This segment comes from Prog-Watch 1315, a variety episode on Progzilla Radio also featuring Long Earth, Gabriel Zingiber, Phideaux and Beardfish. The player below has the full show — Dick van der Heijde’s Locked-In is the album explored in this piece.
There are albums I put on because I want to hear some music. And then, every once in a great while, there’s an album I put on… and it changes the way I hear everything afterwards. What we are going to listen to today is one of those albums.
I am going to be honest with you about how this one arrived. A set of promo files, into my inbox, like a hundred others. I didn’t read the blurb. I never do read the blurb. Not at first: I like the music to speak before the press release, and the accompanying blurb gets to work. So, I hit play, and the opening chords of Blue Door came at me from nowhere. Joyous. Startling. Immediately demanding attention.
Then the vocal arrived. And everything changed.
The artist is a Dutchman called Dick van der Heijde. At the age of twenty-eight, a stroke to the brainstem left him fully conscious — but completely paralysed. Unable to speak. Unable to move. For more than three decades, the only way he’s been able to communicate with the world is letter... by letter... by letter, spelled out with his eyes.
For thirty years, he had music inside him which had nowhere to go.
So how, given all of that, am I sitting here telling you about an album of such scintillating musicianship and real emotional power?
The answer is AI. And I know – I know – what that word does to some of you the moment I say it. Arms folded with attitude. Or worse, not bothering to listen at all. “Oh, it’s AI slop.”
Well. No. It isn’t. And I’d ask you to trust me on this for the next 30 minutes, because van der Heijde isn’t using AI to make sounds. He’s using it to reach something profoundly real – his sound. AI didn’t create an artist here. What it did was give an artist his hands back. It gave him his instruments back. After thirty years, it gave him his voice back.
There’s a line early on: “I wanna matter, leave a spark, be a fire in the dark. So I write my words, I chase my sound.” There’s nothing artificial in that confession. That’s thirty years of imprisoned creativity, finally finding a way out.
Musically, this sits rooted in AOR and progressive rock. It is rich, almost cinematic. Violin, saxophone and flute drift in like whispered voices at exactly the right moments. But the it is the structure of the album I would like you to hold onto as we listen the album. There are two instrumental pieces on this record – Positivity Part One and Positivity Part Two – placed either side of the album’s emotional centre. In Part One, a simple melody sits alone against near silence. Searching. Unresolved. By Part Two, it returns transformed, sprightly, determined, found.
Everything we’re about to hear is the journey between those two points.
So let’s start at the beginning. Track one. Blue Door.
Listen to how ordinary this moment is. A glass of water. A bedroom floor. A blue door. No drama in the words at all: the devastation is in how mundane it sounds. And notice – really notice – the music underneath is not bracing us for tragedy. It’s alive. Defiant. That tension, between what the music is doing and what the lyric is describing, is the whole album in a single track.
♪ Blue Door ♪
“Didn’t pack a bag, didn’t get to choose. One soft second and I came unglued.”
A prisoner in his own body. He can hear everything. He can see everything. He can think. He can feel. But it’s like beating your fists against the walls of a soundproofed room – no one out there knows you’re in here. Track 4 picks this thought up directly. It’s called Blink Once For Yes.
Listen for the refrain that gives the track its title. This is a man reduced to the smallest possible vocabulary – one blink, two blinks – and somehow still makes himself heard.
♪ Blink Once For Yes ♪
From there we move deeper into the same silence, with Still Here.
This is the sound of a man pressing his entire consciousness against the glass, and simply insisting – one blink at a time – on his own existence. I’m here. How do I make you understand that? How do I make you see me? Don’t you dare make decisions about me as though I’m not in the room.
♪ Still Here ♪
“I am still here, more than you know.”
From here, something begins to shift. Quietly. Track 7even, Learning Curve, is where the lyrics start to open outward again.
“Years on the same old pillow, seasons in the same four walls. But love keeps opening windows, bringing the world to my hall.” For a long time, it’s one-way traffic: the world comes in, but there’s no way back out. What you’re about to hear is a man building that way back, letter by letter. Listen for the word “slowly” in this one. It carries everything.
♪ Learning Curve ♪
“Every letter was a lifeline in a world I couldn’t say. And slowly I was found again, in a different kind of way.”
One blink. One letter. One word. One sentence. And then. He is found. Still here. Still himself.
I want to bring you to what I think is the emotional heart of this record now. Track 8: Painted Skies.
This one’s a memory. A father who taught him sound could be found anywhere: in the ticking of a ceiling fan, in footsteps down a hall. Through thirty-three years of silence, the lesson stayed with him, in the place where things matter most. And now, he can finally offer it back.
Of everything on this album, this is the moment that quietly took the breath out of me.
♪ Painted Skies ♪
“Now when I hear a melody that feels like home to me, it’s his laughter in the colours, in everything I see.”
The journey keeps moving outward. Because this was never a story about just one person. Track 13, Pain Around Me, turns to his mum. Thirty winters of care, three plates still set at dinner, three sons; two ghosts, one anchor.
Listen to how this refuses to be simple. It’s not just about being cared for – it’s about the exhausting, daily, unstinting cost of love. And it cuts both ways. He can’t move. But he can still reach outward and offer comfort of his own.
“I am the one you kept. Not your punishment, your burden. I’m your stubborn little breath that refuses to stop burning.”
I didn’t know what I was hearing when I first pressed play on this record. And weeks later, I still don’t fully know because something changes with each listen. There’s sorrow in every step of this album, and there’s real joy too, and I find myself just shaking my head at what this man has achieved, at everything he’s endured, and at the fact that I’ve been allowed to sit here and share something this deeply human with you.
Locked-In is not an album about locked-in syndrome.
It’s an album about what it means to be stubbornly, defiantly, beautifully alive.
We opened on searching and silence. Let’s close on where that silence ends up. This is Positivity Part Two.
The melody you’ll hear underneath all of this comes back changed: sprightly, determined, found.
♪ Positivity Part Two ♪
That’s Locked-In, by Dick van der Heijde. Find him – please do go and find him – at dickvanderheijde.nl, or search for him on YouTube, where the whole album exists as individual videos, one for every track.
First broadcast as Prog-Watch 1315 on Progzilla Radio, as part of the Progressive Discoveries segment.