The World at Night: the Sweet Sleep of Nits

The fourteenth shape is a Pillow

A sweet-sounding song by Nits about heartache appears on the album “Henk”: “Pillow Talk”. In fact this album has quite a few songs that hint at romantic relationships, in an unusual and somewhat distant way though, and they all seem to share an element of trouble: there are signs typed by a typist of candy, words of a singing telegram and words said in reverse that hold not much good in them. And then this pillow that the lyricist is addressing almost in despair. All the lyricist is left with is a pillow still showing the shape of his lover. It’s not really a subject matter that will stick around in the lyrical world of Nits, but the pillow song has always stuck with me. And I see the drawings of pillows made by a young Albrecht Dürer, a German painter and engraver. The pillows show the traces of shapes of a head or a face in them; they look really lifelike and the painter obviously took great care in drawing them in a lovingly detailed way. Despite all his fame and the commissions Dürer received from the wealthy and mighty of his time, he kept this passion for drawing simple forms of daily life. Something he shares with Nits.

And “Henk” has the Sleep song of course, the wonderful Sleep song! Although this song is based on a very tragic story written by Goethe – “Erlkönig” – the song has always felt soothing to me, like a peaceful sleepy state. “Darling child come with me”, Henk Hofstede sings and I don’t feel the luring threat in this line that is present in the original poem. I must admit that this song can also at times send shivers down my spine because it somehow has a chilly undertone hidden somewhere in the German lyrics, a feeling that this journey won’t have a happy ending, but nevertheless the dominating sensation is one of grandeur and sophistication of an expression of beauty going hand in hand with a vulnerable state of innocence and surrender, such as sleep can provide. The complexity of this song makes it so attractive and captivating.
I have – since a very long time, well for as long as I got to know Nits – been looking for the right word to characterise the prevalent mood in the songs of Nits and I have never really found it. But what I have always sensed is this ambiguous duality in their work between a belonging to the world of the here and now and then at the same time a sweet feeling of escape in a sort of fantasy world, like a fairy tale sometimes, or a dream, a place where you don’t need to fight the world, but can surrender to it trusting that everything will be alright. As if in a sweet state of sleep … And when you wake up the world is fresh and full of promise …

In the music of Nits the pace is often a little slower, a little friendlier than in the real world and Nits are great at creating little shelters in their music: there’s this wonderful place – a place of birth – described as a “valley of bricks”, it’s almost like a dream world that the lyricist assembles back together, like in an irrational, fantasy world. We are in the real world, but somehow the words and the sounds have a tenderness and a vulnerability, an innocence where reason takes a back seat for a moment and changes reality into something that only exists in the music of Nits. The houses and rooms of the Nits songs, their streets and cities, are places of shelter where the sensory images of daytime are lovingly combined with the fantasy of night time dreams and their trusting surrender to what is out of our control. Oh these wondrous keyboard sounds of Robert Jan Stips. You’d recognise them anytime without fault. They are unique I think. Just listen to the first notes played by Robert Jan on the song “House of the Sleeping Beauties”… what is that? It sounds like a dream we all want to live in. It sounds like waking up in a dream world that feels real. As if we were creatures of an underworld that is softly asleep. Nits music as a house of sleeping beauties. Yes, I feel this image might perhaps come closest of all to the ungraspable nature of the sound and lyrics of Nits. Their music is surrendering to a night-time world of sleep and dreams, but remains firmly planted in the here and now of an every-day world.

The world of Nits has the cosiness of a bed or a couch with the fluffiest pillows where you can sleep and dream and where you can make sense of it all, of the world, in the most positive and optimistic way possible. “Trusting” is the word maybe, like when you give yourself over to sleep – like a child – in a trusting act towards world, somehow believing that something or someone will be watching over you. I think this might be contributing to the freshness that their music has kept all these years. Nits come to their instruments “rested” as it were, trustful, after sleeping on it, and taking in the wisdom and the energy of a good night’s sleep – as a constant reset of renewal – where dreams take over and soften the daylight. Tomorrow will be another beautiful day.

There is a wonderful poem by John Keats with the title “Poetry and Sleep”. Shall I quote a few lines here?

What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
What is more soothing than the pretty hummer
That stays one moment in an open flower, 
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?
What but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes!
Low murmurer of tender lullabies
Light hoverer around our happy pillows!
Silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses!
Most happy listener! when the morning blesses
Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes
That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise.

It’s as if Keats could have written this poem about the music of Nits with its tender lullabies about the world. “What happens now to your eyes”, when sleep closes them softly … Music and sleep so deeply attached to one another. Sleep, the gentle inspirer. And Nits say: “It’s ok to surrender … it’s ok to surrender to the world too …”

“Wake me up sun ray – On this bright sunny summer day – Leave my bed – Bike in head – Is this the real world?”

Joke Roelandt, July 2024