CK: Now that you are finally here, what do you think of the U.S. audiences and your first U.S. tour?

SDA: Well, we’ve been comparing it a little bit to the Spanish audience and the southern countries in Europe. Because they are always very enthusiastic, even when you hit the first note until the last one everybody is like (she imitates the roar of an enthusiastic crowd here), they are with you the whole time right from the start to finish. Very enthusiastic, in a way they are almost in your face, so enthusiastic and that is really good, really good. Because in the more Northern countries in Europe, it’s more waiting a little bit, they’re more relaxed, then they clap after a few songs, they have to get warmed up first. We expected a little more of that, actually, not this southern hospitality that we have in southern Europe.

CK: So, you found that within a few songs here the audience is already with you or instantly from the first note?

SDA: No, instantly yeah. Yeah so, that is really a big surprise and a lot of people knowing the songs and singing along to all the songs, and also driving such a long way to see us only for a short forty minute set like yourself …. (laughs) …..

CK: Yeah, right you haven’t come to my part of the country yet ….

SDA: And where is that?

CK: Boston is about four hours north of New York City. So, I drove down to that show on a weekend and then flew across the country to hit these shows. But, you’ll come back eventually.

SDA: Ok, yeah, I hope so.

CK: Do you feel each night you have to prove yourself or because the US audience is instantly there you don’t really have to prove yourself again to this new audience?

RW: No, it’s not a matter of proving, it’s more enjoyable. We can relax. It’s just playing. It’s forty minutes to play our songs and we don’t have a big stage set here or a big show, so for us it’s just grab the instruments and go.

SDA: It’s very rock and roll. (Laughs.) It’s more about the music and the audience, of course.

RW: So, you can just focus totally on the music and the audience. And now, it’s about the energy we get back from the audience and everything runs by itself. It’s a very natural and pressure-less tour. And it’s working in a very good way.

SDA: And we are enjoying it very much. In Europe, people expect a lot from you because you are well known, and people know more or less what to expect from you and they expect a lot from us. And here most of them have never seen us live maybe they have seen the dvds, of course or heard some songs, and it’s such a nice way, like a second time you can present yourself again, but for the first time again. When we were starting out in Europe, ten years ago, the first time you present yourself, you get that first time impressions from the audience, (she mimics a sigh of surprise and awe) You surprise people because they don’t know you.

RW: It’s fresh for the audience but it is also fresh for us again.

SDA: Yes, it’s fresh for us again because they are getting to hear you for the first time.
And those first reactions you never get that again, because the second time you come around again, people are already expecting more from you as they already know what to expect more or less. So, it’s very nice and a very relaxed tour because there is not a lot of pressure on us. It’s really nice.

CK: People always ask me what you sound like, it’s big, it’s cinematic, I don’t know you just have to listen to it – it’s like nothing you have ever heard before, how would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it before?

SDA: Cinematic is a very good word. Yeah.

RW: I think cinematic is an important word in our music. It’s very cinematic, and big but sometimes also small. It’s metal, it’s rock, it’s …

SDA: It’s symphonic, it’s orchestral, it’s folk, it has a lot of elements and different music styles I think. It’s good music, yeah. (Laughs …)

CK: Is it difficult, or challenging to write lyrics in English when that is probably not your primary language?

SDA: It’s more interesting because it becomes more poetic for us. When you write in your own language it becomes too direct more or less. And for us, yeah, it’s more interesting.

RW: And we are used to it, we have always written our songs in English. The only thing is sometimes you get insecure when it comes to the lyric writing stage sometimes you need a native speaker to check if it was written correctly and sometimes you can make a stupid mistake of course. And you won’t have slang in your lyrics of course, because you don’t know any American or English slang. But, we also watch all our movies in English, our American movies.

CK: Oh, that’s how they come to Holland they are in English, they don’t subtitle them?

SDA: Yeah, nothing is subtitled.

RW: No, we are a small country, in big countries like France and Germany – they overdub the sound in their native language, in Holland they never do that so ….

SDA: Also, because we are trading country, so, we are used to adapting to other languages, we speak many different languages in Holland, most of us, so we are used to it.

CK: Nice, your voice blows my mind every time I hear it, it’s so emotional, it’s so powerful, it moves through so many different ranges, octaves and moods, the way you create it and deliver it, and come to find out you never received any formal training but instead you are self taught and learned just by listening to your parent’s great record collection? And is it true that when Robert met you, you were in a Stevie Ray Vaughan blues style band?

SDA: (Laughs) Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, yeah I was in a blues rock cover band – we played some music of Stevie Ray Vaughan, you are well informed by the way. (Laughs) But, also we played songs by Van Halen, or Journey, and many different bands.

CK: So a lot of that music and bands that I grew up you grew up with as well?

SDA: Yeah, it’s also because I was the youngest in the band the guys I was playing with at that time were all five or six years older than me, guys usually get more in contact with different kinds of music, that’s why I got into this kind of music as it wasn’t the thing you’d hear on the radio. It wasn’t really the type of bands my parents would listen to, because they didn’t listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan or Journey. Although Journey is a band they could have listened to. But, I also got in contact with a different kind of music through all my friends. It was a combination of different things, my parents who are more or less living like hippies and listening to a different kind of world music, instead of the radio, and having older friends, and a lot of guys as friends.

CK: When did you first discover you could sing and when did you become a professional, because I think you have been in bands since you were in your early teens?

SDA: Yeah, I have. Well, I always loved singing. Not to entertain people but just for myself – I felt happy doing it. When I was fourteen, there was course in our home town it was a music school and you could learn “How to play in a band.” (Laughs)

CK: A Course? It was a class?

SDA: Yeah, a class and I didn’t have any musical background, “oh, I want to make music so bad, but I can’t do it on my own, you know, I want to do it with people and get to know people who like the same kind of thing.” Then, they said OK, what do you want to do? Well, actually I wanted to sing because that makes me most happy of all but I was too shy to say it because a lot of times when people say they want to sing it’s because they want to have the attention or be in the limelight, you know, and that wasn’t it, so I said “Yeah, I want to play keyboards” even though I couldn’t breathe a note. (Laughs ..) Anyhow, I learned myself a little bit, I played keyboards a bit at the time, I was really pretty bad actually because I really wasn’t motivated to play keyboards, I really wanted to sing. Yeah, then they said we still need somebody to sing. And then I said, “You know what, I’ll do it and if you don’t like it, then just tell me.” So, I started singing and they really liked it. So, then they said, “you know what, forget the keyboards.” But with those guys I later on started the blues rock cover band.

CK: So mid-teens after you took the course?

SDA: Well, I was fourteen when I started and they were nineteen, twenty years old. I played with them for five or six years something like that and then I met Robert. He was really into metal, death metal, symphonic music, combined with a lot of melody like Paradise Lost for example and he just let me hear those bands and I was like, “Oh wow, what’s this and a world opened up for me.” So, we met in college.

CK: What were you there to study as the fall back?

SDA: Fashion.

CK: Fashion - that’s good as I have a follow up question on that later.

SDA: Aaah (laughs)

RW: Human Resource Management. And we both worked actually for a year…

SDA: One and a half years.

RW: Yes, one and a half years, almost two and …

CK: That was when the WT debut album Enter was cut and released around ’97?

RW: Yeah, we became professional when we released “Mother Earth”, like a year after Mother Earth’s release because we released the single right after the album was released but it didn’t get any attention. Suddenly, a year later it got picked up by our video channel called “The Box” where viewers can vote and pay to see a video and suddenly it became a hit on that channel.

CK: My daughter loves that video.

SDA: Laughs ……

RW: From there it grew to national radio, then, at that point it became too busy to just have the band as a hobby, we had to quit our jobs, which of course, is a very nice thing.

CK: Yeah, I can imagine.

RW: Then we started a professional career.

SDA: Well, we liked our jobs but more or less if you can do your passion all day through, that’s the best thing you know.

CK: Yeah, that’s most musician’s primary goal. Often times, some keep their day jobs and moonlight at night.

SDA: Yeah, the only thing is we never thought we were able to because of the fact in Holland, it’s impossible almost, there isn’t really a supportive music scene so we made a decision to be a hobby band with no pressure from anyone.

RW: It was for us a conscious decision to have it as a hobby that way you have no pressure, it’s more fun, and you can do what you want, you can make the kind of music you want and it doesn’t matter if you become successful or not, you know, so, we kind of liked that.

CK: Yeah, but the great thing is you have done it your way with no compromise musically speaking, I mean the music that you create is not the typical music you would hear here on your local FM radio in America, and that’s why I love it, amongst other things. Over in Europe, though, you are on the radio?

RW: No, exactly, so that’s a good thing. Yes, we do get radio play in Europe but that is also after a very long time.

SDA: Yes, many years went by …

RW: And still very often our singles are being considered too heavy for radio.

CK: Did you just build your audience on your live reputation, basically gig to gig and fan to fan right across Europe?

SDA: Yeah, exactly.

RW: Yeah, well that was the good thing when we became professional we had more time to tour. Before that it was only on holidays for just a few weeks.

CK: Because you had to work during the week, you can’t go out and gig …

RW: Exactly so after that we started to go out and play Germany and we did our first European tour.

SDA: But we were at a point where we had to decide whether to stop the band or we have to quit our jobs, one of the two, because it was getting too heavy, because we were playing big festivals in Europe, sold out shows in Holland, Belgium and other countries. Then we went back to our day jobs, these were not easy jobs but also very heavy. Human resource management is not exactly a light job. So, we were faced with a choice and then “Ice Queen” became a hit and everything kind of ran by itself after that. We were able to do our thing that we always wanted to and we had already convinced everybody through our music and our live shows.

CK: It became a hit almost accidentally?

SDA: Yeah.

CK: When you were talking about fashion earlier, I’ve always loved your flair for the dramatic on stage, from performing inside a cage high above the stage and I have another dvd where you sing the entire first verse of “Mother Earth” from the balcony in the audience, and then you walk down through the backstage joining up with the band on stage mid-song, and with the great stage set designs you do Robert and Sharon your costumes and dresses, my question is for the both of you, was it always your vision to create a dramatic visual presentation with your music, as I always felt your music is very visual – you can almost see it when you hear it. Your music is so inherently visual. Was it always a conscious decision to present a big show in your live performances?

SDA: Ok, yeah, (laughs) actually it grew very naturally for us. Also, with the dresses and the stage set everything grew gradually and fell into place very naturally. We started making this music and visualizing things for ourselves while writing the lyrics and creating the music. And later on, we realized that clothing for me was an excuse because I like these kind of dresses by the way (laughs) and the feel and the touch of the dramatic is just something I liked doing. It was just a combination of things and it fits together actually quite nicely. RW: And we always had the goal that every time we took another step in our career, we had more possibilities to do more with our show. SDA: Yeah. RW: It’s of course something we always had in the back of our mind, it would be great if we once played this huge stage to do something with it – not just play your set, but, to make something special out of it. That’s what we like ourselves as well. continued...

[click to enlarge]

continued on page 2