Lijbaart, Joost & River Adomeit & Amelie Spinks - Sunflower - Love Letters LP

With Love Letters, drummer and composer Joost Lijbaart has created perhaps the most personal album of his career, an album on which he lets go of many of his musical certainties. After 35 years in jazz, improvisation and world music, Lijbaart asked himself a simple yet confronting question: what remains when technique, virtuosity and musical complexity are stripped away? What happens when the only intention is to play honestly? The answer was rhythm, sound and the expressive power of words. Together with young New Zealand singer, bassist and songwriter Amelie Spinks and American bassist River Adomeit, Lijbaart formed the band Sunflower. In its music, his long-standing love of country, folk and Americana comes clearly to the surface—genres he had listened to for years but had never previously explored in a project of his own. The age difference between the three musicians (Spinks is 23, Adomeit 29 and Lijbaart 58) did not create distance. Instead, it became a source of inspiration, shaping the songwriting, the lyrics and the musical concept. Their collaboration brought back the excitement of first experiences: making music without routine and without predetermined roles. For Lijbaart, Sunflower also required a radical new approach to drumming. Much of what he had developed throughout his career ,extended percussion, complex rhythms and technical virtuosity had no place in these songs. Instead, he searched for something more essential: rhythm, texture and expression through simplicity, finding exactly the right balance between instrumentation, lyrics and groove. The songs on Love Letters draw attention to the places where life may reveal itself most truthfully: in small gestures, in touch, in waiting and in care. They open up a world in which quiet actions carry more meaning than grand statements, and where silence and listening can lead to greater understanding and wisdom. At the heart of the album is the idea of equality not as a declaration, but as a way of being. In “If I Was a Woman,” Lijbaart consciously attempts to step into a perspective that is still too often overlooked within a patriarchal society. “Eight Hands on a Black Cat” explores the strange contrast between the tangible, truthful experiences of domestic life and the noise and superficiality of the outside world. For Joost Lijbaart, Sunflower is not a side project, but a new artistic beginning: music made without protection, in which virtuosity no longer determines what should be said. The song does.