When the promo arrived, I didn’t pay too much attention to the blurb. I downloaded the files and hit play. The opening chords of Blue Door came from nowhere: joyous, startling and immediately demanding attention. Heavy guitar chords call an echoed response from the keyboards, the depth of the soundstage giving the melody added weight and emphasis.
Arresting. Captivating. Vital. Something urgent, pulsating, pleading to be heard.
It takes roughly thirty seconds before the lyrics arrive. Slowly, reluctantly, and with a growing sense of trepidation, I began to grasp what I was actually listening to.
Dick van der Heijde has Locked-in syndrome. At the age of 28, a brainstem stroke left him fully conscious but completely paralysed and unable to speak. Since then, he has only been able to communicate L by E by T by T by E by R, B by Y, L by E by T by T by E by R using his eyes. For more than three decades, his passion for composing music had nowhere to go. The stroke immediately silenced its expression. The body wouldn’t, the body couldn’t cooperate. There was only silence.
So how, given all of this, are we listening to an album of such scintillating musicianship and emotional power?
The answer is AI and the possibilities it offers by opening doors previously locked tight. It transformed everything.
I’m going to be blunt, because I know as soon as some folks read those two letters, they will either approach this album with arms folded or simply not bother at all. ‘Oh, it was created by a machine.’ ‘It’s AI slop.’
No, it isn’t. Dick van der Heijde isn’t using AI to make sounds. He is using it to reach something profoundly real – his sound. There is a fundamental difference. AI didn’t create an artist here. What it did was return an artist’s creative power, put an instrument back in his hands, and, after thirty years, give him back his voice. ‘I wanna matter, leave a spark, be a fire in the dark. So I write my words, I chase my sound.’ There is nothing artificial in this emotional confession. It is thirty years of imprisoned, stifled creativity finally finding a way out.
Musically rooted in his passion for AOR and progressive rock, Locked-In carefully unfolds as something deeply autobiographical, often painfully personal. The arrangements are rich and cinematic, with violin, saxophone and flute appearing like whispered voices at key moments, sometimes mournful and at others, energetic and vital, a voice in the motionless wilderness being slowly heard again after so many decades.
Beneath everything lies the structural secret making it work: two instrumental pieces, Positivity Part One and Positivity Part Two, placed on either side of the album’s emotional centre. In Part One, a pure, simple melody sits alone against near silence, exploratory, searching, unresolved. In Part Two, it returns transformed: sprightly, determined, found. Everything between them is the journey we must follow.
Opening track Blue Door instantly places us at the moment everything changed. Everyday domesticity is precisely observed. A glass of water. A bedroom floor. A blue door. ‘Didn’t pack a bag, didn’t get to choose. One soft second and I came unglued.’ No drama. There is no need. The devastation lies in its quietness, the mundane ordinariness of the moment before everything ends.
And yet. Those opening chords carry a joy and a vitality which wrong-foot you completely. This is not music bracing itself for tragedy. It is the music of a defiant aliveness, even as the lyrics describe life slipping away. In the tension between musical vitality and lyrical devastation, something vital reveals itself: even though everything has been taken, the man himself is still there. Untouched.
A prisoner in his own body. He can hear. He can think. But much like beating your fists against the walls of a soundproofed room, no one knows he’s there. No one can see his presence. There is no bridge from the inner prison in which he is held.
With Still Here, we move into the depths of this horrific silence. ‘I am still here, more than you know.’ This is the voice of terror. I’m here. How the hell do I make you understand? How on earth can I make you see me? Don’t you dare make decisions about me as though I am not in the room. One blink at a time, a man presses his entire consciousness against the glass and absolutely insists on his existence.
With Learning Curve, the lyrics quietly begin to open outward. ‘Years on the same old pillow, seasons in the same four walls. But love keeps opening windows, bringing the world to my hall.’ One-way traffic: the world comes in. But what is the way back?
Quiet, relentless determination. The only option available to someone with nothing left but will.
‘They said it wouldn’t come again. But no one told the silence how determined I would be then.’ There is no rage here. No tirades of pain and resentment. Just a man, letter by letter, rebuilding his connection to the world. ‘So I learned to speak in signals, in a flicker, in a sign. A language made of waiting, of patience over time.’
Learning Curve brings us something quietly radical. It redefines the meaning of progress. It takes what could be a story of private suffering and places it in public. The lecture hall. The faces in the distance. Being looked at but not seen. Being present but not counted. And through all of it, the determination never wavers. ‘Every letter was a lifeline in a world I couldn’t say. And slowly I was found again, in a different kind of way.’
Slowly. The word carries everything. It is painstaking, incremental, hard-won. One blink. One letter. One word. One sentence. And then……he is….. found. Still here. Still himself.
Painted Skies brings us to the album’s emotional heart. ‘He had paint on his fingers and laughter in his eyes. Turned ordinary evenings into painted skies.’ A memory. A loving embrace from the life before, someone who shaped how he heard and understood music. His Father. A man who taught him sound could be found anywhere: ‘From the ticking of a ceiling fan to footsteps in a hall.’
Those lessons endure. Through thirty-three years of silence, they stayed, in the place where things matter most. Now the music lives again, he can finally offer it back: ‘Now when I hear a melody that feels like home to me, it’s his laughter in the colours, in everything I see.’
For me, it is one of the most quietly devastating moments on the album.
Pain Around Me continues the journey outward. The walls open. ‘I am the one you kept in a body that won’t answer. You carry three sons in your chest. One laughter, two ghosts, one anchor.’ His mum. Thirty winters. Three plates are still set at dinner.
The cruelty at the heart of this track is exquisite and unbearable in equal measure. Isolation becomes more painful precisely because of the utter dependence on others for your very existence. They have no choice. He has no choice. And yet here is love, unstinting, exhausting, devoted, daily love. A two-edged sword of grace cutting both ways simultaneously.
‘I am the one you kept. Not your punishment, your burden. I’m your stubborn little breath that refuses to stop burning.’ He reaches outward, offering comfort, carrying her grief alongside his own. Unable to move, but still offering his love. This is a journey of many people. There is never, ever, just one.
I didn’t know what I was hearing when I first pressed play. The journey of discovery on which this album has taken me is unlike anything I have experienced as a music writer. Even now, something changes with each listen. Each step exudes both sorrow and joy. I shake my head at the sheer beauty of what this man has achieved. At everything he has endured. At the fact he has endured it, at the fact I have been allowed to share something so deeply human.
Locked-In is not an album about locked-in syndrome. It is an album about what it means to be stubbornly, defiantly, beautifully, alive.
TRACK LISTING
01. Blue Door (3:58)
02. Still Here (Ballad Version) (5:27)
03. The Muller Test (3:19)
04. Blink Once For Yes (5:30)
05. The Sweater (2:43)
06. Positivity Part One (3:04)
07. Learning Curve (5:37)
08. Painted Skies (3:49)
09. Feels Like John (Shadows Cast) (3:12)
10. Positivity Part Two (3:37)
11. Briek (4:45)
12. Gasping For Air (3:33)
13. Pain Around Me (4:36)
14. Still Here (Rock Version) (5:33)
Total Time – 58:42
MUSICIANS
Created by Dick van der Heijde
All instruments and vocals by Suno
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Independent
Country of Origin: Netherlands
Date of Release: 20th April 2026
