Inspired #138 - remme
Breaking into the world with his first musical journey ‘get older’ - Dutch singer-songwriter remme talks to us about his inspirations behind his second track ‘hunger’.
Who are your top three musical inspirations?
I would say Jeff Buckley, Frank Ocean and Fleetwood Mac but there are a lot more artists that I would like to mention. Ever since I got Spotify on my phone my musical inspiration is pretty much endless. With just one tap on my screen I can go from Jeff Buckley to Justin Bieber and from Post Malone to Elvis Presley, creating my own albums in the form of playlists. I think because of that my music is inspired by all popmusic from the last 50 years;).
Is there a certain film that inspires you?
Not really to be honest, I’m so obsessed with music that I’d rather spend time writing songs than watching movies;). Though, there are some movies and tv-series I really love like ‘Star Wars’, ’Fargo’ and ’Twin Peaks’ for example, but I don’t think they inspire me in a way that it changes me or my music.
Who is the most inspiring person to you?
When I was about 12 years old I went to guitar lessons for the first time. There I met Isa, my former guitar teacher. He taught me a lot about blues and other music genres I didn't know about. One or two years later Isa asked me to write a song and sing it as homework. I had never done this before but I noticed that it inspired me a lot. In no time the guitar lessons turned into songwriting lessons, where I would bring song ideas from home to finish them together with Isa in ’class’. Isa always felt like kind of a mentor to me, he’s the one who inspired me to do music in the first place.
What city do you find the most inspiring?
A few years after my first guitar lesson, when I was about 16 years old, Isa moved to Berlin and started working in a studio fulltime. We kept in touch and once a month I sent him some songs that I was working on. He invited me to come over to record some demo’s, my first single ‘get older’ was actually one of them. These days most people I work with(writers, producers and beatmakers) live in Berlin, so working there is always very inspiring to me. I have not seen that much of the city itself though, every time I visited I just went back and forth from my hostel to the studio, nowhere else;) Till this day, the studio in Berlin feels like a second home to me.
What were your inspirations when writing the track ‘hunger’
I wrote ‘hunger’ with my friend Isa on one of my first trips to Berlin a couple of years ago. I remember taking the cheapest overnight bus from my hometown in the Netherlands to Isa’s apartment in Marzahn, a district in East-Berlin. It was about -10 degrees outside so we basically had no other option then to stay inside and make music. I was so tired from the bus ride that I could barely keep my eyes open, ‘hunger’ was the first song we wrote that day. Usually I start off writing songs just by sitting behind my piano and playing/singing random stuff that comes up in my head. Once I hear or play something that feels good I record it on my Iphone and I let it rest for a bit. Listening back to it I try to make sense of the words that I’m singing and I try to tweak it into a fitting story. The words and sentences come from a subconscious mind, it’s called jibberish. For me ‘hunger’ was not really inspired by something specific, I guess my inspiration was just that I like writing songs so much.
How would you like to inspire people?
By telling stories that people can relate to.