Jack Driessen

Jack Driessen — Dutch keyboardist — was After Forever's first keyboard player, responsible for the orchestrations of the debut record Prison of Desire (2000). That is an important detail in the history of symphonic metal. In 2000 the formula was not yet settled, and the keyboard was the instrument deciding whether the result would sound like a metal band with ornaments or like genuinely orchestral music. Driessen wrote the string and choir arrangements that give Prison of Desire its character, over which Floor Jansen, then twenty, made her first recording. He left the group shortly afterwards, and the keyboard chair would still pass through Lando van Gils and Joost van den Broek before the band closed in 2009. Driessen, however, is the one who set the sonic standard his successors inherited.