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Als het avond is — Suzan: Dutch vocabulary & story · Verbomatico

Als het avond is

by Suzan & Freek

Language: Dutch
Released: 2018
Genre: nederpop
Level: A2-
Difficulty score: 521
Duration: 3:26

How to study this song

“Als het avond is” carries 7 Dutch words, 13 adjectives and 31 verb forms — 51 study entries in all, graded A2-. Begin with avond and nacht: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 31 distinct forms against 13 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
avond	evening	tarde, noche	sera	soir	noite	Abend

Adjectives

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
slecht	bad	mal	male	mal	mal	schlecht

Verb forms

NL	EN	ES	IT	FR	PT	DE
voel	I feel	siento, me siento	sento, mi sento	je sens	sinto, sinto-me	ich fühle

What this song teaches you

Level · A2-

Vocabulary words: 7
Adjectives: 13
Word combos: 7
Expressions: 10
Verb forms: 31
Quiz questions: 35

Background

About the song

«Als het avond is» is the song that turned two amateur musicians from a small town in the east of the Netherlands into the biggest Dutch-language act of their generation, and it did so more slowly than almost any hit before it. Suzan Stortelder and Freek Rikkerink released it on 2 November 2018 through Sony Music Entertainment. It was the first song they had ever written themselves, it runs for three minutes and twenty-five seconds, and the only thing on the other side of the single was an instrumental version of the same recording.

The two had known each other since 2007, when they met in the music room of their secondary school in Groenlo, a town in the Achterhoek region of Gelderland. Suzan, born on 15 June 1992, plays piano and sings; Freek, born on 29 March 1993, sings and plays guitar. They started out playing in a school band, became a couple, and gave their first public performance in 2009 at a campsite in Winterswijk. From 2014 onwards they posted a cover version every week under the name «De Minuut», and in 2016 one of those covers, a stripped-down reading of a song by The Chainsmokers, was shared by the band themselves and collected millions of views. That was the moment the Dutch music industry noticed them, but it took another two years before they released anything of their own.

The song did not begin in Dutch. The duo first wrote it in English, under the title «A Night Like This», and only afterwards decided that what they wanted to say would land harder in their own language. Once they had made that decision the writing went very fast: the four authors — Suzan, Freek, the producer Arno Krabman and Leon Palmen — have described a single studio day that started with coffee at half past ten, work at eleven, and a finished song by five in the afternoon. Krabman also produced the recording. Suzan has been careful, in interviews, to say that the song is not simply about a break-up: it grew out of the feeling, which both of them had had, of missing somebody very badly, and listeners have taken it just as readily to be about distance, about illness, or about the end of a friendship.

What the song actually describes is an evening. The singer is fine during the day and comes apart after dark, when the noise of ordinary life stops and there is nothing left to do but think about the person who is no longer there. The first half of the song looks backwards: there used to be arguments, and now there is only silence, which turns out to be worse. Then comes the chorus, which is a plea rather than a complaint — the singer asks to be told that things will work out, and asks for small promises about a shared future, the kind you can hold on to. The second half brings the other person back into the room, standing there in person, and the singer is sure of their own feelings and completely unsure of the other's. The question the song ends on, and never answers, is whether to hold on or to let go.

Did you know?

The song holds a chart record that is the opposite of the usual kind. It entered the Dutch Top 40 in December 2018 at number thirty, as the highest new entry of that week, and then climbed for month after month. It finally reached number one in March 2019, seventeen weeks after entering — the slowest climb to the top in the history of the chart. The previous record had stood for forty-eight years and belonged to «Non, non, rien n'a changé» by the French children's choir Les Poppys, which had needed fourteen weeks in 1971.

It was originally an English-language song called «A Night Like This». The duo rewrote it in Dutch before releasing it, and it was the first original composition they ever put out; until then their entire public output had been cover versions.

The whole thing was written in one studio day. The authors have described the schedule almost to the hour: coffee at half past ten, writing from eleven, and a finished song by five in the afternoon.

Suzan and Freek met in 2007 in the music room of their school in Groenlo, in the Achterhoek. They played in a school band, became a couple, and performed in public for the first time in 2009 at a campsite in Winterswijk.

Their break came from a cover, not an original. From 2014 they posted a weekly cover version under the title «De Minuut», and in 2016 The Chainsmokers shared their version of one of the band's own songs, which brought them millions of views and their first national attention.

Both of them had day jobs when the single came out — one in architecture, the other at a record company — and both gave them up once the song took off.

The producer and co-writer Arno Krabman, born in Leeuwarden in 1982, has co-written more than thirty-five entries in the Dutch Single Top 100. He is also the co-author of «De diepte», the song S10 took to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2022, where it finished eleventh in the final with 171 points.

The title is a small Dutch grammar lesson on its own. It is a subordinate clause, and Dutch sends the finite verb to the end of a subordinate clause, so the title closes on a verb — an order that has to be learned rather than guessed by speakers of English, Spanish, Italian, French or Portuguese.

The music video was directed by Eric Zwiers and released in 2018. The single itself carried nothing but an instrumental version of the same recording as its B-side.