Music in our heads

Sing a melody and everyone around you could be playing it to a different beat in his/her head.

That’s what I realised after making my latest half-yearly appearance on my ccMixter (ccM) page. (In case you are wondering, ccM is a Creative Commons-licensed music-sharing site and home to an international music-loving community.)

I was halfway through the first of John Campbell’s two-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher when “The Iron Lady” reached our shores.

The combination of Campbell’s vivid writing and Meryl Streep’s exemplary acting set me thinking: what could have gone through a person’s mind – and a famously tough one – when she was faced with naysayers and obstacles in her path to the top?

So I wrote a song.

The title, “Heart of Steel”, is admittedly nothing creative for a song inspired by a book and a film about a lady with a metallic nickname.

It’s not a political commentary, just a song about an imaginary emotional world of a person. This person could be anybody.

In our quotidian lives, we too would come across people who do not share our dreams and beliefs, challenge us or even try to put us down. I’m not doing a poll here but my guess is that there could perhaps be some kind of universal experience shared by those determined souls who doggedly pursue their dreams and succeed against all odds.

Anyway, when the Muse visits, he would usually present me with either the lyrics or the melody each time. It’s always one or the other, but they hardly appear together. So I was somewhat excited when the lyrics and melody came to me together this time. This is definitely a rarer occurrence than the transit of Venus happening next week.

And so, I recorded this vocal track on my iMac with an imaginary piano playing in my head. (No, I still can’t play any instrument decently.) I had to keep my imaginary accompaniment simple; it can get rather confusing when I record a cappella stems without any real music track.

Not long after posting the stems on ccM, I received two pleasant surprises.

One fellow ccM musician, Jeris, showed me that this track could be given a Celtic treatment. Another ccM musician, stellarartwars, responded later with a dubstep version.

This is amazing.

The beauty of music mesh-ups is that you can’t predict what you’re going to get when you share your music. And it is intriguing how people could come up with songs that sound so different when they are presented with the same raw materials.

I don’t know how this works in our brains.

One thing’s for sure: this world gets a lot more musically interesting when we share the songs playing silently in our heads.

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Strike up a new tune, again

For a long time, I’ve had difficulty defining my music tastes.

During a time when girls in my class were split between the American boy band fans and ardent Xinyao (Singapore Mandarin folk music) supporters, I was soaking up J-Pop music with a strange mix of Bon Jovi and Tommy Page.

When J-Pop finally hit the local airwaves, I had already moved on to graze on indie/rock pastures, in both the Mandarin and English realms.

I was jolted by the edginess in self compositions by Faye Wong and her then beau Dou Wei, and possessed by the restrained high notes of The Cranberries’ Zombie.

That was the time when I suddenly thought, maybe I too, could write a song.

A simple beginning

So I started learning simple chords on the guitar. I even bought an acoustic guitar and an electronic keyboard.

Together with my music-loving friends, we began creating our own tunes and penning our own lyrics. All night long, we would hole up in someone’s hostel room, sharing our latest compositions and hearing each other’s views.

My friends were coming up with one beautiful Mandarin pop ballad after another; I was churning out stuff that even I couldn’t classify.

“That sounds alternative”, someone very kindly said. I shrugged. I couldn’t resist throwing in odd combinations of chords and throwing up awkward lyrics.

I also made life miserable for the poor girl who was chosen to sing my song at our campus concert. Thankfully, she was blessed with a great voice and made it sound better than I thought it was.

By some stroke of luck, a music publisher was there in the audience. He decided to take me on after the concert.

Entangled in hooks

The publisher was a very patient guy, always ready to point out and correct the flaws in whatever works I managed to offer him. And he introduced me to the concept of “hooks”.

Hooks are riffs and phrases in songs that catch listeners’ ears and if possible, memorable and easy to recall. These, I also learnt, were what the music labels were looking out for. You need hooks to sell your music.

That requirement proved to be one arduous hurdle for me. I was, and still am, terrible at creating hooks.

Instead of letting the music come to me, I ended up stringing notes together to make them sound catchy. The more I tried, the more contrived the tunes became.

After some time, I stopped trying. Other distractions took my attention away and I barely wrote anything.

I didn’t sell a single song during my brief spell under the publisher.

I reckoned I wasn’t cut out for commercial songwriting and learnt to accept that I wasn’t musically creative after all.

Waking up the Muse

And so began my long dry spell of music inactivity. The Muse went into a painfully long and deep hibernation.

That was until I met Ivan, years later.

Then he introduced me to Adrian, the other half of their band, Starfish Stories :: The Band.

Suddenly, I was stepping out of the showers humming nobody’s tunes once again.

I bought my first set of basic recording gears in a long time – first, a voice recorder, then a dynamic mic and a small amp. I started recording my singing and sending the guys my stems.

Next thing I knew, I became part of the band.

Slowly, it dawned upon me that I was heading down the wrong direction in my early attempts at music-making.

It’s all about the process

Songwriting, I realised, isn’t about writing likable songs, sellable songs, and at the zenith – to an amateur at least, songs that make it to the shelves of music stores.

It’s about capturing that the serendipitous moments in our lives with our musical expressions. It’s about discovering the rhythm and resonance within us, and if you feel generous enough, share them with the rest of the world through your music.

So it is not a must to make music that people love and want to put on repeat mode. It’s a compliment, if they do.

More importantly, all of us are entitled to enjoying the process of making our own music (with due consideration for our next-door neighbours, of course).

Ivan and Adrian never put all of the above that way to me.

But they have opened my mind in a way that they probably aren’t aware of.

I am glad that there are at least two guys in this world, other than my family, who will put up with my endeavours, no matter how grating my melodies may sound to the ears or how unpoetic my lyrics may be.

I have restarted my musical journey again, haltingly but surely.

And I am thankful for the company that I have this time.

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Make Belief

A long time ago when I was still doing radio shows, one of the regular guests on my shows was a cosmetic surgeon.

Every week, he would come onto my programme and speak about the curious world of nips, tucks and lifts. And he would always amaze me with his stories of how people, celebrities and ordinary folks alike, transform themselves into more aesthetically pleasing creatures.

One of the enlightening things I’ve learnt from him was that they have a measurement called the Golden Ratio that could mathematically define the perfect human face.

Sometimes I wonder, if indeed all of us could achieve the perfect look, won’t we end up resembling one another?

Some days ago, I chanced upon some YouTube clips comparing photographs of Korean and Japanese celebrities taken before and after they had nose or eye jobs, face lifts, or even jaw reduction surgeries.

Seriously, some of them look like twins or triplets.

So I wrote a song.

And this is how the lyrics go:

 

Make Belief

By I-Ling (@myvanillaworld)

Your big, round eyes

And that lovely nose

Long thick lashes

Wish I had those

Those endless legs

Looks that turn heads

You had me believing

That’s the way to be

 

My dreams are big

But they say I’m too short

There’s no way I can climb onto

The stage or catwalk

 

This body in the mirror

Needs more than a tuck

It is so hard to be like you

I don’t know where to start

 

But how am I to think I am beautiful

When you are always showing me I am not

And how am I to learn to love the way I am

If they adore you ‘cos you’ve changed everything

 

And how am I to believe I am beautiful

When you are always telling me I am not

But how am I to learn to love the way I am

‘Cos they love you when you are not yourself

‘Cos they love you when you are someone else

 

And I came up with a tune for it.

So now it’s up in the ccMixter universe, waiting for some GarageBand gurus who would be interested enough to perform their “surgeries” on it.

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A Song for Sound Out Singapore

Talk about timing.

A couple of days after I uploaded my April blog entry on the memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, my friend in music, Ivan Chew, asked if I was interested to collaborate with his band Starfish Stories :: The Band on a new song.

This song, he explained, would be a contribution to UNIFEM Singapore’s Sound Out Against Sex Trafficking campaign.

I’ve always enjoyed singing. But never had I written a song, or sung anything for any particular cause.

And I’ve got to admit, sentimental stuff rule the day 99% of the time in my amateurish little garden patch of music. Social causes? That’s a tough genre to tackle without sounding either overly preachy or too puerile, I thought.

Nevertheless, I gladly agreed. I mean, seriously, how often does someone like me get a chance to partake in such a meaningful musical activity? I am just another regular unknown hobbyist, not a professional artiste with some pan-continental reach.

So I started work on my lyrics, to go with the band’s instrumental track Smile Again. Turned out that the images evoked by the book I was reading were still fresh in my head. And the words started flowing. Briefly.

Then they stopped.

The Muse came and left in a hurry.

Meanwhile, the guys – Ivan and his bandmate, Adrian Loo, were churning out their instrumental tracks like there was no tomorrow. (That was how one song morphed into an entire album.) And there I was, struggling with the ebb and flow of inspiration for just one vocal track.

Thankfully, after listening to Smile Again countless times, I managed to wake the Muse up in time for me to complete my paltry contribution to the final album.

So now, it is out. The finished track, Open the Door (Smile Again). Along with the four fabulous instrumental tracks that Ivan and Adrian created in less than four weeks.

To hear my warbling, the guys’ fine guitar work, as well as Ivan’s mastery of Garageband, check out the album on the band’s website. The Creative Commons-licensed album can be streamed and downloaded here.

Not to forget, the cool album cover designed by professional designer, Stefano Virgilli.

And have a listen on the official Sound Out website. You’ll also find works by other contributing musicians on this website. More important, check out what Sound Out is all about.

Cover art available at Flickr.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. Courtesy of Stefano Virgilli, using Creative Commons licensed works by Olfert (Olof Adel): In a classroom |Pillemarisk

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Listening to the dreams of Starfish Stories

I had originally intended to time this entry with the January 3 online release of 2010 Crystal Tears and the Dream Nebula, the latest Creative Commons music album by Starfish Stories :: The Band.

2010 Crystal Tears and the Dream Nebula by Starfish Stories :: The Band (CC-BY-2.0)

The band comprises my friend, Ivan Chew a.k.a. the Rambling Librarian (who really is a librarian), and his equally brainy bandmate Adrian Loo. And Ivan was kind enough to give me a sneak preview.

But fate has it that I had to be knocked out of action on the eve of New Year’s Eve, to end 2009 on a feverish high, before crossing over to 2010 with a prolonged spell of gut disorders. All thanks to a stale sandwich. No more egg mayo for the next three months.

’nuff said about me. Back to the music.

I was first introduced to Starfish Stories’ music through Ivan’s CD copy of their second album One World One Moment;  2010 Crystal Tears and the Dream Nebula is the duo’s third. With their high output, I won’t be surprised if their fourth is ready before mid-2010, but nay, let’s lay off the pressure on the guys.

As I was putting this post together, I also revisited the band’s first album SeaStars 2007 – the curious me is always listening for the changes in a musician or band’s sounds. Not sure if my ears are right, but I thought that the guys are showing more versatility than before.

My personal picks from their 2010 album are the title track Crystal Tears and The Dream Nebula 2010 and Stroke of Midnight v2.3.

Crystal Tears nicely captures the feel that the title suggests. The steady buildup at the beginning sets the perfect mood for this track. I could almost see the bursts of heavenly colours in my head and hear some distant stars fizzle out at various intervals. The highs and lows are nicely balanced, and I like the little touches that the band has put in, like the edgy noise at 1’12” that balances the airy feel of the warm pad without going overboard. So it’s somewhat like watching meteoroids pass you by as you traverse the duo’s musical galaxy, without heading dangerously into an overcrowded meteoroid cluster.

There’s something mischievous about Stroke of Midnight that makes it fun to listen to. I almost laughed when I heard the first chime of the clock. I don’t know why but the picture that came to my mind was that of Cinderella on the run, on roller blades. That probably wasn’t what the guys had in mind, but that incongruous image aside, I enjoyed the drum work and the mean guitar playing in this fast-paced track.

This time round, the band has also very kindly included my croaks in Goodnight Not Goodbye v2.2, a song written by Ivan. Thank you, guys!

And for a hint of what’s to come in their next album, they have included the teaser track, Thank You. Interestingly, the Asian character in their New Age/Indie music is becoming increasingly pronounced.

Perhaps that’s what music-making is all about – developing your style, rediscovering yourself, and finally, defining your own brand of music.

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Genki Playlist: Progress by kōkua

It’s amazing how some songs are able to bring cheer to our lives, while others trigger bucket loads of tears.

By and large, the radio waves and music charts are dominated by sad love songs, of spurned feelings, of betrayal, of things gone awry and lives spiralling downhill.

That’s why I appreciate songwriters who pen uplifting songs that provide the inspiration when I ache for it, or even tickle my funnybones when I need a good laugh.

I have started collating a list of “genki songs”, to spur me on when my energy level dips or my mood swings off tangent.

One of the latest on my chart is Progress by Japanese songwriter-singer Shikao Suga (スガ シカオ).

More accurately, it’s a song written by Suga, and performed and produced by a collective named “kōkua“. The group comprised Suga himself as the vocalist, and four other professional musicians – Satoshi Takebe (武部聡志), Hirokazu Ogura (小倉博和), Takamune Negishi (根岸孝旨), and Gota Yashiki (屋敷豪太).

kōkua was formed to produce the theme song for the NHK documentary programme Professionals: Ways of Work (プロフェッショナル 仕事の流儀) which went on air in January 2006. The single was released in the same year.

And the famous line that has inspired many viewers, and listeners, goes: “あと一歩だけ、前に 進もう”, which basically means “go forward, it’s just one more step”.

In fact, the beauty of Suga’s lyrics is that they speak plainly of the everyday person’s aspirations to search for the ideal self and find the courage to face the future, a world of unknowns.

I caught the song while watching the NHK programme a few months ago – yeap, it’s still running. A very belated introduction to this motivational programme and this talented songwriter and singer, I must say.

Suga is now with Office Augusta, an indie music label that has been churning out some refreshing vocalists like Chitose Hajime (元 ちとせ) and Motohiro Hata (秦 基博) .

Hopefully, there will be more great stuff from Suga and the Office Augusta stable to add to my genki playlist soon.

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Good-night Not Good-bye II (2009)

thank you (2007) by dalobeee

Deepest thanks to the Rambling Librarian for posting the song Good-night Not Good-bye II (2009). And for the song dedication.

I’m really glad that he accepted my amateurish vocal recording and did some wonderful magic with the mixing.

Oh yes, he is not your regular friendly, bookish librarian.

He’s actually a singing, guitar-strumming songwriter who happens to be a wizard at Garage Band. And his paints and draws. Wonder which part of his right brain faculties I am still unaware of.

Thankful to have met him.

Photo credit: thank you (2007) by dalobeee, originally posted under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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