Brooks Celebrates “One Night (Loneliness)” & Return To Future House Music

Thank you guys for having me back! It’s been a while but it’s good to be back!

The first version of “One Night”… four or five years ago I made a demo when I was in between shows, only had like 10 seconds finished and posted it on Snapchat. I think some people recorded it somehow and posted it online. I never got to finish the song but people kept asking about it. I couldn’t post anything without comments and messages of people asking when this song would be released. People already gave it a name which was “Loneliness” – I didn’t come up with it myself actually. Eventually I finally decided to go back to the studio and finish everything! Therefore I had to find that demo first and I think that took even longer haha.

Since I posted the first 10 seconds, over the next years I’ve improved a lot on the technical aspect on the music side. So when I opened the demo I found a lot of stuff that I would see as doing the wrong thing in my eyes now. There was so much that I wanted to improve but at the same time there’s a reason why people kept asking for it because they liked the original demo. In the end I only had those 10 seconds of the track and the rest still had to be made so it didn’t change a lot at all since I tried to keep it as close to the demo itself.

On Future House Music a lot of stuff happened for me. I released a couple of songs that got a lot of traction and were played by the bigger DJs for the first time. Besides that, with this track I really wanted to give back to the people because they were asking for it for so long and really liked the demo. To me it felt like the right thing to do was to release it with Future House Music, it connects very well to the story. Especially with a track I started working on five years ago, it probably was around the same time I started releasing on Future House Music.

It really was unbelievable! The appreciation I got was amazing. I played my older songs and they knew every word of it. I played unreleased tracks and they even knew those already for some reason and I don’t even know how. It felt so welcoming to see everyone in the crowd being excited about my old Future House Music tracks I played of which I thought they had forgotten about, if that makes any sense. I could tell everyone there followed the whole journey – I started at Future House Music, then released on other labels and did bigger collabs but it all led to that moment. This was something special to me on a personal level as well.

The number one is it all started as friends and I was like literally a nobody that would spend his last 20 euros on the train to Tilburg, which is where they lived back then. Just to hang out, talk about music, go for some drinks or something. I was just starting my career, I didn’t even see it as my career at that point haha. So yeah to see that developed a couple years later is crazy. It’s weird to think about how they are the people that gave me that chance. Then two or three years later you’re flying to Bali because you rented a villa together a couple of weeks before you start touring again. And now they’re booking me to host their own ADE show as their headliner, I just love the crazy journey I’m on together with them.

Second one is WOO HAH!, it’s a hip hop festival in Tilburg that I went to for the first time with them. It was such a good weekend. Gino had a small apartment right next to it and he knew some people from the music scene that could get us tickets and yeah, the whole weekend was just an amazing experience.

I feel like because of the connection to Future House Music and what I would play in a club, is this. For example, me doing a mix for Future House Music makes it so much more connected to “Loneliness” than any club show I would play. I would still play it, but then it’d be just a track in my Brooks set. And now I tried to open the mix with it and build everything around it instead of it just being some track you open with. It gives so much more meaning to it. On a Brooks level it’s not that different, but on a personal level it is. It’s much closer to me, if that makes sense.

“Sober,” I did this one together with Vluarr. First of all he’s such an amazing producer, but also a really genuine, great guy to hang with. It’s really refreshing to see someone like him on the rise again. He’s an insanely good producer instead of someone who just randomly shows up and does whatever they do. He has so much really good music to back it up on and he’s so excited to make music and release as much as possible. So definitely Vluarr on that number 1 spot.

Also SMACK – I met them at the ADE event as well. They seem like really great guys, but even backstage they kept their masks on so I actually have no idea who I’ve been talking to haha. But they were super genuine, really nice guys who make cool music and their stage presence is also awesome.

And CMC$, of course he also released a lot on STMPD in the first couple of years I released there too. And then, just like everyone else, everyone kind of took a break over Covid. But it’s good to see him releasing again and I really like the track that I got from him, “Afterglow.” Felt good to include his name and his music again.

Especially after Covid, and of course everyone had their own things to deal with, I personally get a lot of energy from reconnecting with friends. I now really value time to recharge. If you’re tired after one show, that’s fine. Normally I would feel bad about that, and would think I had no right to be tired. But now I finally realized that’s not a healthy way to look at it. So now I take more time to visit my mom and have a glass of wine with her, or go to the woods with my dog, or whatever I need to recharge basically. A lot of times I would recharge and feel bad about it because I felt like I should’ve been busy. Nowadays I genuinely try to enjoy not being busy and taking the time to recharge. That basically turned everything upside down and it’s been working great for me so far.

I’m starting to get more and more ideas on music. I’m so motivated right now and happy with how good my mindset is. I noticed how fast I’m working and how much music I’m pumping out. I spent just a few weeks in the studio now and I already have five or six tracks halfway. So this winter I’m focussing on working a lot on my music so next year we can build everything around that. Who knows, maybe even an album or just an EP.