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B1+

Duurt te lang

Davina Michelle

Language
Dutch
Released
2018
Genre
nederpop
Level
B1+
Difficulty score
844
Duration
2:33

How to study this song

Learning “Duurt te lang” means 114 entries at B1+ — 48 Dutch words, 12 adjectives and 54 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. The glossary is the place to begin — beat, bed and blikken are the song’s keywords. This one leans on its verbs: 54 distinct forms against 12 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level part of the list will already be familiar; the rest is what closes the gap.

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

NLENESITFRPTDE
beatbeatritmo, beatritmo, beatrythme, beatbatida, beatBeat
bedbedcamalettolitcamaBett
blikkenlooks, glancesmiradassguardiregardsolharesBlicke
blokblockbloquebloccobloc

What this song teaches you

Level · B1+

Vocabulary words
48
Adjectives
12
Word combos
8
Expressions
14
Verb forms
54
Quiz questions
35

More Dutch songs at this level

  • Dansen aan zee — BLØF (2000)B1+
  • 100 Tranen — Qlas, Antoon & Boef (2026)B1+
  • Europapa — Joost Klein (2024)B1+
  • Blijven slapen — Snelle & Maan (2021)B1

Background

About the song

«Duurt te lang» is the song that made Davina Michelle famous in the Netherlands in the space of a single television evening, and it is not even hers. The original belongs to Glen Faria, a rapper from Amsterdam who records under the name MC Fit, and it came out in April 2013 on the Top Notch label, as part of his first solo album. Faria wrote it about something very unglamorous: the slow grind of an ordinary marriage, the arguments that repeat themselves word for word, the evenings when two people who love each other simply have nothing left to say. It is a domestic song rather than a dramatic one. In 2013 almost nobody noticed. The record did not enter the Dutch charts at all, and for five years it stayed a track that people who followed Dutch hip hop knew and almost nobody else did.

What changed everything was a television format. «Beste Zangers», broadcast by AVROTROS, works on a simple and rather generous idea: a group of singers spends a season together, and each episode is dedicated to one of them. The artist whose episode it is does not sing at all. Instead the others each pick one of that artist’s songs and perform their own version of it, in front of the person who wrote or made it famous. The eleventh season ran from 1 September to 27 October 2018, was presented by Jan Smit, and brought together Lee Towers, Trijntje Oosterhuis, Alain Clark, Tino Martin, Maria Fiselier, Glen Faria and Davina Michelle. The fifth episode, broadcast on 29 September 2018, was Glen Faria’s. Davina Michelle chose the song about the tired marriage, and sang it sitting a few metres away from the man who had written it.

She very nearly did not do it. Until that autumn she was known, in so far as she was known at all, as a YouTube singer who covered international pop in English. She had started her channel in February 2017 and posted a cover every week, and in August 2017 her version of P!nk’s «What About Us» went round the world after P!nk herself praised it in an interview. Dutch was another matter. According to Marcel Fisser, the programme’s bandleader, who picked this particular song for her and wrote the arrangement she sang, she thought she sounded terrible in her own language because of her Rotterdam accent and did not want to sing in Dutch at all. Fisser chose it anyway, on the principle that the point of the show is not the singer but the artist in the chair: the song has to move the person it belongs to. Michelle later admitted that she left the recording convinced it had gone badly and that she wanted the whole episode behind her as fast as possible.

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bloco
Block
brieflettercartaletteralettrecartaBrief
conflictenconflictsconflictosconflitticonflitsconflitosKonflikte
deelpart, sharepartepartepartieparteTeil, Anteil
deurendoorspuertasporteportesportasTüren

This card holds 40 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

NLENESITFRPTDE
boosangryenfadadoarrabbiatofâchézangadowütend
dichtclosed, shutcerradochiusoferméfechadozu, geschlossen

This card holds 10 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

NLENESITFRPTDE
kondenwe couldpodíamospotevamonous pouvionspodíamoswir konnten
pratento talkhablarparlareparlerfalarreden
gingwent, turnedibaandavaallaitiaging
vergatenwe forgotolvidamosdimenticammonous oubliionsesquecemoswir vergaßen
schreefI wroteescribíscrivevoj’écrivaisescreviaich schrieb
zalwillvoy afaròje vaisvouwerden
doento dohacerfarefairefazertun
leefI livevivovivoje visvivoich lebe
kreegI got, I receivedrecibíricevevoje recevaisrecebiaich bekam

This card holds 45 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

The performance did the opposite. Within two days of the broadcast the song was the most downloaded track on iTunes in the Netherlands, and the single was rushed out on 6 October 2018 on the Cornelis Music label. It runs two and a half minutes, and the arrangement strips the original back to piano, strings and a voice that starts almost conversationally and ends somewhere close to shouting. That dynamic is the whole trick of the recording: the lyric is small and domestic, the delivery is enormous, and the distance between the two is what makes people cry at it.

The words are a portrait of a couple at the end of their patience rather than the end of their love. In the first verse the two of them used to be able to talk about anything, but everything turned into a conversation about love and then even that was forgotten; the letters and the text messages and the little song promised everything. Now they sit at the table with their mouths shut, staring, saying nothing that the look on their faces has not already said. The singer takes most of the blame, and describes driving too long through a tunnel with no light at the end of it. The chorus is an admission rather than an accusation: this is taking too long, we have been standing still for a while, we have to move on, and for the last time, I am sorry.

The second verse is the part that makes Dutch listeners recognise their own kitchens. Both of them already know exactly what the other is going to say; at the end of the argument there will be a declaration of love anyway; then the doors slam, another glass breaks, another tear falls and the bag gets packed, and then the clothes go back into the wardrobe and the embrace lasts a little longer so that the anger is forgotten. It does not help, because the pain simply sits where it was. Tomorrow will be the same song with the same words over the same beat — a kind of gold paint brushed over a block of grief. Conflict is normal, the singer concludes, but it must not be allowed to choke you, and since her own tears will not come, she lets the song do the sobbing instead.

For learners of Dutch the song is unusually rich for something this short. It is a small museum of SEPARABLE VERBS, the Dutch construction that splits a verb in two and throws the prefix to the end of the clause: the verbs for closing your eyes, holding someone tight, thinking back, putting something back and coming down to the same thing all appear here with their two halves at opposite ends of the line. It is also full of DIMINUTIVES in -je and -tje — a little house, a little bed, a little song, a text message, a little while, small mouths — which is how Dutch adds tenderness or smallness without an adjective. And because it is sung in ordinary spoken Dutch, it shows the reductions the textbooks leave out: the possessive «mijn» worn down to «me» and «m’n», and «ik» shortened to a single consonant with an apostrophe. Add a row of strong simple pasts, the impersonal «er» that props up a sentence with no real subject, and the verb-second inversion that flips subject and verb after any opening word, and you have most of an A2 to B1 syllabus inside two and a half minutes.

Did you know?

The song is a cover, and the man it was covered for was sitting in the room. Glen Faria, who recorded the original in 2013 under the name MC Fit, was the featured artist of that fifth episode, which is why a singer known for English-language YouTube covers was singing a Dutch rap ballad at all. Faria has said since that he and Davina Michelle speak almost every week and that he is proud of what happened to his song. In the same season Tino Martin covered another Faria composition, «Zij weet het», which also became a hit — one television evening turned a rapper with no chart history into the writer of two successful singles for other people.

Davina Michelle is a stage name built from her own: she was born Michelle Davina Hoogendoorn on 12 November 1995 in Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel, and her parents named her after the actress Michelle Pfeiffer and the British presenter Davina McCall.

She had already been rejected by Dutch television once. In 2016 she auditioned for the fifth season of «Idols», got through to the theatre round, and was eliminated during the duet stage. Her second route in was to do it herself: a YouTube channel opened in February 2017, one cover a week, and a version of P!nk’s «What About Us» uploaded in August 2017 that went viral when P!nk told a magazine it sounded better than she ever would.

The arrangement everybody knows is not the original one. Marcel Fisser, the bandleader of «Beste Zangers», both chose the song for her and rewrote it for her voice, turning a rapped verse over a beat into a piano ballad that climbs. He has said she resisted the idea of singing in Dutch because she disliked the sound of her own Rotterdam accent — which is, ironically, part of what makes the recording sound like a real person and not a television performance.

The chart run started before the single existed. The performance was broadcast on 29 September 2018; within two days the song was number one on iTunes in the Netherlands, and only then, on 6 October, was it released as a single. In 2018 that sequence — television, download, release — was still unusual enough to be reported as news in itself.

The Dutch public radio station NPO Radio 2 invented an award for it. When the annual Top 2000 list was compiled at the end of 2018, the song entered straight in at number 477, the highest new Dutch entry of that year, and the station handed Davina Michelle the first ever «NPO Radio 2 Top 2000 Award». A year later the song climbed to number 144.

The song did not travel. Despite blanketing the Dutch charts for months, in Flanders it only reached «Tip 1» of the Ultratop 50, which is the waiting room just outside the chart proper — a reminder that Dutch-language hits often stop at the border even when both countries speak the language.

Charts & streaming

The original did nothing. Glen Faria’s 2013 recording never entered a Dutch chart. The cover, released on 6 October 2018, five years later, went to number one on all three of the Dutch charts that matter: the Nederlandse Top 40, the Single Top 100 and the Mega Top 50. In the Top 40 it held the top spot for eight consecutive weeks, from 3 November 2018 to 18 January 2019. In the Single Top 100 it led for six weeks, from 10 November to 21 December 2018, and in the Mega Top 50 for five. It was also number one on the Dutch Spotify Top 50.

Those eight weeks set a record. No Dutch female singer had ever led the Top 40 for that long: the previous holder was Yvonne Keeley with seven weeks in 1978, and on the way Michelle also passed the runs of Céline Dion and Alexis Jordan. The record stood until late 2019, when Tones and I took it. It also made her the first woman in eleven years to reach number one in the Dutch Top 40 with a Dutch-language song.

Sales followed the chart. The single was certified gold in November 2018 while it was still at number one, and by 2022 it had reached five times platinum in the Netherlands. It entered the NPO Radio 2 Top 2000 at number 477 in December 2018 — the highest new Dutch entry of the year — and rose to number 144 in the 2019 edition, where it has stayed a fixture. Outside the Netherlands it barely registered: in Flanders it went no further than «Tip 1» of the Ultratop 50.

For Davina Michelle the single was a career, not a hit. In 2019 it brought her a 100% NL Award for the musical moment of the year, and the follow-up, «Hoe het danst» with Marco Borsato and Armin van Buuren, also went to number one and became the first Dutch-language song to pass a hundred million streams on Spotify. Three albums followed — «My Own World» in 2020, «Gold Plated Love» in 2022 and «Higher» in 2024 — along with Edison awards for pop, a performance at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2021 and the national anthem at the Dutch Formula 1 Grand Prix the same year.