Jazz Album – You and Me (2025)
by Millennium
In the first song, Snow In April (ballad), I focus on storytelling. From a female perspective I focus on how it would be if a naive young girl opens the door, to find a deserted soldier on the porch, asking for shelter. The lyrics continue content-wise, there is no repeated chorus; therefore, I needed an image that would capture the imagination of the listener and mark the situation as ‘exceptional’, and that I could repeat. I chose for ‘snow in April’. It reminded me of the jazz standard Summer Can Really Hang You Up the Most, also an image that’s contradicting as summer is mostly perceived as a season to be sorrow-less.
In the second song, Love Between Two Girls (stride ballad), I focus again on storytelling. I wonder how it would be if a girl from out of town comes in, stealing ‘my’ heart, and then moves on. After finishing the lyrics, I realized I wanted a female voice to perform the song, turning the theme into a gay lover’s song, with town (innocence) and city (realism) as a contrasting theme.
For the third song, called Deserter, I tried to enlarge the theme of the first song (Snow in April) by writing a song about a deserter again, but this time from a mother’s perspective, waiting for her deserted son to return home from wherever he went hiding.
With three ballads counted for, I wondered what else jazz had to offer. Bossa nova is one of the answers – this is jazz without swing, with Latin American influences. I wanted the theme to be uplifting and positive, and chose for If I Could Turn Back Time. A woman, telling the listener, if she would be able to do this, she would live her life exactly the same way, with the same man. With one exception: if she could steal one more day from time, so she could be with her lover once more, she would, giving the nostalgic theme a dramatic touch.
Remembering the time I visited New Orleans when I was a teenager, I chose for the fourth song, a New Orleans trio. The subject: a young woman, working as a prostitute, asking a man not to destruct his own life by thinking he can redeem her. No Need For Love has a classic theme: Alexandre Dumas wrote the novel The Lady of the Camellias, turned into the opera La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, which was rejected by the public, because a heroine should not be a prostitute, which proved the theme: a prostitute cannot be redeemed, not in fiction, nor in real life.
No jazz without blues. In the song I Am What I Am, I go through all stages of life, describing the problems and solution that come with all the stages of life, ending with ‘we are what we are’, emphasizing that we are always ourselves, even at old age, when we have changed into a being not comparable anymore to the previous versions of what we would call ourself. As this is the first theme that could be sung from a male perspective too, I chose to let a girl and a man sing it together, turning it into a love song altogether.
No blues without minor blues. Saturday Night Fever focuses on high energy. Trying to figure out how a scat solo might fit naturally into a song, I make the male singer repeat the title of the song and play around with the words, dissolving into a chaotic scat solo that represents ‘the fever’ of the theme.
Wondering what else jazz has to offer, I ended up with bebop, with samba (African) influences. I wanted the lyrics to contain something recognizable and chose for Sycamore Tree. In the first place because there’s a well-known jazz standard about such a tree; secondly, because this tree, mentioned in the Bible, gives the theme symbolic proportions.
I hope you’ll enjoy my jazz album, You and Me