Singer Songwriter Ewout Adriaans 

For 30 years Ewout was the front man of bands like Bottle, Steel & Company (with his brother Pieter) and Jug Bros. With this last band he made nine CD’s, predominantly filled with his own compositions. Since 2018 Ewout is concentrating on his solo career with the release of the album ‘The unpaved road’ on vinyl.

(text continues below foto) 

As a blues performer and singer-songwriter Ewout Adriaans is second to none. Ewout’s guitar style betrays the fact that he started his career as a drummer. For him the guitar is first and for all a percussive instrument. It provides a firm rhythmic basis for the chord progression of the song and melodic embellishments with the slide. One can hear the influence of players like Robert Johnson and Keith Richards. A defining moment was the meeting with hill blues legend R.L. Burnside in 1995, on the Texel Blues Festival. “In the couple of hours I spent on stage with Burnside I learned more about the blues than in a lifetime of playing”, Ewout recalls. Since then the pumping rhythmic style typical for the hill blues, perhaps closer to the African roots than any other form of blues, has been his trademark.

As a songwriter Ewi pays tribute to names like Robert Johnson, Willy Nelson and, above all, Tom Waits. Over the years he has created his own personal idiom, a poetic universe, in which archetypes like ‘the rider dressed in black’ and the ‘unpaved road’ act as symbols for the riddles that haunt our existence. The marriage of these lyrics, tapping in to the darker side of our soul, to the austere musical accompaniment, reduced to its bare essentials, revives the blues as a vehicle for artistic expression as fresh and new as it was 100 years ago.