JW Roy & The Royal Family - A Room Full Of Strangers (2017)

JW Roy is widely recognised for his work, but very rarely he has received a proper award. JW lives his music and his sessions. That’s his course in life now.

‘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 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.