Only since about a year or two, has Marien Dorleijn been making furniture again. His resignation from the carpentry workshop where he worked ten years ago seemed like a formality at the time. He was going to go on tour with his band Moss, which had just released a new record, but since he had exhausted his annual leave, Dorleijn would have to leave the company temporarily. The rest is, yes, history. That new record, Never Be Scared / Don't Be A Hero, blew up and for much of Moss the band became a full-time job. All of them are now in their forties, and have found some peace of mind. And when an album of this stature celebrates its anniversary, it is a perfectly fine opportunity to look back.
Written by: Ruben van Dijk
The ‘looking back’ is officially only scheduled to last one night, when the band is playing Never Be Scared in its entirety in TivoliVredenburg on September 28. And the band members had not even originally wanted that night to happen. “The idea mainly came from other people,” says guitarist Michiel Stam. “'Isn't it nice to make a moment out of that?'… Gosh, shouldn't we just start working on a new record?” “They asked us whether we wanted to do a whole tour,” says singer Dorleijn. “No, we'll just do one. Because ultimately it's the record that helped us go where we could go in the years that followed." Or, as drummer Finn Kruyning sums it up early on in the conversation: “We still exist because of that record.”
The three of them are sat down at a picnic table in Amsterdam Noord, barely a stone's throw from the office of their record label Excelsior. Dorleijn has just gone through the photo material for the vinyl reissue of Never Be Scared. In between the looking back, the three catch up. About camping holidays, a new TV, the kids. Moss has become a band of fathers. Dorleijn's seven-year-old son, for example, recently asked how many records he had made. "Then I explained them all and he asked, 'Are we going to listen to them all?' And so we started to listen to them all - which means you have to start at the beginning."
“I remember when Excelsior said, 'Guys, we’re out of money,' and then they heard the demos and never spoke of it again.”
Marien Dorleijn
And Moss didn't start with Never Be Scared. “We had to hear that very often: 'Yes, I would like your first record.' 'You mean The Long Way Back?' 'Oh, you have another record?'” And often enough Dorleijn had preferred to have forgotten about it himself. That afternoon with his son, he listened to the record for pretty much the first time in thirteen years. He always felt a bit ashamed of it, he says. But: “We needed to make The Long Way Back, otherwise Never Be Scared would never have happened.”
Kruyning: “It took us so long to write that record. And what also played a part: we were actually already playing a lot before that. And then the record was released and nothing really happened.”
Dorleijn: “That was a bit of a disappointment. So you do one little tour and that's it? You're not going out on the road for one or two years? So then we started working on a second record, because Excelsior had said: if the first one doesn't go well, you just do another. Which was actually super sweet. I remember Ferry [Roseboom, founder of Excelsior, ed.] saying: 'Oh well, it cost us some money, but we'll just write that off. Too bad.'"
A second chance came for a second record; or a final record, as the band saw it themselves. "We're going to make that record and then it’ll be done, we thought." It turned out to be the perfect set of circumstances, says Dorleijn. “We had total freedom. We made the record we wanted to make and no one told us what to do. There was no ‘sophomore slump’, it was the easiest second album ever.” On the eve of the recordings of Never Be Scared, Moss was a band that could go in all directions, was bound by nothing and at the same time wanted to move forward with all its countless ideas - and quickly too. Dorleijn: “I remember calling Frans [Hagenaars, producer and co-founder of Excelsior, ed.] and saying: 'We have to start recording now.' And he said: 'I'm working with Johan now, but I can reschedule that for another two weeks. Come on.’ We had sent out the demos and suddenly there was this buzz within Excelsior. I remember when they said, 'Guys, we're out of money,' and then they heard the demos and never spoke of it again. You could just tell there was an internal buzz, that even the raw footage they had been playing to death in the office. I went to Noorderslag and everyone was talking about it. We hadn’t even finished the album yet! I didn't realize that at the time, but in retrospect it was already happening, there was already a kind of excitement. If you are involved in such a process, that kind of thing will give you quite a boost of confidence.”
Dorleijn recently conjured up the recordings for Never Be Scared in ProTools before a rehearsal. He went through every individual channel: kick, snare, cymbals, guitar one, guitar two, bass, et cetera. “I got really excited about it, because I heard that it was recorded at a rapid pace. I hear that there’s no perfectionism is not in it, but that it is rough around the edges. It sounds very liberated, the guitars are a bit out of tune sometimes, you can hear my voice being pushed to its limits. But drown it in a ton of reverb and no one will hear any of it.”
Stam adds: “It just has this energy. You were just full of hunger. I wasn't at the recordings because I wasn't in the band at that point, but you can hear that you had a lot of ideas – but not too many – and that you were well prepared. And then it's just bam, bam, bam and done – not wanting to do another twenty takes. I heard the record and thought: how cool is this! So bare-bones and measured. Of course it's not just bass guitar, two guitars and drums, but all the extra things that are in it fulfill a clear function. That was a real difference compared to The Long Way Back.”
“There was this buzz and then we went on tour – and the first shows we were really like, uh okay, where's everyone?”
Marien Dorleijn
Dorleijn: “The record was also put on tape in eleven days. It was a rush job, but we were very well prepared. We had already made all the demos, again and again. Then we just went and started recording it. That was it. Some things even remained; 'I Apologise (Dear Simon)' is actually a demo, which we only polished up a bit in the studio by adding a guitar and some vocals."
The title of the album came from a friend of then guitarist Bob Gibson, someone from the world of graffiti: ‘never be scared, don't be a hero’ was one of his tenets. It spoke to Dorleijn's fear of the unknown at the time. He calls it a kind of “teen angst”, although he was no longer a teenager by then. “I think I was living through a scary time. I was quite funereal. Not depressed, but… I had just turned thirty and was still sort of figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.” Shout out all you got, he encouraged himself. Sing high, sing loud, use all your energy. “And suddenly I didn’t need as many lyrics – like on 'The Comfort': ‘come out, take care and see / come out, take care and see / you'll get me going on / you'll get me going on’… It’s the same thing over and over again, to the point where I feared that people would pick up on it. But no."
Never Be Scaredwas a sum of its parts with extraordinary outcome. Call it one of the best Dutch albums of this century, if you like. It turned Moss into a Big Act. Less than a year after the release, they would bring their journey to a provisional climax in a packed Grolsch tent at the Lowlands festival. A crazy year, especially since, right after its release, it seemed to unfold just as it did with The Long Way Back. “Let's be honest: there was a buzz and then we went on tour – and the first shows we were really like: uh ok, where is everyone?,” Dorleijn recalls.
And so Moss, the band that venues had been booking on the basis of The Long Way Back, was suddenly playing sold-out venues with a new, completely different album. It presented them with two problems. Kruyning: “In terms of booking, we were always one step behind. A venue would book us three months in advance, things were going just fine and we’d do it for 500 euros – but by the time it was three months later, we were playing in way, way bigger venues for 500 euros. I don't remember what we were paid for Lowlands, but that was a scandalous fee too. It was all very clumsy from a commercial point of view.”
Dorleijn: “And then we played the first shows in The Hague and Rotterdam…”
Stam: “…and there would literally be eight people.”
Dorleijn: “It went very gradually.”
Stam: “I remember you saying: we have a few more guitars and synths on the new record. Would you like to be a part of this? Bob can do some more keyboards and you can play some guitar. Just for a few shows, half a year or so, because that's how it was with the previous record. Nobody had expected this.”
Kruyning: “'I Apologise' was starting to get some airplay. It wasn't in any playlists, but DJs started playing it themselves. And we started to notice that at shows, that suddenly there were all kinds of people who we knew weren’t on Excelsior’s mailing list.”
And so Moss, the band that venues had been booking on the basis of The Long Way Back, was suddenly playing sold-out venues with a new, completely different album. It presented them with two problems. Kruyning: “In terms of booking, we were always one step behind. A venue would book us three months in advance, things were going just fine and we’d do it for 500 euros – but by the time it was three months later, we were playing in way, way bigger venues for 500 euros. I don't remember what we were paid for Lowlands, but that was a scandalous fee too. It was all very clumsy from a commercial point of view.”
“People who are in the ‘song-song’ circuit think The Long Way Back is a beautiful record, but… I don't want that at all. I want to be excitement.”
Marien Dorleijn
Point two. “Some of us didn't want to play anything on The Long Way Back at all.” Dorleijn most of all. “So we really had a problem,” Kruyning continues. "How are we going to do that? We were able to play for an hour - with difficulty. At one point we had to add two more covers.”
Stam: “We started with two songs from The Long Way Back, but quite soon, even those had been taken off the setlist.”
Kruyning: “But why was that? Why was that so intense?”
Dorleijn: “Because we…”
Kruyning: “No, not ‘we’. I am asking you!"
Dorleijn: “Puberty. A kind of musical puberty. The Long Way Back came out in 2007, Never Be Scared in 2009. That’s two years, but before that, we had been working on The Long Way Back for three years, so it was music from five years ago, sometimes even older. I was completely done with those songs, I had had enough of them. And Never Be Scared was so much fun to play. It was so nice, it was so fresh, it was so different. People who are in the ‘song-song’ circuit think The Long Way Back is a beautiful record, but… I don't want that at all. I want to be excitement.”
Kruyning: “That is true, that we would be playing Never Be Scared, and there was this inherent energy that just felt really good. And then suddenly we had to play 'Winter in Finland'…”
Stam: “You notice that those songs on The Long Way Back suddenly sound…”
Kruyning: “…like your mother walking into a party.”
Stam: "Beers away, cigarettes under the table."
Moss has only very recently traded in the ensuing whirlwind for calmer waters. After Lowlands, the abroad beckons, and suddenly the band is touring the US in 2011; there comes a third record, Ornaments (2012), and a fourth, We Both Know the Rest Is Noise (2014); when brand new member Koen van der Wardt becomes so successful with his side project Klangstof and threatens to take Kruyning and Stam with him, Dorleijn almost pulls the plug. Strike, the most recent album from 2017, turns out to be a tipping point.
Kruyning: “After Never Be Scared, we have done seventy or eighty shows every year for several years – and even though we’re not talking 10,000 euros per show, it is still seventy or eighty shows a year. That’s just about enough for everyone to be able to keep doing it, but all of that’s just become less and less of late. We still play amazing shows and they’re all still packed, but there are fewer of them. It happened to Michiel and me a bit earlier on, but at a certain point you can’t justify it any longer.”
Dorleijn: “With Strike we received an offer to release the record through an American label, but they soon asked us: when are you coming to America to tour for three months? That’s the kind of thing we no longer do. We almost all have children. It would cost us money and we’d get nothing out of it. How do I explain that to my wife? It's very strange, because ten years ago I would have said: an American deal? Let's go!"
Kruyning: “An important question now is: why are you doing it? What do you like about it? Where do you get your energy from? Making that list ten years ago, and making it now, those are completely different lists. I think we've gone through something of a reset going into Strike, like: I think we really need to think about this differently, because otherwise it just isn't fun anymore. As a result, recording and playing with Strike was great and I think it is, after Never Be Scared, the best tour we've ever done. I just wanted to make the coolest record I could make right now. That's the only goal. And if someone is still crazy enough to pay for it, then that's awesome."
Dorleijn: “In that sense, Strike shares a lot of kinship with Never Be Scared. Both have been a kind of benchmark. There was no pressure. We simply made the coolest record at our disposal, because when that pressure is no longer there, you come to the most beautiful things.”
The Never Be Scared / Don't Be A Hero re-release is out now. On September 28, Moss will play the album in its entirety in TivoliVredenburg. Editor's note: this article was originally published in Dutch. Some quotes may have been altered in the translation.
