Groundwork Rising, Ruben Hein’s new album, is in many ways a step forward to the beginning. A step towards the feeling of discovery, and back to what it all comes down to in Hein’s music: vocals and piano.
His success can be measured in many ways; awards, acclaimed albums, sold out shows, collaborating with some of the Netherlands’ finest artists. But something burned inside him, a yearning. Not to start over, but to take what he’d learned and dilute it down to it’s very essence. To peel back the layers and expose the core of his songwriting abilities. “I love to play the piano,” he says. “And I love to sing.” A challenge began to take shape – to write honest, heartfelt songs that needed no embellishment. In other words, to get back to basics. “I wanted to go back and put the song first, to strip away all the fat. Everything has to serve the song. And as simple as it may seem, I had to do that by going back to where I started, as a kid: singing behind a piano, alone, without any notions of knowledge or structures.”
From this starting point, Groundwork Rising came to life. Influenced by the likes of Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens, Thomas Dybdahl, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and Randy Newman, Hein conjured an album that was guided by his intuition; simple, elegant, and sincere.
