JW Roy Music

‘This what I want.’ That’s what the young cyclist JW Roy thought when he first caught the rock-‘n’-roll-virus. He swapped the bent handlebars for a guitar and the winner’s podium for a music stage. The flowers and the beautiful girls remained. He got seriously addicted to music while he was at work in his dad’s butchers shop down south in the Netherlands. On the radio, he overheard Texan singer-songwriter Guy Clark. The cyclist with the lipstick of the misses on the cycling stage still on his cheeks definitively lost his heart to music. It would take years before he became a professional musician. ‘Talent alone is not enough,’ recalls JW Roy. ‘I wanted this so badly and I never gave up.’

The Dutchman has been a pro for over twenty years now. In this period, he went from writing and singing in English like he did on his debut album Round Here from 1997, to songs in his mother tongue and even in Southern dialect, to eventually get full circle singing in English again. It suits him all, but as a full-blooded Americana man the latter suits him best. His last two albums, Dry Goods & Groceries (2015) and A Room Full Of Strangers (2017) are the most significant evidence. ‘This what I want.’ Suddenly he knew for sure. ‘These are my musical roots.’
His favourite singer-songwriter albums are still: Old No. 1 by Guy Clark, John Hiatt ‘s Stolen Moments and EVERYTHING by Townes van Zandt. And you can clearly hear his roots. Don’t say the man didn’t go to high school. The three months he stayed in Austin Texas in the nineties served as the jewel on the crown of his self-education, as he went to a gig every night.

JW Roy also writes songs for his peers, no matter if they operate in a totally different genre. With his songbook, he supplies songs for populist singers and rappers too. Why? Once again: ‘This what I want.’ Together with Dutch novelist Bert Wagendorp, writer of the international bestseller Ventoux, he wrote the rock opera Sint Willebrord Sessions about Lance Armstrong, the fallen star of cycling, who was banned from his sport due to drugs abuse. The opera is structured like an ancient Greek drama. Recorded in only one week during working hours, at night they played the set live to a selected crowd. The book-and-cd-in-one album is slated for release in April 2017 by Excelsior Recordings.

JW Roy just loves to write songs. ‘To sit down with an empty sheet of paper in the morning and have a proper song in the evening, still makes me feel so intensely happy.’ You can tell he means it. He wants to be able to feel his own music and almost live in it. This means that sometimes he must cancel his works for others, even his best mates.

JW Roy is widely recognised for his work, but very rarely he has received a proper award. In 2016, however, Dutch copyrights body BUMA awarded him and local rapper Diggy Dex for their one-off hit single as a duo. Good for him! The man not only loves music, he loves life too, preferably out of the city. If you want proof, just ask the people living north of Amsterdam. They regularly see the owner of a big houseboat cycling like mad through the picturesque landscape. JW lives his music and his sessions. That’s his course in life now.