a garden shed and ladder, a stairlift and a sofa, a street and its trees, a mirror and a painting on the wall, from a stuffed toy animal on the sofa, shampoos and toothbrushes, a seesaw and extractor hood, from a young The Nits poster, from young Henk, young Rob, young mother of Henk and young mother of Rob, from young grandma and grandpa, greetings from the young Hofstede family, greetings from the house where Henk and Rob watched their mothers through the window.
There’s a story they told me. A story of every thing.

Joke Roelandt, April 2024