There’s a particular kind of songwriter who writes from conscience as opposed to imagination, one who hears a story the world is telling and feels compelled to hold it up to the light, to sit with it, to reflect on it.
Dutch-born Harry Kappen made his own journey from the Netherlands to Mexico with relative ease, and that ease, he recognised, was a privilege many people making similar journeys may never know.
‘Distant Shore’ is track four on his 2026 album ‘After The Crossing’, and in many ways, it’s the centre of the whole record. It opens slowly, deliberately, acoustic guitar carrying the weight of the emerging scene before anything else. There are whispers of Pink Floyd in those early moments, that same spacious, unhurried atmosphere where the music is allowed to breathe before it says what it came to say. As the vocals layer in, the references shift; Peter Gabriel’s empathy, Bowie in his ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘Black Star’ phases, that particular brand of art that knows when, and how, to be still.
The production is quietly masterful. A line like “fade into the night” is met with echoes and fades into the sound itself, the music mirroring its own lyric. It’s the kind of small creative accents that separate a good track from a truly considered one, and Harry, who writes, performs and produces entirely himself, makes it feel effortless.
The lyrics carry the full weight of their subject. “One last view of everything I ever knew, in a truck with forty souls”. Those are images that do not leave you, nor does “Escape from the fire, fetch my desires again”; the desperation of wanting something as simple as a fresh start, having to risk everything to reach it. These aren’t abstract concepts, sadly, they’re the lived reality of people crossing borders in conditions that those of us stepping onto a ferry or a plane or into a car barely register as risk at all.
The electric guitar solo, when it comes, does exactly what it needs to do, mournful, powerful, and a wordless continuation of everything the lyrics have already laid out. And then, just as the track threatens to stay in that desolation, something seems to shift. The closing moments carry the faintest warmth, a melodic suggestion of sunrise, of grit and determination and the fragile possibility that things might, eventually, be better.
Harry Kappen is a music therapist by training, and it shows, not in a clinical sense, but in the depth of empathy that runs through every second of this track. His understanding of how music holds emotion and how to place that emotion somewhere a listener can sit with it is evident. ‘Distant Shore’ is a song that asks you to imagine a journey you have likely never had to make, and may there be thanks for that, but it asks gently, and with great care.
The album title, ‘After The Crossing’, definitely sits differently once you’ve heard this track.
‘Distant Shore’ is track four from ‘After The Crossing’ (MTS Records, 2026), out now on all platforms.
5th July 2026