{"id":31270,"date":"2017-06-15T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2017-06-15T06:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/balticguide.ee\/en\/?p=31270"},"modified":"2017-06-01T12:10:31","modified_gmt":"2017-06-01T09:10:31","slug":"interview-noeps-andres-kopper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balticguide.ee\/en\/interview-noeps-andres-kopper\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: NO\u00cbP’s Andres K\u00f5pper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTwo years ago, I had a problem: <\/b><\/span>I saw Rhianna in my dreams, every night in a row, for a week.\u201d Andres K\u00f5pper had only been off-stage at Tallinn Music Week for twenty minutes, but already things were getting weird. The one-man success story behind NOEP had just debuted a new single, Jennifer Lawrence, and was explaining why he seemed to like naming songs after women. \u201cIn one dream Rhianna performed here in Tallinn. I thought, maybe I should do something, so I thought about covering a song, then I wrote one.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t meet J-Law in his dreams, though. \u201cIn Jennifer Lawrence, there\u2019s a story in the song, where I meet a girl – in the song – and play this game of giving fake names. She gave the name Jennifer Lawrence, because she thought that was extra-cool. It just so happened that it fitted well into the song, too! But that\u2019s not something I do in real life, though…\u201d<\/p>\n

K\u00f5pper, a tall, slim man with a fashionable slicked-back combover and the kind of chiselled male-model looks that would make him a must-pick for any Scandinavian boyband, seemed to wear his recently-found fame well. It wasn\u2019t arrogance – he spend a long time posing with fans and tried to fulfill every last selfie request before coming backstage at Tallinn\u2019s Club Venus for the interview – but the Estonian singer-songwriter-producer just seemed comfortable in his skin, as if he had come to terms with his songs being sung loudly back at him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those songs are high-end dancefloor-fillers, too. Rhianna is a raucous stomper with K\u00f5pper narrating through a pitch machine his imagined conversation with the superstar. Rooftop is perhaps his most recognisable song, a nostalgia binge that everyone can relate to, taking it back to those free parties with a portable CD player and a gang of mates on the roof. Move was the breakthrough, though. It\u2019s electrifying live, with K\u00f5pper playing the audience as he hits his drum-pad and sings the surprisingly plaintive melody. K\u00f5pper might be confident and calm these days, at least outwardly, but fame wasn\u2019t always a given.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt first it surprised me. I remember a year and a half ago, when Move had been out for almost half a year, my friend called me from Spain and told me the track was in the Spanish Viral Top 50 [on Spotify], in ninth place! I checked other countries, and it was in the Viral chart in 20 of them! Since then it\u2019s been about getting the next songs out, and it\u2019s been cool.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Though Estonians are patriotic about NOEP, and will support their favourite act wherever he goes on tour, K\u00f5pper felt his songs hit home even with audiences unfamiliar with them. \u201cOne of the coolest gigs I\u2019ve had was Finland – I played at Flow. The crowd was super-supportive. Considering it was a foreign country, and there weren\u2019t that many Estonians in the crowd – I asked – the atmosphere was great. French people have always seemed really receptive to my music, too.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The journey to being a one-man band,<\/b><\/span> producing, DJing, MCing and singing for himself, came \u201cquite naturally,\u201d K\u00f5pper said. \u201cI used to be in a band, and I made demos for them, and I thought after a while, \u2018damn, I like the demos more!\u2019 I released Move, and it went from there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even so, inspiration was sometimes easiest to come by when working in a team, he explained. \u201cI had a quite productive songwriter\u2019s camp recently, where I managed to produce two pretty neat tracks. I\u2019m not sure who will perform those – maybe a Latin girl and an Estonian boy-band, but they sounded cool. I love writing together with other people, because there\u2019s instant feedback, and if you click together with someone and you trust their taste, the pace of work gets 50% faster. Sometimes you run out of ideas… those fantasies and ideas come much faster when you\u2019re in a situation with other people and you have to write something. Sometimes people say one line, and it gets you started on a thought that might become a song.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The plan was to tour through the summer with Jennifer Lawrence and NOEP\u2019s other singalong bangers, and then to bring the audience some new thrills. \u201cThere are still a lot of tracks that I haven\u2019t released, because some of the other songs [released instead] have been more radio-friendly, so there might be a portion of songs later on, too.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In some ways, K\u00f5pper is Estonia\u2019s answer to Calvin Harris, the DJ who stepped up and became his own frontman, and is now a megastar. Like Harris, being part of the mainstream wasn\u2019t something that bothered K\u00f5pper. \u201c I have thought about it, but the thing is, I listen to quite a lot of mainstream songs. There are a lot that I don\u2019t want to reach my eardrums, but I\u2019ve thought that, as long as I like my tracks, I don\u2019t care if it\u2019s mainstream of alternative or whatever.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TEXT STUART GARLICK, PHOTO MART VARES<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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