Brandies Band is based in Belgium and is built around singer-songwriter Kris Van den Branden (vocals, guitar). Brandies Band are a family affair: Kris is joined by his wife Veerle (vocals and percussion), their daughters Hannelore (flute) and Evelien (piano), and their nephew Glenn (guitar).
Their debut album “Yeats to Music” (released in 2022) featured 10 contemporary songs based on poems by the world famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The album drew the attention of Flemish and Irish national broadcasters. For their live performances of “Yeats to Music” in Flanders and the UK, Brandies Band were joined by the a cappella group Factor 7 (Veerle and Kris being members of Factor 7 as well).
“Another Mountain” is their second album. Together with the release of this album in January 2025, Brandies Band released “De Laatste Trein” (the Dutch version of one of the songs on the album) as a single.
In August 2025, Brandies Band released the single “Be Brave“, a song dedicated to all children affected by war. For this song, a choir of seventeen voices joined Brandies Band to turn the lyrics into a collective cry for peace. The Belgian artist Dirk Garcia produced powerful artwork based on the lyrics. Pupils of GOEZO Kerkeblokken primary school (Nijlen, Belgium) created colourful peace drawings, which feature (together with Garcia’s artwork) in the YouTube video of “Be Brave”.
Kris, the leader of the b(r)and
The other band members (left to right): Glenn, Hannelore, Veerle, and Evelien
The story behind the album Yeats to Music (told by Kris)
When I was a student at the University of Antwerp, I attended a course on Irish poetry taught by guest lecturer Brendan Kennelly (the Irish poet and Trinity College Dublin Professor). The course made a lasting impression on me. Brendan Kennelly made us stand on a chair and read aloud Irish poems with a great sense of drama. After a couple of weeks, he suggested that we try and set Yeats poems to music. I took on the challenge and composed three songs at the time (“Lullaby”, “The song of wandering Aengus” and “Crazy Jane on God”). All students and professor Kennelly sang the songs in class every week, and we even got to singing the songs in an Antwerp pub during the final week of the course.
Over the past decades, I have added more Yeats songs to the collection. During the COVID pandemic (2020-21), I found the time to work on some more songs and finalise the melodies and arrangements of the earlier ones. In Summer 2022, I recorded the songs with Brandies Band. The album “Yeats to Music” was released in October 2022: It features 10 original songs based on poems by W.B. Yeats. With the support of the Brendan Kennelly Trust, we lovingly dedicated the album to Brendan, who passed away on 17 October 2021.
Inspired by the favourable reviews and reactions the album received, I wrote two more songs based on Yeats poems in Spring 2023: “Love is like a lion” and “Rise and Go Now”, the latter one being released as a bonus track in May 2023. “Love is like a lion” later featured on the “Another Mountain” album.
To celebrate the centenary of Yeats being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Brandies Band and the a cappella band Factor 7 played the Yeats songs live on stage in Flanders and the UK (including a concert at the Liverpool Irish Festival). The concerts turned out to be quite memorable events: the audience was moved by the songs and the stories behind Yeats’ poems, they also joined us in singing the chorus of “Crazy Jane on God”, a collective extended D note during “No second Troy” (sending a magically reverberating sound through the concert hall) and an enthusiastic “Yeah” during “Red Hanrahan’s song about Ireland”. Great fun!
Brendan Kennelly (1936 – 2021)
Brandies Band 