JB Meijers - About

‘…why not is a much more interesting question than why…’

After many years of pivotal sidemanship and work in the background, JB Meijers, renowned musical/producer (a.o. De Dijk, Acda en de Munnik, Eboman, Supersiub, Daryll Ann, Solomon Burke, Ellen ten Damme) has made a solorecord. The following is an excerpt from an interview:

“In my teens I read a book by Hubert Lampo, a magical-realistical novellist. A whole new world unfolded before my eyes. The threedimensional world I was moving in al of a sudden expanded. I found the same things in it I saw for instance in Willink’s paintings, but I only made that link later on. To create a mysterious vision in an objective manner, based on craftmanship.
Doing daily chores, I find that hard stuff to do. I know how to, but to me it feels like trying to be part of the world of the grown-ups. ‘Well slept, get up and off to work...’, that’s not my cup of tea.
I’m just better in my own order; it seems like a chaos, but it’s mine.
That freedom, to create a very own world in which you’re comfortable I found back in Lampo’s books, Willink’s paintings and –to name a movie- Der Himmel Über Berlin by Wim Wenders.
It’s a look of life that helped me often when reality tried to strangle me.
We get a lot of stuff to handle from the day we’re born. If we don’t filter all of it, it’s simply hard to take. Music’s like a buffer to a lot of that. It might not have all the answers, it sure knows how to ask some poignant questions.
Songwriting can work very refining. Like a mantra you redefine all these questions into some kind of form until they’re totally harmless. I’d like my music to communicate in the first place. The idea of making a solo record seemed like a very vain thing to do for a long while. ‘I’ll be the trashman of popmusic’ is what I thought for a long time; perfectly happy with my well respected place in the shadow. Until the moment where I just couldn’t deny it anymore knocked at the frontdoor. I simply had to. ‘Why?’ was no longer the question and the question ‘Why not?’ remained unanswered. I realized for some reason that I had to confront my world with the one around me. And the other way around of course. Because in the end, they need each other. We define each other, and that’s how it should be”.

JB Meijers was born in Delft in 1972, but moved to the south of Holland, near Antwerp. In 1990 he signed a recorddeal with Virgin records and released 2 albums with Charmin’ Children, a band strongly rooted in English pop history. This band breaks up in ’93 just before Richard Janssen asked him to join post-Fatal Flowers-band Shine.
During his Shine period he worked a lot with Eboman too and when in ’96 Shine breaks up he starts a band with Felix Maginn (Moke) called Supersub; a really succesful Dutch/Irish “Britpopband” (?).
His work as a producer is by this time growing out of proportion and when JB’s to be found more in the studio than onstage or in the rehearsal room with Supersub he decides to leave the “band-scene” in 1999 to fully focus on his studiowork.
During Supersub Acda en de Munnik and De Dijk are already having enormous successes and when they ask JB to leisurely join them on stage whenever possible he finds himself not-so-left-the-band-scene after all. Since 2000 JB’s a solid touring and studio craft for both these acts.
Besides all of that, JB arranges scores and does some incidental work in the musical business (Joop van den Ende’s Stage Entertainment) and writes music for a large variety of purposes.
In 2009 JB starts working on a solo-album...