‘My music has become much softer now’
German student Jan Kroschinski (25) is in Rotterdam for a year to do a master Strategic Management. He’s also a guitar player of some distinction.
text Gert van der Ende photography Michel de groot
“Sadly enough my parents didn’t force me to study some kind of instrument”, Kroschinski states, overviewing his musical activities. As it is, his first involvement with music was when he was already fourteen years old. Thanks to an encounter with an attractive girl at some party, who happened to sing in the school choir, Kroschinski suddenly found himself singing on a weekly basis. To his own amazement he happened to quite like the singing expedition. “I was classified as a baritone. The choir’s repertoire existed mainly of pop and musical songs.”
It wasn’t much later that he started to sing in a band. A kind of punk-rock affair that besides Kroschinski consisted of two guitar players, a drummer and a keyboard player. In the beginning, most songs were based on three chords max, since the musical capacities of this occasional quintet weren’t the best in the world. Still the band – Tuesday Afternoon – got better and better and had quite a few gigs in their five year existence, mostly on parties. “Still we amazed ourselves, because in due time we got better and better”, Kroschinski says. The kind of music they played, can best be compared with that of Blink, Green Day and Die Ärzte (a punkrock band, world-famous in Germany). But as it happens with high-school bands, they split up after graduation and everybody went different ways. All those years he also kept on singing in the choir, and even performed in a real musical based on an Agatha Christie novel.
After a year of doing civil service in a Kindergarten, Kroschinski swapped Cologne for Maastricht to do a bachelor. “There I started to play the guitar because it was the best way to implement my very own ideas into music. It was quite an autodidactic process, although I always was in search of people to play music with.” It also meant the end of his punk-rock adventure. “My music started to become ‘softer’, I discovered that this suits my voice better.”
These days Kroschinski, who is also quite involved in sports – he practices yoga, volleyball, swimming, running, among other things – is best described as a singer-songwriter. He still plays covers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, White Stripes, that kind of stuff. “For ten years I’ve dreamt about becoming a professional musician, but that’s over. I see it as a hobby now, though I definitely want to release an EP one of these days.” But before that Kroschinski will bring something completely different on the market: UnderCovers – an app for young couples with which they can discover in a non-offensive way the similarities in their sexual preferences and fantasies.
