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B1

Blijven slapen

Snelle & Maan

Language
Dutch
Released
2021
Genre
nederpop
Level
B1
Difficulty score
800
Duration
2:51

How to study this song

The card for “Blijven slapen” is built from 77 study entries at B1: 20 Dutch words, 26 adjectives and 31 verb forms. The glossary is the place to begin — dag, date and gangen are the song’s keywords. It is unusually descriptive — 26 adjectives alongside 20 everyday words — so expect colour rather than plot. 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
dagdaydíagiornojourdiaTag
datedatecitaappuntamentorendez-vousencontroDate
gangencoursesplatosportateplatspratosGänge

This card holds 17 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

What this song teaches you

Level · B1

Vocabulary words
20
Adjectives
26
Word combos
7
Expressions
10
Verb forms
31
Quiz questions
35

More Dutch songs at this level

  • 100 Tranen — Qlas, Antoon & Boef (2026)B1+
  • Dansen aan zee — BLØF (2000)B1+
  • Duurt te lang — Davina Michelle (2018)B1+
  • Europapa — Joost Klein (2024)B1+

Background

About the song

«Blijven slapen» arrived on 26 February 2021, in the middle of a Dutch winter in which the clubs were shut and nobody was going on dates at all, and it proceeded to sit at the top of the Nederlandse Top 40 for ten straight weeks. It pairs two performers who were already famous separately and who had never made a record together. Snelle is Lars Sebastiaan Bos, born in Deventer on 3 October 1995 and raised in the Gelderland village of Gorssel; his stage name is the Dutch word for the fast one, and he had been rapping since his teens before breaking through nationally in 2019. Maan is Maan de Steenwinkel, born in Utrecht on 10 February 1997, who won the sixth season of The Voice of Holland in 2016 and who in 2019 became the first winner of that programme to put a single at number one on the Top 40. Between them they covered most of the Dutch pop audience, and the record was built to use that.

The song was written at Snelle’s house by the two singers together with Arno Krabman, Okke Punt and Delano Ruitenbach, and produced by Krabman with Jimmy Huru. The melody did not come out of the writing session at all: Snelle has said he had already worked it out in the shower the day before, which is the sort of origin story that sounds like an anecdote and is in fact a good description of how the tune behaves. It is short, it loops, and it is the kind of line that fixes itself in a listener’s head on first hearing. The finished track runs two minutes and fifty seconds, which is barely longer than a radio jingle, and it is built on a light disco pulse rather than on a trap beat — one of the reasons it travelled so far outside the usual rap audience.

The structure is the real point of interest, and it is worth explaining because it is what makes the record work as a teaching object as much as a hit. The song is a conversation between two registers. Maan sings the framing sections in sung, melodic, fully articulated Dutch: a woman getting ready for an evening out, second-guessing the dress, worrying she left too early, wondering how late the last train runs, wondering whether the person she is meeting is right for her at all. Then Snelle takes a verse and the whole texture changes. His part is rapped, fast, and written in the Dutch people actually speak rather than the Dutch that is written down — pronouns shrink, words fuse, and the line lands on the beat instead of on the grammar. Putting a rapped verse inside a pop song was not new in 2021, but the two halves here are unusually well matched: the same words come back in both, which lets the listener hear the same vocabulary twice, once sung slowly and once spoken fast.

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NLENESITFRPTDE
alleenalone, onlysolos, a solasda soliseulssozinhosallein, nur
casualcasualinformalcasualdécontractéinformalleger, casual
chicsmart, eleganteleganteelegantechiceleganteschick, elegant
echtreally, trulyde verdaddavverovraimenta sériowirklich, tatsächlich

This card holds 22 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

NLENESITFRPTDE
doeI dohagofaccioje faisfaçoich tue
aangedaanput onpuestomessomisvestidoangezogen
benI amsoy, estoysonoje suissou, estouich bin
vertrokkenleftsalidopartitopartisaídoweggegangen
isises, estáèesté, estáist

This card holds 26 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

The subject is a first night spent together, and the song tells it almost entirely through objects and through euphemism. Rather than describe anything, it inventories a small bag: a toothbrush, a change of underwear, a bottle of scent, a phone charger. That list is the joke and the tenderness at once — it says that the decision was made in advance, quietly, before either person admitted it. Around it the song keeps counting: one date, two hours, three courses, a thousand unanswered questions. The suggestive lines are all indirect, and the song is careful about it; it is a mainstream Dutch radio record, not an explicit one, and the discretion is part of its charm. What it is really about is the specific nervousness of an early relationship, the mixture of hope and doubt that makes a person overthink an outfit and pack a bag at the same time.

For a learner of Dutch the card is unusually rich, because almost everything in it is everyday language used at two different speeds. The sung sections give clean examples of the separable verb, which is the feature that most confuses students coming from a Romance language: a verb like aandoen or opbouwen or kwijtraken is one word in the dictionary and two pieces in a sentence, with the particle stranded at the end of the clause. They also give the Dutch perfect tense built with hebben and a participle in ge-, the question-word order, and the modal-plus-infinitive pattern that pushes the second verb to the back of the clause. The rapped verse then supplies the other half of the language: the reduced pronoun written with an apostrophe, the fused question word, and the elisions that make spoken Dutch almost unrecognisable to someone who has only read it. The vocabulary itself is domestic and concrete — a dress, a room, a train, a night, a charger — with a scattering of diminutives, which is the single most Dutch thing in the song. A small dress, a little scent, a little spot in someone’s room: the suffix does the emotional work that another language would do with an adjective.

Did you know?

The melody was not written in the studio. Snelle has said in interviews that it came to him in the shower the day before the writing session, and that he and Maan then put the song together at his house with the three other credited writers. The pair had known each other for a while and had talked about working together; this was the first time they did.

The video went up the same day the single did. It stages the date the song describes, with the two performers and a group of dancers, and it ends with a cameo that only makes sense to a Dutch audience: the television presenter Chantal Janzen turns up in a bed on the beach and joins the dancing. Janzen spent years fronting an RTL 4 programme built on the same idea as the song title — she would stay the night at a celebrity’s house — so the appearance is a joke about the title rather than a guest spot.

That video became the second most-watched music video in the Netherlands in 2021, which for a Dutch-language record is an unusual position to reach in a year dominated by international releases.

The song is the meeting point of two very different career paths. Maan came out of a televised singing competition in 2016 and had to prove she was more than that; Snelle came up through Nederhop and had to prove he could carry a pop melody. The record settled both arguments at once.

It belongs to two albums rather than one. It appeared on Snelle’s fourth album, «Lars», released on 13 March 2021 — a fifteen-track record that went straight to number one on the Dutch Album Top 100 and reached number four on the Flemish Ultratop 200, with five of its songs already out as singles — and then again on Maan’s «Leven» in 2022.

The title is an ordinary, unglamorous piece of Dutch. The verb blijven means to stay and slapen means to sleep, and put together they are what anyone would say about spending the night at someone else’s place. The song gets its whole effect from using the plainest possible phrase for something the singers never state outright.

Snelle’s stage name means the fast one, and he has explained it as a reference to how quickly alcohol affects him rather than to anything about his rapping. Maan performs under her own first name, which is also the Dutch word for the moon.

A Netflix documentary about Snelle premiered in April 2021, in the same weeks the single was sitting at number one — so the film arrived with the biggest hit of his career playing on every Dutch radio station behind it.

Charts & streaming

The single entered the Nederlandse Top 40 in the spring of 2021 and climbed to number one, where it stayed for ten consecutive weeks, from 27 March to 4 June. Ten weeks at the top is exceptional in that chart for any record and close to unheard of for one sung in Dutch. In total it spent twenty-one weeks on the Top 40 and accumulated six hundred and eighty chart points, which remained Snelle’s best-performing top-five entry.

It also reached number one on the Single Top 100, the Dutch sales-and-streaming chart, holding that position for three weeks from 1 May 2021. In Flanders it was a smaller but real hit, peaking at number ten. Over the course of its run it was repeatedly reported by the Top 40 organisation as both the most-played and the most-streamed song of the week in the Netherlands.

The year-end tallies show how much of 2021 it accounted for. It finished third in the Top 40 year-end list and first on the Single Top 100 year-end list, making it the best-selling single in the Netherlands for the whole of 2021. It was certified platinum there in June of that year, four months after release.

The awards followed the chart run closely. In April 2021, while the record was still at number one, Snelle and Maan won a 3FM Award for best collaboration. In January 2022 they took a Top 40 Award for the biggest hit of 2021. In April 2022 they won the Edison Pop award for best single, with a jury that described the record as a masterpiece with nothing hidden in it — a fair summary of a two-minute-fifty pop song that does exactly what it sets out to do.

The success carried the parent album with it. «Lars» went to number one on the Dutch Album Top 100 and to number four on the Flemish Ultratop 200, and for Maan the song became the second of the three enormous collaborations that define her chart record, alongside her 2019 number one and the 2022 single that went on to become the biggest Dutch-language hit the Top 40 has measured.