Music of the Seasons along the Street of Life: The Autumn of Nits

Some music videos are iconic. The video Nits made to accompany Cars & Cars is certainly one of them. In fact my favourite way of listening to this song is watching the video with the version of Cars & Cars that is tied to it. For me anyway, the video adds a few dimensions to the song, which I sometimes miss during the more recent live performances. 

Nits edited some words to the video that underline the seasonal character of the song (spring, autumn, summer of 1992). It is perhaps one of the reasons that this song rightfully became one of the showpieces in their extensive oeuvre, its sense of seasons passing. Nits have always known how to portray the seasons in their music, the melancholy that is intrinsically woven into the passing of the seasons is a definite trait felt throughout their music. The different colours, shades of light and darkness, coolness and warmth glide through their songs – I’d even dare to say they form the ephemeral, fluid fundament of their music. Just like the seasons, Nits are never in a hurry and trust the natural flow of life. The foundation of the house of Nits appears through its windows. I for one am very sensitive to the coming and going of the seasons. And I always sensed somehow that the music of Nits feels the same way. It IS the melancholy of the seasons. It is like the most sensitive camera that captures not only the visual elements of time passing, but also the emotional and spiritual dimensions that the changing of the colours of the seasons carries with it. Music and its moving images. Cars & Cars is about the coming and going, the leaving … eventually never to return.

Cars & Cars is a trademark song. Together with the video it is just a perfect piece of art. Because in the typical Nits fashion, underneath the simple wordings of the title – Cars & Cars – houses a profoundness which the video so beautifully brings to the surface. And the imagery is not complicated, but it feels real and focuses on the essential. A picturesque drive through a summer landscape, cars and cars along the streets of life, the movement of time taking us with it, in a whirlwind of circling, spinning motions. What an understated drama in these sounds and images! Which makes it all doubly poignant. That’s the Nits way… The lightness with which Nits bring about the deepest emotions makes up their strength and uniqueness. Just a little road song along European fields and villages.

The sound of the water of spring, the rooms where we live the seasons of our lives, the houses mirroring our faces and our existence, the bare branches of the trees appearing through the windows, now, as we are growing older together with Nits, I can’t watch the rolling images of this video without tears welling up in my eyes. And when they switch off the radio in the car… : the silence of Time Spinning … while Robert Jan softly brings a restful calm again after the whirlwind, just like that, after the stormy times, he brings peace again through the touches of his keyboard. It’s simply a journey through life we’re making through this song, together with Nits. They always seem to know how to make it personal although emotions are almost never mentioned in the lyrics. The sketching of our existence amidst things and people, in certain places, simply does the trick. Befindlichkeit: here is where I am and this is how I feel, that’s the equation central to the music and lyrics of Nits. Seasons come over us and happen to us, just like moods do…

Nits have painted us spring and summer but never without the colours of an autumn that is inevitably approaching. It’s kind of odd that winter is not mentioned in the video, although winter has a strong presence in their work, its snow and ice could be the frozen life of the cinematic fairytale that Nits are for ever aspiring to. After autumn, once, an eternal winter will follow, but it’ll be a winter of beauty and with the whiteness of a snowy-landscape canvas there to be filled with the memories of the songs that run through our lives.

Cars & Cars is an atypical existential piece of film, sunny side up. It furtively alludes to the European tradition of existential movies in the spirit of a brooding Kierkegaard. It captures the ephemerality of life without the usual dread and despair of the genre. The video visualises a road trip away from the familiarity of home, away from the rooms we live in, away from the faces we love. As Gelsomina does in Fellini’s La Strada or like the old professor making a trip in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. The imagery of the bare trees seen through the windows is one of these Nits motifs recurring through the autumnal music of this northern band. Nits reunite innocence (like in the eyes of Gelsomina) and lightness of heart with a darker counterpart of human fate as if this was the best of all possible worlds … and their musical creations almost convince us that Leibniz was right. Cars & Cars lies at the opposite side of the existential spectrum where the moving images of La Strada or Wild Strawberries take shape. Same aspiration for beauty, but the road traveled by the Nits car is very different from the one taken by Zampano’s motorbike cart …

Joke Roelandt, March 2024