by Romy Coomans

As I’m asked to write this article I’m just experiencing the law of Murphy first hand. The people who came to see my car didn’t take it, I got some cancellations on gigs I presumed where set, I’m broke and the sandwich I ordered is not the one I got…

I’m annoyed, irritated, like anyone else would be.

So now there are three things I can do:

1. I can sit back and talk myself into believing I am doomed to fail;
2. I can get up and try to do something with this in the back of my mind; its useless no matter what.
3. I can get up and try to do something with this in the back of my mind; where I want to go.

The funny part is that there is no right or wrong. Any of the three will be my reality if I choose to believe in them. And although at this very moment I feel like number 1 is a perfect description of my world and number three seems like an unrealistic bitch, I know it is in my hands what the rest of my day, week, month, year is going to look like.

I’m a singer, a professional one. I’m a 26 years old Dutch citizen married to a 17 year older guitarist living in a nice mansion in a small town in the south of the Netherlands. Do I live an ordinary life? Most people would say no, but that’s a matter of interpretation. My life has been a repetitive battle between mind and heart. I say repetitive because the outcome was always the same.

The heart wins…

The heart won when I had to pick my education:

Am I going to study law because I have the capacities to do so, or am I going to make music because I have the passion to do so?

The heart won when I fell in love:

Am I gonna ignore my feelings because of an age difference or am I going to ignore the age difference because of my feelings?

The heart won when I was stressed-out:

Am I going to take it easy on my obligations that bring me certainties or am I going to take it easy on my dreams that are still uncertain?

There is a strong force inside me that has always dragged me to my decisions. A force that I sometimes hated for making it so hard on me. Why could I not just pick what I knew was good for me, what I knew would give stability, what I knew would give peace? But I always landed on my feet. And that made me think… What if I consciously would teach my mind to believe in my dreams, goals, and wishes, irrelevant of how far fetched they might seem at first? If I could make my mind cooperate, how much further would I land than ‘just on my feet’? Let go of my expectations, create possibilities.

Making a living by making music seems to some already pretty much living on the edge. How often I get the question: “And what do you do next to making music, I mean as a job?”. My husband and I felt the urge to push ourselves a little bit further. Moving people by singing songs of Adele is great, I mean we love Adele, but how would we grow as artists if we could get that same effect from our own songs? So we started writing melodies to our feelings, figuring out how to record those feelings, figuring out how to agree on disagreeing on melodies keeping an eye on each others feelings, until after a year and a half we had a decent set of songs we felt confident about.

We like to believe in possibilities but we also like to believe that this requires full dedication. Since we have only 24 hours in a day we figured that we probably would have to spend a lifetime mastering all requirements for recording an album of a certain level. So we searched online the contact info of studios, producers and musicians we admire. It takes some time but it doesn’t take an expert to find the contact info of producers that worked with stars like Alanis Morissette, Katy Perry, and Elton John and, since we had nothing to loose, we start writing emails. Only one day later we received an enthusiastic email from an 8 Grammy Award winning producer – Joe Chiccarelli – saying that he is flattered by our interest and overwhelmed by the songs and is willing to record our album in legendary recording studio Sunset Sound. WE ARE DANCING on the table,… but freeze when we see the price calculated for recordings. Our emotions jump up and down for a period of time, this is a crossroad: Are we going to decline this once in a life time offer because we can’t afford it or are we going to accept it, knowing that we will have to gather the crazy amount of € 70.000,- in less than two months. Are we going to practise what we preach or are we going to fall back into old habits? With € 10.000,- of savings we signed the contract. Two months later we are on a plane, supported by over 350 sponsors who believed in this incredible opportunity and our courage without having heard a single note or any guarantee the album will become a hit record.

Is that a realistic thought? No, but with faith, hard work and perseverance it became a reality.

Today is a bad day, I choose to believe that. But the message I just received, if I would be willing to write an article on ‘The sense of efficacy’, makes me smile. Its all part of the plan, my mind is still on the right track.