How I Like Nits Best #2

Looking at postage stamps and hearing one of the most beautiful songs ever

Framing the faces of four kids, these four postage stamps send us a letter from a past not too far away. With the stories of an eternal childhood as in an illustrated children’s book. The little histories are sung in a voice with the vintage timbre of memories. Seeing the smiles and grins with the slightest hint of mischief, it’s easy to make the journey back in time. Not only the melody is to die for, the lyrics are amongst my favourites of all written or sung poetry, beginning with its double title: “In a Play” and then between humble brackets “Das Mädchen im Pelz”, as beautiful as it is simple.

For me, this song is like a declaration of intent written by Henk Hofstede, pointing at some of the stage requisites and characters that the future Nits oeuvre will comprehend. In their musical plays Nits intend to bring the most lyrical report of lives lived at a certain moment in time, in a certain well-defined place. “I will try to frame your face – I will try to speak your name”, Henk sings in these wonderful verses sketching his intentions.

Das Mädchen im Pelz reminds me of a sumptuous painting by Titian, old black-and-white forties movies with graceful actresses, but also of children’s fancy-dress parties with clothes from another time, another generation, found in a huge trunk in the attic. Fiction and reality seamlessly flow into one another. I guess it’s just the age-old adagio “All the world’s a stage” that makes its way into Nits’ letter from the past. Actors dying like melodies softly die out. The escape in dreams and fiction, in the stories that we tell and enact, the imitations or representations of reality, the costumes we wear to cover our skin, are always imbued with a dripping present. Oh how I love the verses about the clothesline in the attic, the dripping blouses. Nits’ beloved water metaphors ripple so effortlessly into these wonderfully natural associations of the mind and eyes.

And you don’t really know if you have to be happy or sad on this adventure that takes you up into the skies filled with trees reaching out higher than any plane could fly. The song’s images give out the perfect combination of joy and sadness, sense of wonder and melancholy.

A few skipping beats from the drums and the scene is set. “In a Play” is what all stories sound like, it starts off with the opening of the curtains on a small stage or the turning of the first page when I read a book. The music is like the music of all stories, how they all unfold, from the expectant suspense at the start to the inevitable “The End”. The beauty and the scope of this song, focusing on the requisites, decors and costume details of a story that might have been staged, are just unsurpassable in my eyes. In a softly demure, almost non-theatrical way, it is an icon of the luscious theatre pop that Nits bring so spontaneously to the concert stage. It’s one of those simply momentous songs of Nits, with classic uncluttered lines and yet you are able to see the richness of detail of pearls and diamonds on the skin and in the hair of das Mädchen im Pelz, looking fabulous – pale skin, dark eyes -, as Titian himself painted her.

How Nits make these beautiful fairy tales of music, poetry, images, art references and everyday realities is a mystery to me. But it says to me that some beauty is everlasting, absolute, and that you might never need anything or anyone else anymore…This song is like a promise of beauty, whatever happens, the beauty of moments passing by, the aching beauty of melancholy. It’s like a day in a young life that never ends. You sit with your best friend on a log in a clearing in a forest, counting the stars, watching their play of sparkles and twinkles, and in the pale moon light you show him the vaccination mark on your upper arm… Life begins. Always all over again, in another play.

(It’s so sad that I couldn’t find a live video recording of this song on youtube (referring to my previous post#1), just the one made on the occasion of their fortieth birthday with lovely Marjolein van der Klauw on guitar and vocals.)

Joke Roelandt, June 2021