A Small History Of: Anna Balou

So… ‘Balou’... It's actually my middle name. I'm named after Baloo the Bear from Jungle Book because my parents liked him so much. Pretty cool if you ask me... But uh, who am I anyway? I grew up in quite the creative, cultured family. I come from a long line of Dutch professors that obsess over language, poems and books - I think that goes as far as a couple of generations back - until my dad was born. He is a professional musician, producer and songwriter. I grew up in a house with access to about 40 or 50 instruments to choose from, ranging from sitars to a hammond organ. That didn't mean that I cared back then, though. It was just my dad's job. Still, I've been playing backstage, running around venues and sleeping on strangers' jackets in cloakrooms since I was a baby, basically. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I too finally decided to start playing an instrument. I started playing the drums when I was 10 years old. My brother was learning to play the bass guitar and wanted to play ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ by Queen with me. So my dad explained to me how to hold the drumsticks and how the song goes and we just started playing. My dad recorded it, so it should be somewhere on an old hard-drive. He once told me that it actually wasn’t bad for a first try. So ultimately, I was excited back then. I felt pretty bad-ass, so I decided to get some lessons and join my brother playing jam-sessions at the local youth centre. We mostly played blues-standards with some guys that were a couple of years older than me. Mom would pick us up around bed-time and trusted that Tom, my brother, would take care of me while we were there. He did, of course, but he was also a mischievous 13-year-old who was friends with 16-year-olds that were already legally allowed to drink beer. So I spent a lot of time wandering around the youth centre. It was a pretty cool place actually, it had rehearsal-rooms, a stage, a storage basement beneath the stage and mysterious locked rooms. I was pretty adventurous so I never got bored. At the time I listened to bands like Alice Cooper, Bring Me The Horizon and Avenged Sevenfold because I suppose I was a bit edgy and felt like that would make me look cool. I did honestly enjoy the music too, though. I dreamed of playing in a metal-band and buying my own drum kit with a double bass pedal, but playing blues standards was fine for me, too. I would also fantasize a lot about Sheila E. being my mentor on the drums and eventually taking over her place as Prince’s drummer, but I realized that I was too young to be in Prince’s band. Anyway, I didn’t turn out to be a drummer. Quite a shame though. By the time I was an insecure 13-year old teen I felt like I was bothering people around me when I played the drums. It was loud, I was self-conscious and afraid that I secretly sucked at it but no one would tell me. So I stopped playing music altogether.

I think I was around 14 or 15 years of age when an anime intro-song suddenly sparked my interest for the piano. There was this Youtuber called Animenz who would play anime intro-songs on the piano. He’d transcribe the songs to a complicated classical arrangement and play them on a very expensive Steinway & Sons grand piano. It was magical to me. At the time I lived at my mom’s, who didn’t have instruments at home except for an old slightly out-of-tune piano. I knew that I had to try to play these songs as well, but only if I was home alone because I couldn’t stand the thought of people hearing me fail at something. So every time I was alone for a while I’d sprint to the piano and learn these songs. And I did. After a while I was playing very theoretically complicated things with incredible speed but I had no clue what I was doing. I was almost literally copying whatever Animenz did and my hands and (muscle-)memory were somehow able enough to follow the videos. After learning quite a lot of songs, I was able to improvise a little because I started to recognise patterns in the piano and could hear which chords would sound nice together. But I didn’t really care about improvising, I just wanted to be able to play the songs from the anime series I’d watch. I played the songs in secret until I was satisfied with how I played it and then I played it for some people in my family. They were pretty shocked that I suddenly could play such complicated songs. Eventually I started playing in public too. Every weekend I would travel to my dad’s place (which was 2,5 hours away by train) and there was a piano at the train station where I had to wait for a half an hour layover. This is where I grew more and more confident at playing music for an audience - people would come and listen to me play. Sometimes people recognised the songs which would make me very thrilled - I didn’t know a lot of people ‘in real life’ who were as excited about anime or video games as me. But as you do as a teenager - you eventually get bored I guess. I learned everything I wanted to learn, plus some more, but that was enough piano for me. Of course I would sometimes play for myself, it was quite calming and fun to play but I didn’t really feel the urge to learn more about it anymore. By this time I had moved in with my father, who has all the instruments, so it was pretty easy to sneak into the studio at 2 a.m. and softly play some tunes. I don’t know how exactly, but something suddenly changed.

Friends of mine were starting to form bands together and I thought it’d be fun to be in a band as well. So one night, as I was playing the piano in the studio, I remembered something that my dad and my brother were talking about during dinner. (At this point, by the way, they were both pretty much booming in the world of music and were on tour a lot) They talked about pop-songs and how they usually consist of 3 to 4 chords. So I remembered that and took a random guitar and decided to write a song. The guitar was in a completely different tuning, as a lot of guitars there were, but I hadn’t the slightest clue. I put my index finger flat on the frets and moved from the first fret to the fourth and then back to the second and the first. Something like that. It magically sounded alright so I thought it was pretty good. Having no idea what I was doing, while having more idea of how a piano works, I decided to take it to the piano. I’d hit every note individually and started looking for it on the piano. Eventually I found out that I was playing B - D - A. Whatever guitar tuning that was, I need to find it again because it was quite convenient. Anyway, at the time I wrote poems, so I just scrolled through my phone to find a recent poem and started singing it while playing. I had never sung before because it was way too confronting to hear myself like that, but I was dedicated to the craft and had a friend to convince of my skill in songwriting. It was quite deep in the night and I recall locking the studio door before daring to sing. After a few tries it sounded okay, so I decided to get it over with, film it and send it to my friend. He had already asked me to play the bass in his band (I couldn’t play the bass, but because I was the only person from the group of friends who had a bass guitar at home I was asked to join them) but this had to convince him that I can be the songwriter too. The moment I pressed ‘send’ my heart was racing out of my chest. I was nervous and sweaty and listened to the video over and over again to see if I could find any mistakes in my singing until I finally got a reaction. “Sounds cool! Maybe we can play it!” ...phew, damn it that was nerve-wracking. So then we had our first rehearsal. My brother taught me the basics of the bass-guitar and off I went. Eventually, after a rough start, our band actually got up and running. We started off with a singer, but the moment she left the band we decided that I would be the one to sing. Then suddenly the guitar-player arranged a gig at a local festival in a village nearby. It was a couple of weeks away and we didn’t even have a full set of songs yet. So I had to write enough songs to fill up our 30-minute slot in a pretty short time and then teach it to the guys. I took the challenge and started making songs at a ridiculous speed. Nearly a song a day, basically. During rehearsal I’d play the songs once, the boys would look at what I was doing and I’d try my best to explain what was going on (they also weren’t trained musicians) and then we’d practise the hell out of it. The songs actually turned out quite nice and my singing got better and better. My skill in guitar and bass guitar started to improve as well, as I wrote the songs on guitar and performed them on the bass. Eventually we had a gig per month or so, which felt like quite a lot and was a huge blast. We recorded an album after a while of ‘perfecting’ the songs, which includes the very first song I ever wrote. The song is called ‘The Journey’ and really is quite a cute song. At least, that’s what I think now - back then I was pretty tough on myself.

Eventually I started to feel a bit restricted by not being able to translate all my ideas to my band mates because of the general lack of knowledge about music theory. I was figuring out new chords by simply moving a chord I already knew up and down the guitar neck and changing the position of a finger sometimes.

After a while I just started making new songs that weren’t for the band, while previously all the songs I wrote were reserved for that. Sometimes during gigs, depending on what kind of gig it was, I would do one of ‘my own songs’ solo. Then that happened more often, until eventually both Balloon Busters (which was the name of the band by the way, I just realized I didn’t even mention that yet) and Balou were ‘booked’ for the same gig. By that time I had a whole set as Balou. It was a great way to promote that I do solo gigs as well. So eventually I did actually get solo gigs. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I was booked full-time at all. It was all pretty low-key but the gigs were at least a monthly occurrence and since it was the only exciting thing happening in my life at the time, it meant quite a lot for me. Then I started getting more Balou gigs than Balloon Busters gigs, so it eventually got my priority. The moment I released my first EP as Balou, I left for a huge solo trip to Thailand and New Zealand for 2 months. While travelling, I noticed that my songs were taking off - I had nearly 200 monthly listeners which gave me a huge confidence boost. My newly launched Facebook page had 200 likes within a week and people were messaging me to come play at their venue. I felt super confident, which really kept me going during my travels as it was pretty hard to be alone so far away from home. During my travels I would think of melodies in my head, wrote new lyrics and I listened to a ton of music. A week before I would leave New Zealand earlier than planned to go back home, my brother asked me if I wanted to be a background vocalist for his Kool & the Gang one-time tribute band. I realized I’d be just in time for the last edition of the tribute festival in my home-town now that I would go back sooner, so I definitely wanted to join in. The day after I got home, I joined their rehearsals and a week or two after that we played the gig. It was pretty huge for me, as I had never played for such a crowd before (there were roughly 2500 people in the audience) and it was a pretty professional band. I was super glad to be home again and to be able to make music again. Short after that, I wrote a couple more songs that I soon after recorded with my dad in his studio. I kept playing gigs but eventually it got more low-key as my life started to get busy with work. I moved out of my dad’s house into a city and started fully fending for myself. I tried out a couple of things - such as working at a coffee shop full-time and studying Fine Art in university, but I eventually started realizing that making music is really what I want to do full-time. I had never really thought about studying music before, because my brother and my father are both musicians and felt like a third one in the family would be too much - but that is of course bull shit. So here I am now. Finally learning about music theory (I need to catch up on it if I want to go to university!) and learning how to handle recording softwares.

I’m curious where it’ll take me. Honestly, I don’t really mind where it goes - I just hope I can forever do and be me and make the things that I want to make and I’ll be happy.