Biography

So who the heck do I think I am? Or who am I, if that's more to the point here. The astute reader probably would have guessed it, but to the less-astuite (or 'people with a different astuteness' or 'the astutely-challenged' if that sounds a little bit friendlier): I'm a not-so native English speaker who cannot afford to hire a spellchecker, nevermind someone who understand the oddly peculiar peculiarities of English grammar. To be a little bit more exact: I'm Dutch. I'm also fairly young, as you can tell by the complete lack of a professional approach here but I hope I am forgiven. If not I'll sign up for some 'business 101' course and see how that goes.

Anyway, I'm a 24-year old Dutchman. And I have a name, believe it or not: Arjen Schippers. Don't bother trying to pronounce that if you aren't Dutch, you'll only hurt your tongue. I started playing music a bunch of years ago, when coal was still considered an excellent source of energy and child labor was called 'an early career opportunity'. Starting out on the accoustic guitar I quickly switched to electric guitar, even if only because it gave me the power to annoy vastly more people with a single out-of-tune chord. Not too long after that my attention gradually shifted towards the piano, which I still consider to be my 'primary instrument', even though that may sound a lot fancier then it really is. Having received some violin lessons for a year or so, mostly to get familiar with the basics of bowed instruments, and having attempted to write songs as soon as my guitar-skills encompassed over two different chords, I set out to write a proper album, not in the last place because people around me started bugging me I wasn't particularly striving towards much, if anything at all..So I set out to create not just any album, but one that actually had a certain aboutness. Or a concept-album, if you're from the 'happy-go-lucky LSD' era. This eventually resulted in Inside Outsider, my first album and one on which I was assisted by producer Martijn Groeneveld and visual artist Bas Steur. The rest is not yet history, but will be soon.