William Fitzsimmons

WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS

William Fitzsimmons is a singer-songwriter with a fascinating and very personal story. He delivers that story with the help of a full band, fluctuating between folk and electronica.

Fitzsimmons now has a new release: Lions. He has channelled his experiences of the past years into moody, intimate music. The lyrics are confident and loving and sung in a frail voice; as if, like autumn leaves, they would otherwise be crushed under lumbering feet.

The music is sometimes airy and dreamy, other times the echoes of a harsh reality. But, one way or the other, it is always fragile.

Fitzsimmons is a singer-songwriter par excellence in his lyrics, melodies and guitar accompaniments. The band somewhat changes the atmosphere, but that is not a disturbing factor, on the contrary. Fitzsimmons successfully maintains the momentum gained with Gold in the Shadow.

The personal story of this Pittsburgh-born bard begins with his blind parents. The members of his family would use music to communicate because of the disability. There were all kinds of instruments in their house and both parents gave William a theoretical music foundation.

Fitzsimmons’ parents separated when he was still in his teens, the main subject of his first lyrics, which perhaps explains partly the success of his later music. It is a situation that a large part of his generation underwent.

In the last period of his training as a psychiatrist, he clearly resorted to music for the first time to settle the score with his own gloomy inner demons. Before he had a great awareness of all that, he participated in TV programmes, filled concert halls and his music managed to reach recesses he had never even dreamed of.

The openness with which he shared his personal experiences and his rise to fame led to the break-up of his marriage of ten years. After two years of silence, he sang about this event and everything that had to do with it on the album The Sparrow and the Crow. This album was voted ‘Best Folk Album 2008’ on iTunes.

Lions (2014), his latest album, covers the past years of his life. ‘They have been wonderful, painful, long, incredibly brief, and more educational and rewarding than any I've ever lived before. ‘Lions’ is something I'm terribly proud of and utterly connected to’ (nettwerk.com)

DENISON WITMER

Fans call his music neo-folk and compare Denison Witmer to singer-songwriters from the Seventies, like Cat Stevens and Nick Drake. His guitar picking sounds easy but requires a complex dexterity. His lyrics are as poetic as guarded.

This singer-songwriter, like Fitzsimmons, sings about his past. Witmer also strikes a sensitive and sober style, full of personal feel. On the one hand his life is imbued with luck, on the other hand he has tasted the bitterness of life when those dearest to him deceased.

He pressed his first album in one thousand copies, thinking he only ordered a hundred. In a desperate attempt to get rid of them all, he started touring and sold every single album. Ever since he enjoys his ‘underground succes’, like he calls it on his website.

His tenth album, Denison Witmer, is inspired on his newly acquired fatherhood, but also on the loss of his own father. He took care of him and stayed close to the man in the last days of his life. These two life-determining aspects are very present in the music as well as in the lyrics.