Alex Roeka - Raw Grace

After twenty-five years in the music industry, Alex Roeka retreated to a village in Zeeland to relax, reflect and write new songs.
Who was he anyway?

In the first song of his new album Rauwe Genade he tries to answer that: Singer of life, love and death. A song that can be seen as an overture, in which a number of elements of the album are already discussed.
After a few weeks he proved not to be insensitive to the nature surrounding him, which resulted in a song of praise
on the ever-present Zeeland wind. With the final line: 'Zeeland wind, that stubbornly and grimly wrings the delight from me.'

He had taken a suitcase full of poems to Zeeland with the intention of compiling a book there. Many of the poems took him back to his past and evoked old images, such as the Amsterdam Warmoesstraat, immortalized by him in the slightly surrealistic The Street of Grace.

An old acquaintance suddenly dropping in reminds him of a once written but forgotten song full of longing and powerlessness, in which the difference between man and woman evokes a seductive, erotic tension: Bachata of old love.
Meanwhile, the relationship with his girlfriend plays a role, as sung in the melancholic Deeply Attached to You.
However far you may be from the goings-on of the world, you cannot shut yourself off from it, if only because of the baker who, every time you come to buy a loaf of bread, goes over the news from the tabloids with you and leaves you with the restless awareness that you are living in a world adrift.
And then comes the sad news that his best friend has died. Alex feels called to sing a song at the funeral, Song for A. An evocation of the past. 'We didn't fit well in that mouse-gray mold.'

Life goes on and the man, who is called the village idiot, actually inspires him to write a dance number. 'Dance when you are standing on the dike and you look into the mouth of the sky.'

With its space and silence, Zeeland is a paradise for the cycling enthusiast, which Alex is. A flat tire lands him at a campsite with a group of Poles, who repair his tire and then fill him up with food and drinks. When leaving the campsite, the manager bursts into a hymn of praise for The Poles.

By visiting korfball matches in the village, Alex comes into contact with the enthusiastic pastor who regularly acts as a referee. In the clubhouse, the preacher asks him if he also believes, which leads to the cheerful, here and there absurdist religious song Credo for an empty head.
An old café friend, Iwan, comes to visit and tells us at length about his adventurous, anarchist life, more than enough for a biting song about freedom and the hunger for life.
Iwan's stories evoke the desire to return to the city to wander through the old neighborhoods one last time. 'A phantom hunted from a vague past'.

And then love again of course. What do you really want with me? With the answer: 'To stay with you until the last laugh of life has been sighed from your lungs.'
Autumn. The warm days are over. Smells of melancholy and longing rise from the ground. People have come by, but there are also those who have not come. Alas. 'In a little while we will not see each other again.'
And then he leaves Zeeland again. And once he's gone, there's the loss of the bridges, the dikes, the space. But you have to let go and move on, with the village idiot's word in the back of your mind: Dance!

'Rauwe Genade' is Roeka's fifth album for Excelsior and was recorded with his personal dream team: producer Frans Hagenaars, multi-instrumentalist Reyer Zwart and drummer Jeroen Kleijn. The latter two also support him in the eponymous theatre programme, in which the album will be performed in its entirety in addition to the stories.