K’s Choice comeback

Siblings Gert and Sarah Bettens of K’s Choice have been making music together for more than two decades. But, until a few years ago, they wrote their songs separately.

Sarah has been living in the US for many years, but even when they were both living in Belgium, they penned songs alone, presenting them to the other for comments, alterations or rejection. But that has all changed with their new album, The Phantom Cowboy.

“We tried to work together for our first record, but it just felt more comfortable to do it alone,” says Gert. “Now I think of it, it is slightly surprising, since we know each other so well. If we don’t like what the other does, we can say it without worrying about hurting each other’s feelings.”

“Now,” Sarah adds, “we felt it was time to try it”.

With their hit single “Not an Addict”, K’s Choice experienced major success in the second half of the 1990s, extensively touring Europe and the US. In 2003, they decided to take a break: Sarah embarked on a solo career, while Gert formed a new band, Woodface.

Five years ago they reunited and released Echo Mountain. But it’s this year that feels like a watershed for the band: With 11 tightly rocking songs and lasting only 30 minutes, The Phantom Cowboy feels like a new start for K’s Choice.

It’s their shortest album to date, and never before have they penned such sort songs, devoid of redundancies and played with a sense of urgency. “We had set out from the start to not put too many songs on the album,” Sarah says, “but we didn’t think the album would be so short because we couldn’t imagine the songs would be that concise.”

Short and sweet

For his part, Gert says he prefers “for people to think, ‘what a shame this great album is already over’, instead of saying the record contains great songs but is too long. Think of The Ramones.”

Or the American band Magnapop, who made some great albums in the 1990s and are another reference The Phantom Cowboy has regularly evoked.

“In the past, our albums were a collection of songs we had written in the previous two years,” says Sarah, “but this time we clearly stated what kind of record we wanted to make before we started to write.”

The new album will naturally be the focus of this month’s concerts across Belgium, but let’s hope for the fans they’ll play for a bit longer than 30 minutes.

Of course, assures Sarah. “Some older songs fit the new approach, and we have some others that we can make fit. Anyway, it’s not the kind of music you can easily listen to for, let’s say, 90 minutes. That’s way too tiresome for the audience, I think.”

Musically, The Phantom Cowboy is an album with one clear line, and lyrically, the songs fit nicely together. Gert: “That’s a coincidence. The only approach we confirmed before writing was that we didn’t want to bare our souls in all the songs, as we regularly did in the past.”

The music, continues Sarah, “wouldn’t suit lyrics that are melancholy or full of metaphors. They had to be more assertive.”

“But in the end,” says Gert, “the songs still deal with personal issues.” Like coping with getting older, notes Sarah.

At first, The Phantom Cowboy was only a working title, taken from Scooby-Doo and the Phantom Cowboy, a book one of Sarah’s children brought to the studio. But in the end they couldn’t think of a better title. By then they had also written a song with the same name. Sarah: “It’s about a mysterious, lonely figure travelling through the desert.”

It wasn’t difficult for her to identify with this type of character. “I owe much of my happiness to the people around me,” she says, “yet I also feel that, at the end of the day, you fall asleep alone with your own thoughts. No one else can fully understand what you think or feel.”

American dream
Sarah, who also has American citizenship, lives with her wife and their children in Johnson City, Tennessee. Since 2012, the year she turned 40, she’s been part of the town’s fire brigade, the only woman in the team. “I had the feeling that if I still wanted to do something else with my life, it was now or never. It’s compensation for all the hobbies I never had time for.”

She likes “the camaraderie, the physicality of the work,” she says, “and how the job has a clear start and end. I love that regularity; for a musician, the work never really stops.”

The Phantom Cowboy will be released in the US in September. “In America, we can still draw on the success we had in the past,” she says. “For instance, we did a small acoustic tour last year.”

“But we haven’t toured there with a full band for ages,” says Gert. “It would be great if we finally could go back with this album.”

Sarah: “Having an American career is still a dream, even more so since it became my home country.”

The K’s Choice Belgian tour in May is sold out with the exception of a rehearsal show on 19 May in Opwijk and 25 May in Binche. Get tickets now for their December show at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels