“A girl in the front row held up a sink, like a literal kitchen sink!” The Hopeless Romantic Tour - Will Linley Interview - Amsterdam (11/11/2025)

The Hopeless Romantic Tour - Will Linley Interview - Amsterdam (11/11/2025)

Interview and written by: Jessica Kamp  

Photography: Jenna Stoch

Jessica: Will, welcome to Amsterdam! How does it feel to be on your own tour?  

Will: It is amazing! It’s so much fun, I think for the last in a while I opened for other bands, so it feels good to play my own shows and I feel like to be able to start curating what a Will Linley concert feels like, looks like and sounds like is fun.  

Jessica: That’s great! Has the South African audience responded differently to your songs compared to the audience overseas? And if so, how?  

Will: I think there are some songs that maybe South Africans caught on a little faster, a song like “Blame” potentially is a song that South Africans really enjoy and that goes down well in South Africa. I haven’t played it in Europe before so on this tour I am playing this song a lot and see how it goes down. It is amazing. I think that the fanbase is small enough that no matter where you are in the world, most people will know most of the songs.  

Jessica: That’s amazing to hear, and what does it mean for you to represent South African talent on the world stage?  

Will:  It is an absolute honor! It is amazing, I think it is something amazing happening in the South African music industry right now, and to be playing a tiny part in that is a real blessing. So, it makes me very excited for the South African music industry and it’s just that a lot of awesome young talent coming up and that’s cool. I feel like I am seeing a lot more 16-year-old singer song writers posting videos on social media and writing songs and putting it out there. That’s cool and exciting to see because it feels like this didn’t happen 5 years ago.  

Jessica: That’s so awesome, and is there a specific thing that stood out during tour, since this isn’t your first stop?  

Will: Yah, I have never played a show in Glasgow, Scotland before and that was cool, I loved that. And let me think, that was probably my favorite part of tour, playing a show in Glasgow. And it has been amazing for my parents to watch because they never saw me play overseas. So that’s been special.  

Jessica: Did they travel with you?  

Will: No, no they have been doing their own thing. They are going to tonight’s show and that’s special.  

Jessica: That’s very special to hear Will, let’s go on to the next question, “What fan interaction did stick with you during tour?”  

Will: The last tour I did, I opened for Knox, and I was playing in this same exact venue and stage I am going to play tonight, and in one of my songs. It’s called “First Love” the lyrics is “Now I am standing in the kitchen, literally sinking, we’ll never dance again” And at one point, when I was singing those lines, a girl in the front row held up a sink, like a literal kitchen sink. I don’t know how she got it into the venue but that was the best fan interaction I have ever had in my entire life.  

Jessica: Hahaha no! That’s genius. For now, let’s dive into your newest album. What inspired you to create “Don’t cry because it’s over”?  

Will: I think a lot of the music and a lot of the themes that I touch while writing music is love and I think that at the end of the day when I was creating an album, I wanted to create something that took what I been doing for the last few years. The idea of falling in and out of love and feel things so deeply and extremely on both ends. When you feel like you’re falling in love or out of love and get heart broken. I wanted to create an album and took the lesson’s out of those experiences.  

Jessica: That’s honestly inspiring and beautiful to hear about. This tour is called “The Hopeless romantic tour” What is the most romantic thing you’ve ever done for someone you really liked?  

Will: Haha, I love that, I planned out a whole date in the morning. It was a first date and I said, “are you free on this date?” and she said yes. I said, “Okay don’t plan anything, but be ready at 9 AM” And I picked her up, she walked down, and I had her matcha order in my hand and we went for a very long walk, and we stopped for breakfast. But they didn’t have avocados, and she really wanted avocados, so we went to find another place to have breakfast. Then we walked a long way back home and it was a wonderful first date. But I had planned out everything and later that evening we went for a quick drink and said our goodbye’s. That was my attempt to be a hopeless romantic.

Jessica: That is so cute, ladies that’s the proof this kind of gestures still exists. We just haven’t found the right person, yet I guess. Unfortunately, we came down to my last question. And this question is a regular one for us to ask. What lesson did you have to learn, and would you like to pass on to the upcoming artists?

Will: That you need to be okay to suck, you must get comfortable with being bad. And the minute you become comfortable with being bad, is the minute that you’ll start to succeed. When you start to get comfortable with making a mistake when you write that song, you give yourself the permission to create something new every day and you have the chance to create something that you love. And that’s something I had to learn to get used to, I still do. Because I am too scared of, you know, I am too scared of failing. I want it to be perfect all the time and you must be comfortable with making something bad because it frees you to potentially create something amazing.