Douglas Firs | New album "Happy Pt. 2" out now!

‘Happy Pt. 2’ follows ‘Heart of a Mother’, the poignant grief album about Gertjan Van Hellemont's late mother, and is about finding happiness again after deep grief, but without letting go of that grief. Grief remains, but there is also renewed hope and energy to be heard.

Gertjan's love for that American roots and indie folk music can once again take center stage on Happy Pt. 2, with a prominent role for Bart Vervaeck's wailing pedal steel. Happy Pt. 2 reconciles classic songwriting, as Gertjan has learned from his influences, with a spacey and contemporary sound, thanks to Wietse Meys' ethereal saxophones, Senne Guns' adventurous synthesizers, and Kevin Ratterman's canyon-wide mix. He was also responsible for the sound of the albums Hinges of Luck (the Spotify count of "How Can You Know" is currently at almost 10,000,000), and Heart of a Mother.

The road to Happy Pt. 2 was long and eventful, but the album is here, and it stands for a new beginning. That couldn't be any different after Heart of a Mother, the album overloaded with superlatives by the press about the death of Gertjan's own mother and the birth of his son, immense sadness and equally great joy at the same time. But how do you follow up such an album?

Gertjan saw a photo of Lukas Turcksin and knew. Happy Pt. 2, that had to be it. An album about finding happiness again after deep sorrow, but without letting go of that sorrow. Realizing that it will always be there, but that it doesn't necessarily have to take over all the time. Because life is so much more than that. So we have to start over again and again