Ruben Klay’s first connection with music began at home, sitting at a simple keyboard and working his way through a songbook of traditional songs, Beatles tunes, and whatever else caught his ear.
Then came Back to the Future.
At eight years old, Ruben watched Marty McFly launch into his wild version of “Johnny B. Goode.” He was captivated.
When his school held a lip-sync competition, Ruben borrowed a cardboard guitar, learned the moves, and did his best Marty McFly impression.
Something clicked on stage.
Soon he was discovering Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and the electric guitar’s seemingly endless possibilities. He knew that was the instrument he wanted to play.
But guitar lessons weren’t easy. His hands were small, the strings hurt, and eventually the guitar went back into its case.
Until a television commercial changed everything.
It was 1995, and Levi’s 501 commercials were everywhere in the Netherlands, bringing American imagery and music into Ruben’s world.
He started playing guitar again and learned the rock music he loved: Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana, Lenny Kravitz.
Then his sister bought The Sounds of 501, the soundtrack to the Levi’s advertising campaign. On that CD, Ruben discovered Muddy Waters. The song was Mannish Boy.
It wasn’t the complexity that caught him. It was the space between the notes, the groove, and the sheer power of the music.
“I’d never heard so much power in music.”
Ruben began to understand that a single note, played with the right feeling, could say more than a hundred.
When he asked his guitar teacher to teach him the blues, the teacher didn't give him a song book - instead, he wrote three names on a piece of paper: Muddy Waters. B.B. King. T-Bone Walker.
“Buy the records,” he told him. “Listen. Play along. Listen again.”
Ruben did exactly that.
By fifteen, Ruben was sneaking into open-mic nights at a local bars, where older musicians welcomed him into their world.
Technically, he was too young to be there.
But he kept coming back.
At seventeen, he was invited to play a festival with a friend’s father’s band. There was just one catch.
He had three months to learn 65 songs.
Bob Dylan. Neil Young. Jimi Hendrix. The Rolling Stones.
He already knew half of them. He learned the rest.
The gig led to more shows and eventually to Greyhound, one of his first bands.
When the question of who would sing came up, Ruben remembers asking:
“So who’s going to sing?”
The other musicians looked at him.
“You.”
Early bands. Long drives. A lot of rock & roll.
At first, he tried to sound like a blues singer. It would take years before he learned to simply sing with his own voice.
More bands followed, including The Double Shots and The Mellotones.
Soon, Ruben was playing regularly across the Netherlands and Europe, traveling to England for weekend gigs and performing at festivals farther afield.
The miles accumulated. So did the hours onstage.
But as other musicians developed ideas about what he should play and who he should become, Ruben found himself wanting something different.
He wanted to discover his own sound.
For years, one question had stayed with Ruben since first hearing Muddy Waters:
How can so few notes carry so much?
The answer came through thousands of hours onstage, musicians who challenged him, records played again and again, and the places and people he encountered along the way.
Blues remained the foundation.
But there was also rock, soul, jazz, country, folk, and the great songwriters whose stories stayed with him.
The boundaries between genres mattered less and less. What mattered was whether the music felt true.
And gradually, the music became his own.
“I really felt like I was kind of a blues pilgrim.”
A collection of places, people and moments that shaped the music. Click on a place to explore the story.
“I really felt like I was kind of a blues pilgrim.”
A collection of places, people and moments that shaped the music. Click on a place to explore the story.
"I really felt like I was a blues pilgrim."
After years of performing, traveling, and following the music all over the world, the road has brought Ruben to Ireland.
He’d visited ten times before. But in October 2026, he returned to make Ireland home for a while.
It’s a place where music and storytelling have long been intertwined, where songs carry stories, and where music lives in the spaces between people.
For Ruben, Ireland feels both new and strangely familiar. And this isn’t the destination at the end of the story.
It’s another beginning.
New musicians. New rooms. New audiences. New stories.
The road isn’t finished.