The Netherlands finds stillness inside the spectacle

MAY 15 2014 · 12:05

The Common Linnets · "Calm After the Storm" · Netherlands · 2014 Placement: 2nd · Language: English · Composers: Ilse DeLange, JB Meijers, Rob Crosby, Matthew Crosby, Jake Etheridge · Venue: B&W Hallerne · Host: Copenhagen, Denmark · Type: performance innovation · Broadcast: HD Ilse DeLange and Waylon walked out onto the B&W Hallerne stage in Copenhagen dressed like a Nashville session duo who had wandered into the wrong building, and inside a contest defined that year by Conchita's beard and Poland's butter-churn double entendre, they did something quietly radical: they stood still. Calm After the Storm is a slow country-folk ballad, a Bonnie-and-Clyde highway reverie written in the American idiom but performed by two Dutch artists who had built careers in a market that rarely exported its country music. The staging was almost confrontational in its restraint — a stripped-back look, a single guitar, close harmony, no pyro, no wind machine, no key change. They looked like people making a record, not performing a song contest entry. DeLange's voice was precise and unhurried, Waylon's baritone doing exactly what a country baritone is supposed to do, and the song's small emotional turn — 'it's the calm after the storm' — landed as the kind of understatement Eurovision had nearly forgotten was available. The Netherlands had last won the contest in 1975 and had spent most of the 2000s failing to qualify; the broadcast AVROTROS's decision to send a country-folk duo instead of a dance-pop entry reportedly came from the conviction that the country's Eurovision strategy had been wrong for a generation. The Linnets finished second, behind Conchita by 52 points, ahead of Sweden's Sanna Nielsen. The Dutch broadcasting establishment took the lesson. Context The Common Linnets were formed specifically as a Eurovision project, assembled by DeLange and Waylon from her long-running Americana-pop career and his country-rock solo work. AVROTROS selected them internally rather than through a national final, a decision that broke with a decade of Dutch semifinal exits. The song was co-written by Nashville songwriters and positioned closer to Grand Ole Opry than Grand Prix, which made its Eurovision success improbable on paper. Legacy Calm After the Storm reset the Netherlands' Eurovision posture from dance-pop-by-committee to songwriter-driven entries with tonal confidence. The direct through-line runs to Duncan Laurence's 2019 winner Arcade — another stripped-back piano ballad from a Dutch broadcaster that had learned to trust restraint. The Linnets' runner-up finish is frequently cited as the moment modern Dutch Eurovision was born. Mythology Widely considered the anti-Eurovision entry that almost won Eurovision. Remembered as the performance that proved the contest's largest stage could be made smaller.