CarlDennis aka Thom Dieben
December 8th, 1950 - January 21th, 2022
Thom Dieben enthusiastically joined our project in 2016. As a kick-off there was this pleasant lunch at Café La Pompe in St-Gilles, and from there it was the greatest of rides. Using his monniker CarlDennis, a reference to his admiration of the Beach Boys, he would build a lasting impact on SecondHandSongs and the cover songs community worldwide.
Simply looking at the numbers his legacy is huge:
- 472.790 entries created (8% of the entire database!)
- 10.030 submissions processed
- 42.201 videos added
But Thom is also the editor who made a huge push into indexing more non-English songs in the database: The sheer volume of songs in Finnish, Icelandic, Greek, and many other languages is truly impressive, and this is an important element that opened up this project to the many less represented countries.
However, mostly we will remember Thom for his openness and friendliness. Always in a good mood and always seeing the best in each and everyone us, regularly sailing us through difficult discussions and moments of tensions.
Thanks for your contributions Thom, your legacy will live on.
--To the SecondHandSongs Team, and all of our followers: Thom was so thrilled I found this cover song, that it needs to be added to his tribute. Here they are:
In English: Time of the Season
Auf Deutsch: Silver Moon
I never got to meet Thom in person, but even with the mistakes I have made, I feel we had kindred hearts. He was always there to help me, when I needed it.