Record: Accidental Pictures (Arland Records, 2023)

Our life is like a string of accidental pictures.

From the song, “Accidental Pictures,” by Ruud Houweling

After the pandemic eased off, in one of my first face-to-face meetings with friends, I had a conversation with two brothers about their father, a man who lived to be over 100 years old and who died just before the pandemic arrived. I knew their father and had many conversations with him, so I knew a few of their popular family stories — the tales every family tells and retells through the years until they’re burnished with a collective patina of shared nostalgia.

I mentioned something their father told me a few years earlier, a small detail from his youth. The brothers were astonished. They had never heard the detail I shared with them. This, in turn, astonished me. I realized 100 years — which feels like a surreal time scale for living memory in our hot-minute world — still isn’t enough time to ask everything we want to know about our parents.

Recording artist Ruud Hoeweling’s exposed, lyrical “Accidental Pictures” (Arland Records, 2023) is the attempt to do what we all hope to do with our parents — in Ruud’s case his father — before they’re gone and before our memories fade. Can we heal the slights and wounds, accept the revealing (and sometimes unflattering) comparisons, and allow our parents to be who they are even if who they are disappoints us, all while visiting that most terrifying of borderlands, our shared mortality?

“Accidental Pictures,” recorded at E-Sound Studio in 2023, is an LP-length song cycle about the universal end-of-life disorientation.

Every songwriter has to write at least one train song.

Ruud Houweling

The emotional urgency of “Accidental Pictures” is intensified by the unstated but present global crisis of COVID, doubling down the pressure on his family as they worked their way through loss. Ruud explores some of this pressure early in several tracks on “Accidental Pictures,” none more sharply in focus than in “Seeing the Ocean.”

“COVID had started outside our bubble,” says Ruud. “We were (my family) in my father’s last few months. My relationship with him was very good but intense. So his increasing illness and parting took a lot from me and my family. That dark ride ended up in that song.”

“Accidental Pictures” was created within an intimate acoustic folk tradition propelled throughout by Rob Wijtman on drums, Ro Krauss on viola, and other players contributing double bass and pump organ (Egon Kracht), clarinet (Michiel Van Dijk), trombone (Kobi Arditi), cello (David Faber), vocals (Libby Decamp), and even tuba (Patrick Votrian). This approach keeps the tone of the record quiet, allowing Ruud’s guitar and lyrics to carry more of the weight. Occasionally, he switches out his acoustic guitar for a mostly subdued electric guitar, but the mood remains somber, gentle, and introspective.

“I had the riff in ‘Seeing the Ocean’ — I love good half-time guitar riffs,” Ruud continues. “I used to be in a rock band called Cloudmachine. But riff-based songs are very rarely real songs. It was my aim to see if I could achieve both. The dark vibe of the riff-verse fit well with the things that were going on in my life at that time.

“I was longing for a breath of air. The chorus of that song releases the tension of the verse,” says Ruud. “The vastness, the shimmering, the salty air, the instant peace.”

It wasn’t my job to heal my father. But in the end, we sort of did it together — after an entire lifetime. I’m very grateful for that.

Ruud Houweling

There’s great beauty in loneliness. Perhaps the most emotionally universal track on the record is “The Bigger Picture” (featuring Rik Cornelissen on accordion), followed closely by the album’s title track, “Accidental Pictures.”

“The verse in ‘The Bigger Picture’ is about not understanding the world, which at this time especially, is a feeling many people know,” says Ruud. “The second verse is about learning to understand love with its inevitable pain. Acknowledging a sense of loneliness while knowing you’re not the only one.

“Then there’s an instrumental bridge leading into the third verse where there’s a coming to terms with how life really works — finding peace, seeing that everything’s connected.”

“Accidental Pictures” ends with a fittingly sparse track that serves as a kind of coda to the entire narrative of the record — “Apricity” — a word that today is considered archaic because it both entered and left popular use in English in the 1600s. Apricity means “the warmth of sunlight in winter,” and it’s often illustrated in photographs with newly fallen snow and a low winter sun coming through bare tree branches.

The song’s title feels like the most “visual” representation of Ruud’s relationship with his father. Yes, it’s a metaphor, but it’s also an insightful observation on the emotional warmth we can sometimes feel (or not) toward our parents.

“I’ve learned that if you know how to look, everything is connected,” says Ruud. “I loved my father so much. He struggled his entire life with who he was, and who he couldn’t be.” This record, although somber in its subject matter, swings with passion, intensity, and purpose creating a universal statement about love, loss, and if such a thing exists, closure.

A year before my father died, he came to terms with having no more control over his life. He relaxed into the here and now. He left the earth in peace, with no more fear.

Ruud Houweling

Note:

This article is the second of a two-part series about the songwriting of Netherlands-based recording artist Ruud Houweling that began with a piece about his new single, “Below Freezing at 14th Street – Union Square Station” (self-released, 2025).

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Credits

“Forgotten” / Anchor photograph by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash.com.

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