Personal Trainer

On the occasion of Personal Trainer's pair of Italian dates, who stopped by Milan and Bologna to present their second album "Still Willing", we met Willem Smit, frontman and main founder of the Dutch indie-rock/pop collective Diy, backstage at the Covo Club. The recurring topic underlying the conversation confirms that of the live dimension, where everything takes shape in an unexpected and almost playful way like a collage. In the little room with us, immersed in a quiet and almost familiar atmosphere, there are the guitarist Franti Maresova, sitting on a sofa and intent on knitting, and the percussionist Kilian Kayser.

Hi Willem, I start with a question to break the ice. How are you and how is the tour going?
Willem: I'm pretty good. We've only just started really, this is our third night now. We had some good times. Our first show was cancelled, but we got a stand-in show for that. Some people asked us to play at their house. So we played in someone's living room, which was quite exciting. And yesterday we had the first proper show in Milano, that was really awesome.

Can you tell the story behind the formation of your band? I read that there have been many line-up changes, but now it's settling down.
W: Yeah, for sure. It started out with just me making songs, and then I would ask different people each time to join if we were playing live. But after like a year or two, we settled down into a band. And then it settled down into this proper band. And now there are seven of us… It's a lot of people.

“Still Willing” is your second album and the first one for Bella Union. How did the signing with the label come about?
W: We were looking for a label, because we put out our first record by ourselves, and that was really interesting and nice to try out and do, but to us it also felt interesting to reach more people, to find a label that would be willing to put out a record of ours. We went to South by Southwest to play there, that's a festival in Austin, Texas, and Simon (Raymonde) from the label Bella Union wanted to meet up with us. And we were like: “All right, having breakfast together”. And then he came to all the shows we played. We played like six shows... And he came everyday live front line of the crowd and really into it. So we were like: “Wow, that's pretty cool!”. I found out that he used to be in a band called Cocteau Twins. Ever since then, we started talking about signing to the label, and then we did after a while.

Who are your main musical influences and how do they shape your sound?
W: I think for me one of the main things is that when I was in high school, I listened to a lot of indie-rock from the late eighties/early nineties. And a lot of music that sounded like bands from that time. So like My Bloody Valentine, Yo La Tengo and Pixies. Bands like that. Governor is another one. And that's what I think there's always going to be like part of my musical DNA. So that's something that will always be there somewhere, but then I also started listening to more pop music, funk music, and hip-hop a bit later. And then I really like to try out really different things. Like: “Oh, let's make like an R&B song now”. And then it will never turn out to be a proper R&B song, because I'm not built that way. [laugh] But yeah, I like to take bits and pieces from a lot of different music.
Kilian: I think it's really funny, because William really deliberately tries to like make an R&B song or something like that. But in the end, people are always like: “Oh, it's like a sort of jamming guitar indie-rock”. [laugh]

The initial intent was to record the album as if it were live, but you changed your mind. Why? And are you satisfied with the choice made? 
W: Yeah, I changed it up because we did the first record like this too. So that was just me with a guy called Casper van der Lans. And at first I was like: “Let's get all together in the studio and perform live, kind of catch that energy”. Because I really like playing live with these guys. But then I thought I built up quite a lot of experience working together with Casper, and we kind of found this way of communicating about music and getting our music to the place we wanted to go. So then I was like, I should probably just do it again with him. Because it feels like, especially right now because we've just done the other records, we can just get in there and get it done and kind of keep it spontaneous the way it sounds. And I'm still happy with that decision. I would still like to do a record completely live, and I also would like to do another record like this or something completely different. But for that time, it felt like a good decision.

Talking about the importance of the live dimension. I read that in 2021 you played continuously for 24 hours at Paradise Amsterdam...
Willem, Kilian and Franti: [start to laugh]

That's crazy. Did you also improvised or just repeat your songs?
W: At the time, we only had like ten songs or something, so we decided to just play ten songs, and then we took a lot of different types of instruments. So we could play the ten songs again, but like completely differently: we would like change up instruments and do weird versions. We kind of made a vague schedule of how we'd want to do it and we gave them all like titles. So one of them was called “The Rhythm Of The Night” section, where we would just play with beats and just bass, synths and stuff. And then the other time we would go kind of semi-acoustic or there would just be like two people on stage or there would be all of them. 
K: I loved the idea of having, every sort of seven hours, one time an hour that someone could take a break to go to the toilet for a longer time, like having something to eat or something. But I think in the end, everyone just got excited by the sound of something else that was happening and wanted to join in. I think Willem never took a longer break than five minutes. Also because he probably didn't like us singing the songs… [laugh]
W: [laugh] Oh, I love that! I do really love that.

“Round” is one of the catchiest and most appreciated pieces. How was it born?
W: That's a funny story. I found out quite late in the process of making the song that it sounds a lot like a song from another band called Bodega. Sometimes we get compared to them too, which makes me feel a bit silly about it because I subconsciously stole it, in my opinion. So I sent them a message and asked them if it was all right and they were really nice about it. But that's, to be honest, how it kind of originated, I think. I was just messing around and I think I wrote it in like five or ten minutes or something. But that's probably just subconsciously, I took a lot of sounds from that song, like the rhythm or something. It's a completely different song, but in my head it sounds very similar.

There’s a song that intrigues me a lot: “Upper Ferntree Gully”. Tell me something more about it.
W: I am quite happy with that song, I like it. “Upper Ferntree Gully” is a long one. I wanted the record to start in a way that it was kind of all over the place and felt like you were in a train or something, sitting down and you could see all these things passing by behind the window. Lyrically, I never really think about themes or something, but it feels like there's a lot going on about reproducing, having children and people on earth spreading. Some of that stuff is going on in the lyrics, but it's all a bit weird and tongue-in-cheek or whatever. I like that song because I had to compartmentalize everything. I would work on one bit of the song for a month and then work on another bit for another month, and then go back and forth between projects and glue it together.

Is there an artist or a band you would like to collaborate with in the future?
W: Yeah, for sure. I'm about to send something to a guy called Wesley (Fransen). He's a rapper from Leiden in the Netherlands, under the name Keenan Mundane. He's my favorite rapper in the Netherlands. I have this kind of song structure that I really want to send him, but I haven't had the courage yet to really send it to him; I will do it shortly after this tour.

When you make a record it's you calling the shots. Are you thinking of doing something more choral in the future with a stable line-up?
W: Yeah, that would be really fun. That's like most of the time what I did in bands before this. For me, up until now, it was really interesting to kind of be the one to really call the shots for everything that happened. But yeah, for sure. I want to try anything, really.

Okay, I think that's it. Thank you so much for your time Willem, and see you later!
W: Thank you so much Martina, see you at the show!