Watch Dutch Artist Daniel De Boer Let Go of Love in ‘Fly Away’ Video

Dutch-origin, Valencia-based singer, bassist and composer Daniel De Boer makes his way through somber and sunny parts of love and the end of a relationship on his latest song “Fly Away,” which comes with a bright music video shot in the Spanish city.

Part of his upcoming album Out of Shadows, De Boer worked with Kerala-origin, Valencia-based producer and sound engineer Shakthi Prasad. The duo first met in July 2021 at a musician’s meeting in a park and quickly found a common interest – global music act Bokanté. As it turns out, Prasad had just returned from working on a new Bokanté album. “His head was still full of the sounds of oud, oriental percussion instruments and world music rhythms, as that is what Bokanté is all about. When I shared with him that I´d been involved in various world music ensembles and projects in the past (especially during my bachelor´s at Codarts University for the Arts in Rotterdam), we bonded even more,” De Boer says.

Through the course of a year, a total of 16 musicians joined De Boer to give his rock and pop-leaning demos a more global outlook in terms of instrumentation, rhythms and melodies. “Fly Away” is part of those experiments that De Boer now terms “world pop.” He adds, “I wrote most of ‘Fly Away’ in the summer of 2020, while on holiday in Bulgaria with my girlfriend at the time. I finished writing the song a year later in Valencia.” It went from a swing sort of tune to a straighter groove.

The music video – whose original concept and direction came from Jep Jorba, another recommendation which came via Prasad – reflects De Boer’s lyrics about freeing oneself, even interpreted in dance by Dutch actor/dancer Sigourney Henning. On the instrumentation front, “Fly Away” brings in drummer Tim Breel, guitarists Pablo Marino and Christian Dias, pianist Laurens Goedhart, strings by Shaden Nahra and additional vocals by Lourdes Trujillo. De Boer adds about the long list of collaborators, “One tricky aspect of doing remote collaborations is that you can´t give immediate feedback. But luckily all the musicians involved understood what Shakthi and I were trying to achieve, and they all understood our vision of making a world pop album.”

There’s a three-city run of shows coming up in Netherlands to promote “Fly Away,” plus more live and behind-the-scenes videos in the works from Out of Shadows. Some of it is directed by Indian filmmaker Kshitij Singh. De Boer adds that he and manager Sam Skold are also plotting out an album launch tour. “[We] are planning a bigger tour in April which will lead from Rotterdam to Valencia, with shows in Belgium and France in between,” he adds.

Watch the video for “Fly Away” below.