MICHAEL'S BIO
Michael Asnot was already fifteen years old when he first laid his hands on a guitar. Some would say that’s too old to be able to achieve something in music, but Asnot was determined to prove them wrong. He took lessons and started playing like the devil was on his heels. He enrolled at !Kunsthumaniora and soon after that he met Tom Lodewyckx, who was by then already making a name for himself in the music scene. Lodewyckx immediately understood that his pupil was capable of more than your average struggling teenager. They kicked off a music friendship that soon became a close professional partnership.
Asnot played in one band after another until 2016, when he got the opportunity to temporarily fill in for Kris Wauters as a guitarist in Clouseau. And that was only the beginning. In the years that followed, Jan Leyers, The Starlings, Sandra Kim, Laura Tesoro, Helmut Lotti, Chris Ayer, Il Divo, Dana Winner, Kate Ryan, Boulevard Vinyl, Ozark Henry, Studio 100 and De Ketnetband all came to rely on this six-string mainstay, both onstage and in the studio. In 2017, Asnot added one more name to this already impressive list: Metejoor. As the band’s lead guitarist he witnessed at close hand Metejoor’s dazzling ascent to the top.
In his spare hours Michael Asnot kept writing in order to build a singer-songwriter catalogue of his own. In 2021 he released his first solo album. On Episodes he claims to summarize the first thirty years of his life. The lyrics are both diverse and personal indeed. Meanwhile, listening to the album it is not hard to find the influences of Asnot’s music heroes. Although the record has its own sound, echoes of John Mayer, Eric Clapton, Crowded House, Donovan Woods, David Ramirez and Noah Gundersen are never far away.
Episodes was well-received and opened the door to various radio appearances. Before long, the debut album was noticed by the people of N.E.W.S. Records. The label, which releases work by versatile acts such as Willy William, Brihang, Ramkot and Eurosong revelation Gustaph, signed Asnot in the fall of 2022. Right away he entered the studio to work on new material together with Tom Lodewyckx, who had also produced Episodes. Boosted by the enthusiasm and support of N.E.W.S., Asnot recorded a ‘serious stack of singles’ in just a couple of weeks. The first one is called Won’t You Stay and was written by Asnot with Pascal Oorts and Tom Dice, half of the duo The Starlings. Won’t You Stay can be found on all regular streaming services.
With his new music, Michael Asnot wants to broaden his horizon. ‘Episodes was an album I had to get out of the way’, he says. ‘It was music that had to come out to pave the way for other stuff. It enabled me to write and play with a feeling of liberation. The new songs are mature pop songs; solid, confident, optimistic. They come from a place where I feel alright and where I’d like to stick around for a little longer.’
To hear the songs of Episodes live in 2021, you had to be lucky. Partly because of his work with Metejoor, Michael Asnot has been performing as a solo act only sporadically until recently. However, this summer he has managed to find time in his busy Metejoor schedule to go out on the road with his own music as well. As a support act for Gustaph, Asnot can be seen on 14 different Flemish stages during Radio 2’s free-for-alle Parkies summer concerts.