Maan, who made her big break in 2015 thanks to her highly successful participation in a talent show, has had several hit songs in recent years. At the beginning of 2020, she ranked top 3 in the Dutch Top 40 with the sensitive Ze Huilt Maar Ze Lacht.
“Picture perfect”
“My songs are often quite personal,” Maan says. “I often think that the more personal I keep them, the more they can go from heart to heart.” When a pop artist writes “She cries but she doesn’t,” she is experiencing negative emotions. “We’ve grown up in this whole social media era, where everything seems perfect all the time, but that’s often not the case at all. And how long are you going to be involved in that? And when are you really going to say how you’re really doing?”
The song is largely autobiographical, especially the part where the singer describes walking through the city and seeing her reflection in the window, but having mixed feelings about the person staring back at her. “You actually think: ‘I know her, but I don’t really want to know her.’ “To see someone who isn’t actually you at all,” Maan says. “The whole song is about insecurity and not feeling good about yourself. I definitely still feel that way. “And I think I will continue to feel that way throughout my life.”
“Finger on the sore spot”
Before releasing the song, Maan often feels alone in this thought. But that will change when you release her. She cries but she laughs. Her inbox will be full in no time. “Only people who recognized themselves in it and who really said, ‘Oh, I could never put my finger on the sore spot, but you wrote exactly that for me. That’s exactly how I feel.’
Listen to the entire Top 2000 from gogo below: