A few weeks ago I heard that Humpback Oak were releasing a limited edition boxed set. That was interesting.
Humpback Oak was one of Singapore’s best loved bands. They came up at a time when Singapore did not have much of a local music scene to talk of. (Actually things are a little better now but still not much. Not in English pop anyway.) There were other bands that were being bandied around like the Oddfellows. I had heard of Opposition Party, but they were metal and I didn’t dig metal.
I had heard of Humpback Oak. It was an interesting name, but they were a lot of bands with strange names. (Astreal? Livonia? Padres?) They were bandied around as one of the best Singapore bands. But it’s relative, I thought. Anything half decent would be considered excellent by our standards.
One day when I was in Tower Records (still remember that place?) I heard “Pained Stained Morning” being played. It was good stuff and I liked it. I’m not going to say they are the best band in the world, but it was streets ahead of what I was accustomed to. Funnily enough once I heard it I knew it had to be Humpback Oak, because of the accent, and because the music matched how it was described in the press. Somber, brooding, haunting. The last adjective is most salient because their second album would be called “Ghostfather”.
I got the album afterwards. I liked it, it was good. Musically they are really not very impressive, but Leslie Low was a good songwriter. I was a little startled at how many good tunes there were on that record.
Second album, “Ghostfather” was equally good. Even though it had fewer obvious pop gems than “Pained Stained Morning”, it was a more unified album, dealing with loss, restlessness and anomie. It’s probably one of the gloomiest albums that I’ve heard, in any case.
I don’t know why Leslie Low picked the name Humpback Oak. They are large, heavy objects. Probably archaic as well. I think Humpback Oak’s music is very Singaporean, rooted in the Singaporean experience. They may have been compared to American Music Club and REM, they may have started out playing a lot of Bob Dylan. But there was the heaviness, the feeling of being constantly trapped in a comfortable cage, of being a frog in a well. It’s not a surprise that they were on the soundtrack of Eric Khoo’s “12 Storeys”, which deals with similar themes. They are distinctly un-American. Their music is whatever the opposite of “yes we can” is.
Except that in the sense that your polar opposite is your own mirror, there was a lot to borrow from those American bands which chose to highlight the emptiness and futility of the American dream. You could borrow that, and it would sound right at home over here, and I think that is what Humpback Oak have done.
Lyrics, I wouldn’t have much to say about the lyrics. I think they are Leslie Low’s weak point, even though you still roughly get what his music is all about. Every Humpback Oak album has their fair share of clunkers, like “don’t die, don’t kill yourself, it takes too much time”. Or “Turkey you turkey me”.
But there’s a lot that Singaporeans can identify with. Like not having an identity, and not fully knowing what is the meaning of that flag you sing the national anthem to every morning. Like being alienated from your parents who knew so much more hardship than you did. Like the eerie emptiness of a void deck in the afternoon. Like staring 20 storeys down from the back of your HDB flat, feeling smothered and yearning for release. Because unlike most of the bands out there, Humpback Oak lives in HDB flats too. (Caveat: a lot of black music from the UK comes from council housing, which is rather similar to our HDB, except that their version of the HDB is more seedy.)
The third album, “SideASideB” wasn’t as good as the first 2. But if I listened to it, I could have 1 or 2 of those songs growing on me.
Anyway I made my way to Club Street with a bit of trepidation – I was on ICT and I was expecting a recall on that day. So I had to drive my van and all that army stuff down to my office, park it there, and take a bus to Club Street amid all that messy MRT construction.
I should go back a few steps to explain: Humpback Oak were releasing a boxed set of all their works, containing their 3 CDs, as well as a 4th CD, containing some rarities and (this is the most interesting part) MP3s of all their cassette demos that they used to hawk in indie music shops from when they were struggling musicians. They were going to sell the boxed set exclusively on Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 pm, at Polymath & Crust / Books Actually.
So when I got there the queue was snaking down to the first floor. It was a little past 1. The queue went all the way up to the 3rd floor. I bumped into the drummer from the second band. I bumped into Siew Kum Hong. So now you know that the NMP who advocated repealing 377A is also a Humpback Oak fan.
When it was my turn, I wondered whether I should buy 1 or 2. I bought 2, cynically thinking that I could probably sell the second one at an extortionate rate in 5 years’ time, especially since it was autographed by all 4 of them.
So there was this table with Leslie Low and 3 others. They looked like they have aged, they’re no longer the skinny indie kids you saw in the publicity photos. They look bulky and middle aged. I didn’t know which of them was who. I know what Leslie looked like, but today he was different, wearing a goatee and a moustache, and looking like that mask people wore in “V for Vendetta”.
Very hastily I mentioned to one of them that I was thinking of covering one of their songs. Which one? “Home”. Hey Leslie, this guy wants to cover our song. “Really? That’s interesting”, said Leslie. Well just send us a copy when you’re done with it, OK? So, great. Now I owe Humpback Oak a cover version of “Home”.
It’s true, though, that I thought I was going to radically re-invent that song into something trip hop and drum + bass. But I’m a long long way from completing it. I’m even a long long way from figuring out how to do drum + bass. I hear it in my head, though, and surely that counts for something.
Anyway, so I’m the new proud owner of Oaksongs, serial numbers 58 and 59 out of 500. I dunno if they’ve sold out by now. Maybe and maybe not. The obvious first thing is that they have spent a great amount of effort on the packaging. I think it was designed by one of the more famous designers in Singapore. The outside is designed to look like a worn cardboard box. A bit tricky when the cardboard is new. When you open it, it looks like a house inside, an indie slacker’s room with all those concert posters and stuff. There’s a little cardboard bed, which is actually a small box containing teeny weeny booklets with all their lyrics.
Leslie Low went through a lot of trouble making digital photographs of his lyric sheets. (Which I think is strange because lyrics is the one aspect of Humpback Oak that I’m not a fan of.) But you can see some of his old songs scribbled on SJI stationery (all 4 met at and were from SJI). In one of the lyrics, you can see his 6th form poetry and his “O” levels schedule side by side.
I also have to comprang about the CD packaging. The CDs are wrapped up in paper that is origami folded. Obviously not meant for heavy usage. I had to dig out some plastic jewel boxes to put the CDs into.
Otherwise, you can imagine, I was proud of my newest purchase. Now to list my old Humpback Oak albums on eBay and get my $60 back.
As for the recall, you can see from the news: some ppl from the Police and from Civil Defence got recalled, but not the SAF. So I didn't get recalled.
Sunday, 28 February 2010
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Facilitation
I think that Lee Kuan Yew is the perfect Virgo – super anal retentive.
I think that the Singaporean education system is very much like Virgo – it will be perfect, and you will be good at the details, but you will also very much miss out on the bigger picture.
Why do we have the biggest port in the world? Why do we have the best airport in the world? A great port and a great airport. But they are just means. We have the best facilities in the world. But they are just facilities. They enable great things to be done, but what?
We are a hub, and we hope to be in the centre of everything. We have a great finance sector, but banks are only there for something. What is that something? That’s why we often talk about the Singaporean soul. But what is it?
We seem to exist for other people. People are a cog in the Singaporean machine. And Singapore itself is a cog in an even greater machine. We host events. IOC conferences. WTO talks. APEC forums.
We have the Esplanade. But so many of the shows at the Esplanade are foreign acts, and actually, justifiably so. They deserve it. But what have we got to show for ourselves?
Singapore has a “special relationship” with China. I don’t really know, we’re supposed to be a gateway to China. Do people remember that Singapore gave a lot of money to China when they were fighting the Japs, and when the Japs got to us, they gave us hell? I hope they remember that.
We’re a gateway to the West. And India too, but not really because everybody knows how “well” Singapore treats its Indians.
The one art form which we’re justifiably proud of is food. But food is the pleasure of the flesh, and not the soul. And food is also a facility – it facilitates our being alive.
I’m quite proud of our HDB flats. I always thought that HDBs were unique in Singapore. Actually, they are not. You have public housing in the US, and the UK. They are horrible places. Squalour, crime, drug abuse, prostitution. In a way, they are somewhere in between the shanty / squatter towns in a bad part of town, and a real house of your own. They are high class squatter holes. 99 year lease? It’s just the government telling you that you can squat here for a while, maybe your whole life. But the land will never be yours.
Remember when you were young, you went to the museum and saw how miserable those poor coolies were in their shophouses? You just have to remember that these days, shophouses are considered to be high class real estate.
You just have to remind yourself that being in the middle of everywhere is the same thing as being in the middle of nowhere.
I think that the Singaporean education system is very much like Virgo – it will be perfect, and you will be good at the details, but you will also very much miss out on the bigger picture.
Why do we have the biggest port in the world? Why do we have the best airport in the world? A great port and a great airport. But they are just means. We have the best facilities in the world. But they are just facilities. They enable great things to be done, but what?
We are a hub, and we hope to be in the centre of everything. We have a great finance sector, but banks are only there for something. What is that something? That’s why we often talk about the Singaporean soul. But what is it?
We seem to exist for other people. People are a cog in the Singaporean machine. And Singapore itself is a cog in an even greater machine. We host events. IOC conferences. WTO talks. APEC forums.
We have the Esplanade. But so many of the shows at the Esplanade are foreign acts, and actually, justifiably so. They deserve it. But what have we got to show for ourselves?
Singapore has a “special relationship” with China. I don’t really know, we’re supposed to be a gateway to China. Do people remember that Singapore gave a lot of money to China when they were fighting the Japs, and when the Japs got to us, they gave us hell? I hope they remember that.
We’re a gateway to the West. And India too, but not really because everybody knows how “well” Singapore treats its Indians.
The one art form which we’re justifiably proud of is food. But food is the pleasure of the flesh, and not the soul. And food is also a facility – it facilitates our being alive.
I’m quite proud of our HDB flats. I always thought that HDBs were unique in Singapore. Actually, they are not. You have public housing in the US, and the UK. They are horrible places. Squalour, crime, drug abuse, prostitution. In a way, they are somewhere in between the shanty / squatter towns in a bad part of town, and a real house of your own. They are high class squatter holes. 99 year lease? It’s just the government telling you that you can squat here for a while, maybe your whole life. But the land will never be yours.
Remember when you were young, you went to the museum and saw how miserable those poor coolies were in their shophouses? You just have to remember that these days, shophouses are considered to be high class real estate.
You just have to remind yourself that being in the middle of everywhere is the same thing as being in the middle of nowhere.
Saturday, 20 February 2010
JC2
When I look back upon the different years of my life, 1 year stands out in 1 respect. It was the year in which I was in JC2.
It was not the year in which I had the most personal growth. It was not the most exciting year. (Actually, in some ways, it was.) It was also the year where I failed a Maths exam for the first time. (I’m counting from primary school – failing maths exams in pre-school doesn’t count, and in any case I don’t remember.)
At the beginning of the year, my father grabbed me by the scruff, and told me, this is the most important year of your life. (For a long time, anyway). That is partially true only – all the years of your life, before you become old and infirm, are important. But he was right in another sense.
A lot of good things happened because I did well in school during that year. In the Singapore school system, you spend 12 years in school, and apparently years 1 to 11 are not that important, but only to let you get to the next level. At the end of your 12th year, in your “A” levels, you will write a series of exams that will determine your fate to a large extent. Which uni you go to, for instance.
I had mostly been a B student. My teachers all saw me as a B student with 1 extra gear that is seldom used. That year, I used that extra gear. I cut back on a lot of my ECAs. I dunno how I managed to clock up a good ECA record, but honestly there was a lot of interesting things, except that when you looked closer, you might notice that it was missing a bit of depth. For example, I did very few things that involved leadership.
I actually started having some structure in my life, which is not really difficult if you’re attempting to do just 1 thing. I don’t remember being exceptionally stressed that year. I was like a farmer. You just did what you were supposed to do every day, and when the autumn comes, you get bountiful harvests.
So that year was the year, I applied for the uni that I got into. (In fact it was only my third choice uni, even though there were many who would gladly study there. My first 2 choices rejected me.) I got a near perfect score for my “A”s. It led to some good things that you guys might know about.
I don’t think that I did anything really meaningful that year. It was a good year, a happy year. For once I didn’t have to feel disappointed about school. There was a peace of mind. Nothing to do but sleep and study. But terribly unexciting. You could say I lived the Singaporean dream.
It was not the year in which I had the most personal growth. It was not the most exciting year. (Actually, in some ways, it was.) It was also the year where I failed a Maths exam for the first time. (I’m counting from primary school – failing maths exams in pre-school doesn’t count, and in any case I don’t remember.)
At the beginning of the year, my father grabbed me by the scruff, and told me, this is the most important year of your life. (For a long time, anyway). That is partially true only – all the years of your life, before you become old and infirm, are important. But he was right in another sense.
A lot of good things happened because I did well in school during that year. In the Singapore school system, you spend 12 years in school, and apparently years 1 to 11 are not that important, but only to let you get to the next level. At the end of your 12th year, in your “A” levels, you will write a series of exams that will determine your fate to a large extent. Which uni you go to, for instance.
I had mostly been a B student. My teachers all saw me as a B student with 1 extra gear that is seldom used. That year, I used that extra gear. I cut back on a lot of my ECAs. I dunno how I managed to clock up a good ECA record, but honestly there was a lot of interesting things, except that when you looked closer, you might notice that it was missing a bit of depth. For example, I did very few things that involved leadership.
I actually started having some structure in my life, which is not really difficult if you’re attempting to do just 1 thing. I don’t remember being exceptionally stressed that year. I was like a farmer. You just did what you were supposed to do every day, and when the autumn comes, you get bountiful harvests.
So that year was the year, I applied for the uni that I got into. (In fact it was only my third choice uni, even though there were many who would gladly study there. My first 2 choices rejected me.) I got a near perfect score for my “A”s. It led to some good things that you guys might know about.
I don’t think that I did anything really meaningful that year. It was a good year, a happy year. For once I didn’t have to feel disappointed about school. There was a peace of mind. Nothing to do but sleep and study. But terribly unexciting. You could say I lived the Singaporean dream.
Monday, 15 February 2010
Bunions
Something funny happened during Chinese New Year. An aunt of mine was showing around her feet. It looked kinda weird, there was a big lump at the base of her large toe, and her large toe was curled towards the other toes. It looked kinda ugly. She said she was going for an operation. She said it was bunions.
That condition of the foot looked familiar, and suddenly I realised that I had a mild version of what she had. I can’t remember how exactly it was but the other 5 or 6 aunts and uncles in my room at that point in time found it extremely funny that I had belatedly realized what was wrong with my feet.
Suddenly a lot of things became clear, like how, around 3 months before my marathon, I couldn’t run more than 15km without getting a sharp pain in that joint. How, if I ran in a way that did not aggravate my bunions, I risked some other part of my leg. And why I retired. (One of the important reasons was my propensity to get injured – now I know why.)
Anyway, my grandmother was there, and she couldn’t understand much of the conversation which was taking place in English. She asked what the hell was going on. I said there was something wrong with my leg. Then she took my leg and felt it, and touched my big toe, and declared, “now, there’s a lump that should be cut off.” The other ppl were laughing their heads off by now.
My father popped in, and looked at the foot, and said, “Well you look at that, it’s not what a normal foot should look like. It’s so obvious.” I sneered, “yeh? You only telling me about that now after more than a year?”
The aunt who had bunions told me, “if you don’t really like your company, you can go for an operation, they’ll give you 4 weeks of MC.”
That condition of the foot looked familiar, and suddenly I realised that I had a mild version of what she had. I can’t remember how exactly it was but the other 5 or 6 aunts and uncles in my room at that point in time found it extremely funny that I had belatedly realized what was wrong with my feet.
Suddenly a lot of things became clear, like how, around 3 months before my marathon, I couldn’t run more than 15km without getting a sharp pain in that joint. How, if I ran in a way that did not aggravate my bunions, I risked some other part of my leg. And why I retired. (One of the important reasons was my propensity to get injured – now I know why.)
Anyway, my grandmother was there, and she couldn’t understand much of the conversation which was taking place in English. She asked what the hell was going on. I said there was something wrong with my leg. Then she took my leg and felt it, and touched my big toe, and declared, “now, there’s a lump that should be cut off.” The other ppl were laughing their heads off by now.
My father popped in, and looked at the foot, and said, “Well you look at that, it’s not what a normal foot should look like. It’s so obvious.” I sneered, “yeh? You only telling me about that now after more than a year?”
The aunt who had bunions told me, “if you don’t really like your company, you can go for an operation, they’ll give you 4 weeks of MC.”
Saturday, 13 February 2010
Songwriting
Another song popped into my head. It wasn't fantastic or anything. But I thought, what the hell, write it down. One day, you're going to be old, and you're going to be glad to be even writing stuff of that standard. Don't be fussy. Build up a stockpile so that you won't regret it when you grow old.
I don’t really know whether or not to write this. I think I may have grown as a songwriter over the last 2-3 years, or maybe I have not. It’s not a coincidence that many people write their best songs before they’re 30. Songwriting is a process, whereby the best ideas, and also the ones that come most naturally to you, are the ones which get written first. So even if you do get better at it as time goes on, your best ideas are already out there, and you simply have to do something different.
Anyway, I’ll put a header on some of my points.
1. Songwriting is a black art.
When people say they write songs, the reaction is naturally scepticism. Why? Because the number of good songwriters out there is comparatively few. It is difficult. Like Bjork says on “Human Behaviour”: There is no map and a compass won’t do. Music theory teaches you relatively little, or at least it’s only half of the story. Music theory is like grammar. Just because you have mastered grammar, it doesn’t make you a great story teller.
2. Music theory.
Of course, having a music education helps. I have been educated in music almost all my life, and I cannot imagine what it is like to listen to music with an uneducated ear, so I take for granted that you will be able to identify notes when hearing them, you will identify chords.
3. Have an opinion.
The second task of a songwriter is to develop taste. Have an opinion about music. Every song, you like it or you don’t like it. Why does this speak to you? What is it saying? Why do some songs remain in the memory, and why do others fade? Why is this something you want to listen to over and over again, and why is that something that irritates you?
This is very important, almost the first skill you have to learn as a songwriter, because you will be using this skill to assess your own work.
I have learnt as much about music from music critics, as I have from my music teachers. I have read reviews about albums, and often wondered, why some albums get bad reviews and others get good ones. Sometimes, music critics are wrong. More often than that, though, they are right. And 20 years later, the critical opinion about a given piece of music should be secure.
4. Emotional vocabulary
Every chord is a colour. (Actually, some people think that every note is a colour too.) But chords are more important than which key of the scale you are playing. Irving Berlin only knew how to write music in the key of F. It doesn’t really matter.
Every chord, relative to the tonic, conveys an emotion. Understand the emotional impact of chords. Simplistically, major chords are happy and minor chords are sad. But not always. From I to IV is like going to a higher plane, and from I to V is going to a lower one. But not always. Inversions (ie changing which note of the chord is used in the bass) change the way the chords sound, and change the emotional shade.
More interesting than the I, IV and V are the relatives of these chords. Sometimes you will have the minor versions, the major versions, the extended chord, your 7s, 9s, 11s, even 13s. Augmented. Diminished. Suspended. Know your chords. This is important.
5. Chord progression
Chord progressions and melody in music are similar to plot and narrative in a story. Like a good maths proof (it is not a coincidence that I learnt how to write a song around the same time I was learning how to write a maths proof) a chord progression is a sequence of ideas which lead, logically to each other. Whether the chord progression makes sense or not, is analogous to whether it is grammatical.
6. Melody
A melody will typically contain certain notes that make up the chord. There will be transitional notes that don’t have much to do with that chord, and they are called passing notes. The melody needs to both be consistent with what’s going on in the chord progression, and at the same time it should be artistically appealing. That’s why writing a song is not easy – it’s like solving a simultaneous equation. You don’t want to have a melody which follows the chord progression like a slave. There’s no tension, and it’s boring. But you don’t want to have a melody that is not related to the chord progression either.
Somebody asked “what is melody” in a music forum. It is a very good question. Our most conventional notion of melody is that it is the part of music which is in the foreground, it is typically linear, with only 1 note at a time (like if 1 person is singing). It is a sequence of notes.
Any of these notions can be violated. The melody can be in the bassline. Counterpoint is what we call it when there are 2 melodies playing against each other at the same time. Harmony is what we call it when 2 or more non-clashing notes are played together. 2 or more voices can make up the same melody, they just sing different parts of it.
7. Form
Almost the first thing people will teach you when you have formal instruction on composition is the form of the music. ABA, AABA, ABABCA, etc. This is important, of course, but it’s like saying that when you write a story, your words must fall on a straight line going from left to right. Although this convention is important, it has very little to do with whether you are writing a good song or not.
There is only 1 thing to learn from the idea of form: big pieces of music are made of smaller pieces of music. How you arrange the smaller pieces is the architecture design.
What’s more important, from my perspective, is how those smaller chunks flow into each other. How everything combines together to form the narrative arc. Always pay attention to the bigger picture, and how the smaller pieces make up the bigger puzzle. Sometimes you can have 2 really spectacular pieces of music, and they sound awful when you put them side by side because the flow is gone. Sometimes you can tolerate having a boring part, because it gives you a break from the exciting part.
8. Hidden melodies
Moving away from our conventional idea of melodies to the bigger picture, we need to understand what is a melody, in a more generic sense. Melodies are narratives. They tell a story. They lead the listener through a series of logically connected moods, and represent an arc through the music for the listener to follow.
If you study the human brain, you will understand that stories are our method of organising information and making sense of them. One favourite technique we have of memorising long lists, is to make up a story where all the items appear in sequence, in the story. The reason why this works is because we are so well adapted to thinking about stories.
Similarly, it is difficult for me to memorise a lot of numbers (musical notes are basically numbers. Sounds inhuman, but deal with it.) But when they are arranged in a catchy melody – miracle of miracles, it’s so easy.
So when you extend the definition of melody, into something like a catchy hook, or a motif, or a drum figure, the definition becomes something like: foreground.
This should explain why hip hop and rap works, even though there are so few chords and melodies. It’s all hidden melodies – the brain still has something to latch onto. Maybe it’s the combination of wordplay, or the rhythm of the words, or catchy slogans.
But the cardinal rule is this: the brain still has to have something to latch onto. Something to think about. Take away chords and melody, maybe you have to make the rhythm interesting. Or maybe you have to make the architecture interesting, like how minimalist music takes away a lot of your points of reference, and instead you pay attention to how the mood shifts and changes very subtly. But music cannot be vacuous.
9. Borrowing ideas
I’m not good enough to come up with my own ideas. Maybe nobody is. I’ve always borrowed from others. It’s like building a nest, all your material is stolen from somewhere else. But the creation, the nest, is yours and yours alone. Unless you steal somebody else’s nest wholesale (or a significant chunk thereof).
So when you are starting to write, just steal. Take a piece here, another piece there, put it together in a way that’s never been done before. Take somebody else’s melody, and harmonise it with different chords. Take somebody else’s chords an put a new melody on it.
Combine genres in a way that has not been done before. Chinese with Indian. Dub with classical. Avant Garde with Gregorian. Whatever.
10. Experience
I started “writing” music when I was 8. I wrote the first song I was happy with when I was 21. Yes, it takes that long. If you start off as an adult, your learning curve will be shorter. But you have to wait a long time and put up with stuff that doesn’t work. Then you learn your lesson from point number 3: assess it like a music critic.
If you can’t finish songs, KIV them. A few songs were stuff I KIV’ed from when I was a teenager, and now I have the experience to complete them, to solve problems I wasn’t able to solve back then.
You might learn some tricks. Like repeating a phrase because it sounds better the second time. Or ending a song abruptly. Or throwing in an unexpected chord.
After a while, the seam that you are mining will be empty. Then branch out, try a different form of music and see what happens. There are a lot of songwriters, they were very good when they were young, and then they lost it. Or rather most of their songs were written and as a consequence they ended up repeating themselves. There wasn't much that was new. Brian Wilson - his last great album was merely to finish a project he abandoned when he was young. Paul McCartney - was never as great a songwriter as when John Lennon was around. Lou Reed - wrote most of his great stuff before he was 30, with the Velvet Underground.
Is songwriting a young man's art? Or is it that people always run out of ideas no matter what? Only a few years ago, when I wrote something good, I'm like, "damn, I never knew I had it in me." Now it's like, "wait, didn't I just write this before? aren't I just piecing together some other stuff that I've done before, and done better?" After your best ideas are out in the open, it just gets more and more difficult.
I don’t really know whether or not to write this. I think I may have grown as a songwriter over the last 2-3 years, or maybe I have not. It’s not a coincidence that many people write their best songs before they’re 30. Songwriting is a process, whereby the best ideas, and also the ones that come most naturally to you, are the ones which get written first. So even if you do get better at it as time goes on, your best ideas are already out there, and you simply have to do something different.
Anyway, I’ll put a header on some of my points.
1. Songwriting is a black art.
When people say they write songs, the reaction is naturally scepticism. Why? Because the number of good songwriters out there is comparatively few. It is difficult. Like Bjork says on “Human Behaviour”: There is no map and a compass won’t do. Music theory teaches you relatively little, or at least it’s only half of the story. Music theory is like grammar. Just because you have mastered grammar, it doesn’t make you a great story teller.
2. Music theory.
Of course, having a music education helps. I have been educated in music almost all my life, and I cannot imagine what it is like to listen to music with an uneducated ear, so I take for granted that you will be able to identify notes when hearing them, you will identify chords.
3. Have an opinion.
The second task of a songwriter is to develop taste. Have an opinion about music. Every song, you like it or you don’t like it. Why does this speak to you? What is it saying? Why do some songs remain in the memory, and why do others fade? Why is this something you want to listen to over and over again, and why is that something that irritates you?
This is very important, almost the first skill you have to learn as a songwriter, because you will be using this skill to assess your own work.
I have learnt as much about music from music critics, as I have from my music teachers. I have read reviews about albums, and often wondered, why some albums get bad reviews and others get good ones. Sometimes, music critics are wrong. More often than that, though, they are right. And 20 years later, the critical opinion about a given piece of music should be secure.
4. Emotional vocabulary
Every chord is a colour. (Actually, some people think that every note is a colour too.) But chords are more important than which key of the scale you are playing. Irving Berlin only knew how to write music in the key of F. It doesn’t really matter.
Every chord, relative to the tonic, conveys an emotion. Understand the emotional impact of chords. Simplistically, major chords are happy and minor chords are sad. But not always. From I to IV is like going to a higher plane, and from I to V is going to a lower one. But not always. Inversions (ie changing which note of the chord is used in the bass) change the way the chords sound, and change the emotional shade.
More interesting than the I, IV and V are the relatives of these chords. Sometimes you will have the minor versions, the major versions, the extended chord, your 7s, 9s, 11s, even 13s. Augmented. Diminished. Suspended. Know your chords. This is important.
5. Chord progression
Chord progressions and melody in music are similar to plot and narrative in a story. Like a good maths proof (it is not a coincidence that I learnt how to write a song around the same time I was learning how to write a maths proof) a chord progression is a sequence of ideas which lead, logically to each other. Whether the chord progression makes sense or not, is analogous to whether it is grammatical.
6. Melody
A melody will typically contain certain notes that make up the chord. There will be transitional notes that don’t have much to do with that chord, and they are called passing notes. The melody needs to both be consistent with what’s going on in the chord progression, and at the same time it should be artistically appealing. That’s why writing a song is not easy – it’s like solving a simultaneous equation. You don’t want to have a melody which follows the chord progression like a slave. There’s no tension, and it’s boring. But you don’t want to have a melody that is not related to the chord progression either.
Somebody asked “what is melody” in a music forum. It is a very good question. Our most conventional notion of melody is that it is the part of music which is in the foreground, it is typically linear, with only 1 note at a time (like if 1 person is singing). It is a sequence of notes.
Any of these notions can be violated. The melody can be in the bassline. Counterpoint is what we call it when there are 2 melodies playing against each other at the same time. Harmony is what we call it when 2 or more non-clashing notes are played together. 2 or more voices can make up the same melody, they just sing different parts of it.
7. Form
Almost the first thing people will teach you when you have formal instruction on composition is the form of the music. ABA, AABA, ABABCA, etc. This is important, of course, but it’s like saying that when you write a story, your words must fall on a straight line going from left to right. Although this convention is important, it has very little to do with whether you are writing a good song or not.
There is only 1 thing to learn from the idea of form: big pieces of music are made of smaller pieces of music. How you arrange the smaller pieces is the architecture design.
What’s more important, from my perspective, is how those smaller chunks flow into each other. How everything combines together to form the narrative arc. Always pay attention to the bigger picture, and how the smaller pieces make up the bigger puzzle. Sometimes you can have 2 really spectacular pieces of music, and they sound awful when you put them side by side because the flow is gone. Sometimes you can tolerate having a boring part, because it gives you a break from the exciting part.
8. Hidden melodies
Moving away from our conventional idea of melodies to the bigger picture, we need to understand what is a melody, in a more generic sense. Melodies are narratives. They tell a story. They lead the listener through a series of logically connected moods, and represent an arc through the music for the listener to follow.
If you study the human brain, you will understand that stories are our method of organising information and making sense of them. One favourite technique we have of memorising long lists, is to make up a story where all the items appear in sequence, in the story. The reason why this works is because we are so well adapted to thinking about stories.
Similarly, it is difficult for me to memorise a lot of numbers (musical notes are basically numbers. Sounds inhuman, but deal with it.) But when they are arranged in a catchy melody – miracle of miracles, it’s so easy.
So when you extend the definition of melody, into something like a catchy hook, or a motif, or a drum figure, the definition becomes something like: foreground.
This should explain why hip hop and rap works, even though there are so few chords and melodies. It’s all hidden melodies – the brain still has something to latch onto. Maybe it’s the combination of wordplay, or the rhythm of the words, or catchy slogans.
But the cardinal rule is this: the brain still has to have something to latch onto. Something to think about. Take away chords and melody, maybe you have to make the rhythm interesting. Or maybe you have to make the architecture interesting, like how minimalist music takes away a lot of your points of reference, and instead you pay attention to how the mood shifts and changes very subtly. But music cannot be vacuous.
9. Borrowing ideas
I’m not good enough to come up with my own ideas. Maybe nobody is. I’ve always borrowed from others. It’s like building a nest, all your material is stolen from somewhere else. But the creation, the nest, is yours and yours alone. Unless you steal somebody else’s nest wholesale (or a significant chunk thereof).
So when you are starting to write, just steal. Take a piece here, another piece there, put it together in a way that’s never been done before. Take somebody else’s melody, and harmonise it with different chords. Take somebody else’s chords an put a new melody on it.
Combine genres in a way that has not been done before. Chinese with Indian. Dub with classical. Avant Garde with Gregorian. Whatever.
10. Experience
I started “writing” music when I was 8. I wrote the first song I was happy with when I was 21. Yes, it takes that long. If you start off as an adult, your learning curve will be shorter. But you have to wait a long time and put up with stuff that doesn’t work. Then you learn your lesson from point number 3: assess it like a music critic.
If you can’t finish songs, KIV them. A few songs were stuff I KIV’ed from when I was a teenager, and now I have the experience to complete them, to solve problems I wasn’t able to solve back then.
You might learn some tricks. Like repeating a phrase because it sounds better the second time. Or ending a song abruptly. Or throwing in an unexpected chord.
After a while, the seam that you are mining will be empty. Then branch out, try a different form of music and see what happens. There are a lot of songwriters, they were very good when they were young, and then they lost it. Or rather most of their songs were written and as a consequence they ended up repeating themselves. There wasn't much that was new. Brian Wilson - his last great album was merely to finish a project he abandoned when he was young. Paul McCartney - was never as great a songwriter as when John Lennon was around. Lou Reed - wrote most of his great stuff before he was 30, with the Velvet Underground.
Is songwriting a young man's art? Or is it that people always run out of ideas no matter what? Only a few years ago, when I wrote something good, I'm like, "damn, I never knew I had it in me." Now it's like, "wait, didn't I just write this before? aren't I just piecing together some other stuff that I've done before, and done better?" After your best ideas are out in the open, it just gets more and more difficult.
A random conversation with Harry Redknapp
I thought that maybe fat boy is not such a good moniker, I’ve decided to call him Harry Redknapp instead.
#9: Yeh, I actually had a female housemate for 2 years.
HR: You never got to sleep with her.
#9: Yeh but I was not interested in her.
HR: It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in her or not. Tell me, did you sleep with her? No?
#9: What does it matter if I didn’t sleep with her, of course I didn’t. I wasn’t interested.
HR: Let’s not talk about irrelevant stuff. The fact is that you did not sleep with her.
#9: HR, we’ve been colleagues for years. But you have never fucked me in the ass either.
HR: Er yeh who wants to fuck you in the ass? You’re so ugly.
#9: That’s besides the point. You had more than 7 years to fuck me in the ass and you’ve never done anything.
HR: What does this have to do with what we were talking about?
#9: Enough talking rot. Now tell me, do you want to fuck me in the ass? Because if you want it, I can give it to you right now baby.
HR: What are you doing? Get off me!!!
Oh and happy year of the Tiger to you guys out there.
#9: Yeh, I actually had a female housemate for 2 years.
HR: You never got to sleep with her.
#9: Yeh but I was not interested in her.
HR: It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in her or not. Tell me, did you sleep with her? No?
#9: What does it matter if I didn’t sleep with her, of course I didn’t. I wasn’t interested.
HR: Let’s not talk about irrelevant stuff. The fact is that you did not sleep with her.
#9: HR, we’ve been colleagues for years. But you have never fucked me in the ass either.
HR: Er yeh who wants to fuck you in the ass? You’re so ugly.
#9: That’s besides the point. You had more than 7 years to fuck me in the ass and you’ve never done anything.
HR: What does this have to do with what we were talking about?
#9: Enough talking rot. Now tell me, do you want to fuck me in the ass? Because if you want it, I can give it to you right now baby.
HR: What are you doing? Get off me!!!
Oh and happy year of the Tiger to you guys out there.
Saturday, 6 February 2010
This is My Story
Well you know that MPH at Raffles City is going to close down for a while so that they can build a secret tunnel to the Assplanade MRT station. So they are having a crosing down sale. Plenty of books for cheap, so I went down to hoot. It isn’t like warehouse sales, where there are plenty of cheap books, but it’s all shit they don’t want.
I got a few books that I could only find elsewhere at full price. But that’s not the main point about this blog post. It’s that… who else should I find in the store but Kassandra Kong.
Now not all of you will know who K Kong is but late last year there was a book by this Singaporean author who caught my eye. “This is My Story”. Now for a book, that was a dumbfuck title if there ever was one. All books are “my story”. Which book isn’t? To be sure, there are other books which have similar titles. Like Antony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. Or there are great novels which are semi-autobiographical, like “Remembrance of Things Past” or “Dream of Red Mansions”. But it’s easier to forgive them because they are talking about an entire milieu, an entire social setting.
So this is meant to be nothing more than an autobiography. An autobiography written at the ripe old age of 22. My story. And what is my story? I fell in love with a bad boy, I went through 2 abortions because of him, and he fucked my sis as well. How dumb is that? Do you want to walk through the rest of your life carrying a sign saying “I am stupid”? No? Then why would you want to write a book like that? 2 abortions! How does that old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. She thinks that her sister doesn’t want to talk to her anymore because she’s pissed off. I think it’s about the shame of having a dumb sis. If my sister were like that, I’d… actually… OK, never mind.
To be sure, there were other books written by women who complained about their sister sleeping with their boyfriends. One of them was “Hillary and Jackie”, which was actually made into a movie. Now that was scandalous. I think some people thought that the book was written in bad faith.
So she was sitting there, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for people to come, like a teaching assistant at office hours during the first week of class. There were some agents, taking photographs. I don’t think people wanted to go up to her. She wasn’t bad looking. If I were her boyfriend I would be some kind of sex maniac too. But she was being shunned. Very conspicuously, I might add, considering how crowded that place was on Friday night, and I could see her scanning the room with that shit eating grin on her face.
I was thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ has a well-earned reputation as being a great guy because only people like him are thick skinned enough to talk to people like you.” Lepers and prostitutes, that sort of stuff, you know.
Ever since I picked up that book (did you see that book? It has her looking very glum on the cover, all curled up and staring at her feet, like those mediacorp drama series actresses who go to the shower to wash up after being violated) – I had a good mind to talk some sense into her and tell her that while it was no big deal, all the stuff that went on in that book, it was extremely stupid to write it in a book and publish it for the whole world to read. Unless it has great literary value – which I doubt, from what I can see on her personal web page. You just don’t go announce yourself like that to the world. You don’t write your autobiography at the grand age of 22. Just ask Vanilla Ice. Why are you writing a book? Are you trying to tell people something they didn’t already know? Some men are jerks. Wow, what an earth shattering discovery.
No big deal if you’re 70, and you just like to tell a saucy tale about the good old days when half the population was after your ass. No big deal if you’ve achieved greater things in life, like, say Tori Amos, then you can go and tell the whole world you were raped and people will still think of you, primarily as a good singer-songwriter, to be loved and respected for something more than what’s between your legs. No big deal if you’re Francoise Sagan, you write “Bonjour Tristesse” and you become a literary sensation at the grand old age of 18. But you need to be talented for that.
I just couldn’t bear to go up there and tell her. I don’t know why. I would have preferred there to be people going up to talk to her, and maybe I would offer a dissenting viewpoint. But I think that mine is actually not a dissenting viewpoint, it is the majority opinion. I look at the forums that come up when you google her name, and they find her creepy. Fellars, this is very Singaporean logic. But I do not want to be the one who has to tell her that she has screwed up, if that’s what everybody thinks. I do not want to be the only one going up to say hi to her. I don’t want to be the creepy pervert to tell her that I open her book up to the page where he does that to her, and then I smell the paper that it’s printed on.
Ultimately, though, I realised that all those objections that I made towards her book, taken one by one, do not really form a solid case for arguing that writing that book was stupid. In the end it was just a question of taste. Something like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And this is a mouth, remember, which is mostly immune to foul odours. It’s very hard to explain to someone why it’s OK to read “Memoirs of a Geisha” and not “Memoirs of a Prostitute”. (Actually I read part of that (geisha) book some time ago. What I find extremely creepy about that book is that it’s written by an ang moh man. If I were writing that book I would be jacking off half of the time.)
OK, a digression. Somebody actually compared this expose to Bonny Hicks. But I think that Bonny Hicks was just being very frank about what the life of models was about. And moreover I don’t think most of it was as sordid as this. I still got her book lying around somewhere. No I don’t jerk off to Bonny Hicks because it’s bad luck to masturbate over dead women. My Bonny lies over the ocean… my Bonny lies over the sea…
I convinced myself that the excuse for inaction is this: she’s dumb. And since she’s that dumb to be writing and promoting stuff like that, it’s futile to try to knock some sense into her, since the only direction you can knock her is up. But most importantly of all, I am a virgin. And I don’t think that virgins should be lecturing people about whether or not they should write about their sexual adventures.
I got a few books that I could only find elsewhere at full price. But that’s not the main point about this blog post. It’s that… who else should I find in the store but Kassandra Kong.
Now not all of you will know who K Kong is but late last year there was a book by this Singaporean author who caught my eye. “This is My Story”. Now for a book, that was a dumbfuck title if there ever was one. All books are “my story”. Which book isn’t? To be sure, there are other books which have similar titles. Like Antony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. Or there are great novels which are semi-autobiographical, like “Remembrance of Things Past” or “Dream of Red Mansions”. But it’s easier to forgive them because they are talking about an entire milieu, an entire social setting.
So this is meant to be nothing more than an autobiography. An autobiography written at the ripe old age of 22. My story. And what is my story? I fell in love with a bad boy, I went through 2 abortions because of him, and he fucked my sis as well. How dumb is that? Do you want to walk through the rest of your life carrying a sign saying “I am stupid”? No? Then why would you want to write a book like that? 2 abortions! How does that old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. She thinks that her sister doesn’t want to talk to her anymore because she’s pissed off. I think it’s about the shame of having a dumb sis. If my sister were like that, I’d… actually… OK, never mind.
To be sure, there were other books written by women who complained about their sister sleeping with their boyfriends. One of them was “Hillary and Jackie”, which was actually made into a movie. Now that was scandalous. I think some people thought that the book was written in bad faith.
So she was sitting there, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for people to come, like a teaching assistant at office hours during the first week of class. There were some agents, taking photographs. I don’t think people wanted to go up to her. She wasn’t bad looking. If I were her boyfriend I would be some kind of sex maniac too. But she was being shunned. Very conspicuously, I might add, considering how crowded that place was on Friday night, and I could see her scanning the room with that shit eating grin on her face.
I was thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ has a well-earned reputation as being a great guy because only people like him are thick skinned enough to talk to people like you.” Lepers and prostitutes, that sort of stuff, you know.
Ever since I picked up that book (did you see that book? It has her looking very glum on the cover, all curled up and staring at her feet, like those mediacorp drama series actresses who go to the shower to wash up after being violated) – I had a good mind to talk some sense into her and tell her that while it was no big deal, all the stuff that went on in that book, it was extremely stupid to write it in a book and publish it for the whole world to read. Unless it has great literary value – which I doubt, from what I can see on her personal web page. You just don’t go announce yourself like that to the world. You don’t write your autobiography at the grand age of 22. Just ask Vanilla Ice. Why are you writing a book? Are you trying to tell people something they didn’t already know? Some men are jerks. Wow, what an earth shattering discovery.
No big deal if you’re 70, and you just like to tell a saucy tale about the good old days when half the population was after your ass. No big deal if you’ve achieved greater things in life, like, say Tori Amos, then you can go and tell the whole world you were raped and people will still think of you, primarily as a good singer-songwriter, to be loved and respected for something more than what’s between your legs. No big deal if you’re Francoise Sagan, you write “Bonjour Tristesse” and you become a literary sensation at the grand old age of 18. But you need to be talented for that.
I just couldn’t bear to go up there and tell her. I don’t know why. I would have preferred there to be people going up to talk to her, and maybe I would offer a dissenting viewpoint. But I think that mine is actually not a dissenting viewpoint, it is the majority opinion. I look at the forums that come up when you google her name, and they find her creepy. Fellars, this is very Singaporean logic. But I do not want to be the one who has to tell her that she has screwed up, if that’s what everybody thinks. I do not want to be the only one going up to say hi to her. I don’t want to be the creepy pervert to tell her that I open her book up to the page where he does that to her, and then I smell the paper that it’s printed on.
Ultimately, though, I realised that all those objections that I made towards her book, taken one by one, do not really form a solid case for arguing that writing that book was stupid. In the end it was just a question of taste. Something like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And this is a mouth, remember, which is mostly immune to foul odours. It’s very hard to explain to someone why it’s OK to read “Memoirs of a Geisha” and not “Memoirs of a Prostitute”. (Actually I read part of that (geisha) book some time ago. What I find extremely creepy about that book is that it’s written by an ang moh man. If I were writing that book I would be jacking off half of the time.)
OK, a digression. Somebody actually compared this expose to Bonny Hicks. But I think that Bonny Hicks was just being very frank about what the life of models was about. And moreover I don’t think most of it was as sordid as this. I still got her book lying around somewhere. No I don’t jerk off to Bonny Hicks because it’s bad luck to masturbate over dead women. My Bonny lies over the ocean… my Bonny lies over the sea…
I convinced myself that the excuse for inaction is this: she’s dumb. And since she’s that dumb to be writing and promoting stuff like that, it’s futile to try to knock some sense into her, since the only direction you can knock her is up. But most importantly of all, I am a virgin. And I don’t think that virgins should be lecturing people about whether or not they should write about their sexual adventures.
Monday, 1 February 2010
Why numbernine is single part 2
Not a bad weekend for me.
I had dinner with some old friends from colllege, and I bumped into some chick I knew from school back then. Well not some chick I knew from school, but I knew her by face. And suddenly we were talking like old friends. And I'm wondering, all those times when I didn't go out and have a lot of friends in JC, was it because the ladies were more dao, or was it because my head was too far up my ass for me to understand that they weren't going to bite my head off? Well it was funny, so that was somebody who could have been a friend, but wasn't.
On Saturday I spent 2 hours stirring up 2 pots of pineapple pulp. Some of you might see the results of it pretty soon.
I helped my father put together powerpoints for a lesson (actually he did all the content himself, and I was just doing the layout. I also taught him how to use a thumb drive, and how not to put it into the wrong hole.)
In between I had a nap and when I woke up I had a new song playing in my head. While out for dinner, I passed by Borders. They had a few penguin classics that were on sale for pretty cheap, and I was tempted until I remembered my promise to myself: no new books. Think about reading the existing ones first. Anyway there was a book called twitterature, where you had all those old literature masterpieces, rendered through twitter. "Anna Karenina" was a hoot, especially that part about some real hip grinding with Count Vronsky. The last part was also blackly funny, because it ended with "the user account has been deactivated" ("Anna Karenina" ends with the title character committing suicide.)
Then on Sunday I did some programming. I had listed a few books on bookmooch, and 3 or 4 were snatched up immediately. At the same time, somebody else bought a few of my books. In all I'm dispensing of 9 inches of shelf space.
I bumped into my boss while near the library. I read some books. There was a book that I borrowed from my cousin while stirring pots. It was about the new version of Excel. Did you know that the new .xlsx format is simply a few zipped up xml files? Just change the extension to .zip, unzip the whole thing, and then you can see, in plain text, just what your excel file looks like.
I also looked through a textbook on assembly language - understood the difference between stack and heap memory.
I tried out some of the food stalls at Liang Court. Then I rushed back home and swam 1km. While doing that, I came up with another song, bringing my total up to 2. Writing songs is like masturbating. When you haven't been doing it for a while, there's a lot of seed stored up. There were a few people horsing around in the pool and once, a chick landed up right in front of me when I was lapping. (Lapping means swimming laps, no other meaning is to be inferred by this). So that was a happy memory.
I went back upstairs, hung around for a bit, and then I drove to the coffee shop to watch Arsenal vs Man U. It went badly for Arsenal and I drove home after the first half.
All in all, a quite productive weekend. So I was wondering, suppose I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't have had much time for her this week.
But not all weekends are like this.
I had dinner with some old friends from colllege, and I bumped into some chick I knew from school back then. Well not some chick I knew from school, but I knew her by face. And suddenly we were talking like old friends. And I'm wondering, all those times when I didn't go out and have a lot of friends in JC, was it because the ladies were more dao, or was it because my head was too far up my ass for me to understand that they weren't going to bite my head off? Well it was funny, so that was somebody who could have been a friend, but wasn't.
On Saturday I spent 2 hours stirring up 2 pots of pineapple pulp. Some of you might see the results of it pretty soon.
I helped my father put together powerpoints for a lesson (actually he did all the content himself, and I was just doing the layout. I also taught him how to use a thumb drive, and how not to put it into the wrong hole.)
In between I had a nap and when I woke up I had a new song playing in my head. While out for dinner, I passed by Borders. They had a few penguin classics that were on sale for pretty cheap, and I was tempted until I remembered my promise to myself: no new books. Think about reading the existing ones first. Anyway there was a book called twitterature, where you had all those old literature masterpieces, rendered through twitter. "Anna Karenina" was a hoot, especially that part about some real hip grinding with Count Vronsky. The last part was also blackly funny, because it ended with "the user account has been deactivated" ("Anna Karenina" ends with the title character committing suicide.)
Then on Sunday I did some programming. I had listed a few books on bookmooch, and 3 or 4 were snatched up immediately. At the same time, somebody else bought a few of my books. In all I'm dispensing of 9 inches of shelf space.
I bumped into my boss while near the library. I read some books. There was a book that I borrowed from my cousin while stirring pots. It was about the new version of Excel. Did you know that the new .xlsx format is simply a few zipped up xml files? Just change the extension to .zip, unzip the whole thing, and then you can see, in plain text, just what your excel file looks like.
I also looked through a textbook on assembly language - understood the difference between stack and heap memory.
I tried out some of the food stalls at Liang Court. Then I rushed back home and swam 1km. While doing that, I came up with another song, bringing my total up to 2. Writing songs is like masturbating. When you haven't been doing it for a while, there's a lot of seed stored up. There were a few people horsing around in the pool and once, a chick landed up right in front of me when I was lapping. (Lapping means swimming laps, no other meaning is to be inferred by this). So that was a happy memory.
I went back upstairs, hung around for a bit, and then I drove to the coffee shop to watch Arsenal vs Man U. It went badly for Arsenal and I drove home after the first half.
All in all, a quite productive weekend. So I was wondering, suppose I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't have had much time for her this week.
But not all weekends are like this.
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