Bubblegum and Ada

Ada has been there since the day I was born. Ada and I knew each other before we could even think. Ada is 20 now and so am I and a lot has happened since the day we first met. That’s what Bubblegum is about.

Ada is my best friend. We grew up together when we were children, we often played in her garden, played dress up or wrote stories together. At this point I want to thank our moms for bringing us together. At one point, I don’t exactly remember when, we saw each other less and less often until we got out of touch. C’est la vie. When I was 12, I spontaneously switched schools and by coincidence we ended up in the same classroom. What followed are 8 years of wonderful friendship. We explored a lot in our teen years, we went to a lot of concerts together, talked a lot about movies, cooked together. In 2018 Ada wrote a paper about music videos for school. So, I wrote a song, “gravity”, for her to shoot a music video for. This was one of the first songs I wrote and the first music video I’ve ever made. I started playing more shows so Ada and I decided that I needed a manager and figured that she would be the best fit for the job. She accompanied me to all of my first shows. We would sit in the school cantine, draft an email together and sign it with “C’est Karma Management”. Looking back this was kind of epic. This year Ada and I graduated high school together. We both decided to move to the Netherlands but we now live in different cities.

When I was preparing myself to move out from home, I reflected a lot on what makes home, home. I realized that throughout my life one of the only consistencies was that Ada was always there. I started thinking about how unlikely it is to know each other for 20 years, grow up together, become adults together and remain close. It was fascinating to me, how two people can grow up together but live totally different lives, and 20 years later the love for one another did not fade in the slightest.

I remembered one picture from when we were four or five, we had a party in Ada’s garden. I don’t remember what the occasion was. We hug each other in the picture, both dressed in pink, Ada had a zebra pained on her face and I had a butterfly. So I decided to write a song about Ada, about her garden, about her zebra face and our friendship.

Bubblegum is an ode to friendship and friends.

I wanted to go bold in both the sounds and the visuals. I wrote the song together with my producers re:dasein, who came up with the idea of using loud distorted guitars, that threw me back into my punk days. I was strongly inspired by contemporary artists like Rina Sawayama, Sega Bodega, Charli XCX or Caroline Polachek for this song. On one side the song is very eclectic and loud, but it also has a softer side in the choruses. I see those moments as a musical manifestation of the tenderness of my friendship. While the more eclectic parts represent the liveliness and chaos of our shared teen years.

I teamed up with the awesome people from TWO STEPS TWICE to work on the video. Everything was a little bit short notice but they still managed to create an awesome universe for the video. The director, Rares Matei instantly understood my vision and managed to turn it into reality exactly in the way I had envisioned it and even more. Our friend Jeff Mandres created very puffy dresses that both him and I would wear in the video, Rares had the idea of making them look like bubblegum wrap. I would consider everyone on the team my friend now.

Greet your friends for me.