Musical dreams Deferred

Around the time I was 30, it was a great time. There were maybe 7 years of my adult life when I felt that life was good, that I was moving forward. I attended peoples’ weddings. I built up my music collection. I did long distance running. I moved to another country, earned a graduate degree. Found a new job. Life was looking up. (It’s not so good now, but there’s still some chance that I could fix it.)

One of the things that moved forward during those years was I discovered that I had a knack for writing music. (And in a way that was why this blog was created – I originally started off with the intention of trying to teach music composition.) It’s a very nice gift to have, although I soon wondered what it really meant.

It’s remarkable how much difference you have in perspective between being a 20 something and a 40 something, and in a way it’s a little alarming how quickly life has passed me by. If you had told me at 20 that by the time I was 40 something, I had written all the songs I had written – well they’re not songs, they’re just tunes. If you told me that, I’d be pretty glad. I’d be overjoyed.

I’d always tell ppl that I was 8 years old when I was in a class for gifted musicians, and they asked me to write something, and I wrote it. I was 21 when I wrote my first proper tune. One that didn’t sound awkward, that sounded like I knew what I was doing. And between the ages of 29 and 43, I just kept on adding new tunes to my collection, over and over. I probably have 50-100 really decent ones.

But here’s the rub. It’s not the 90s anymore, when you could form a band and bash them out, and get a record company to sponsor you for doing so. There used to be a reward mechanism for producing great quality rock songs back then. Now, it doesn’t seem to exist. You could put something out, and somebody would say it sounds like something else they’ve heard from the 60s/ 70s/ 80s/ 90s. It’s just gotten really hard to be original anymore. I haven’t heard of any major musical movements in rock music, since around the turn of the century. It sounds a lot like the post-punk era of the early 80s, where people were just randomly shooting in the dark, in order to get something that was edgy and different.

So the question is, what am I going to do with all my material? I had always harboured this fantasy, that someday, or somewhere, somebody would recognise the value of that music, and I would get some kind of credit. I am kind of hopeful that I am as unbiased an observer of my music as I think I am. And then there’s going to be the arduous work of trying to make the music sound the way that I think it should sound. Most musicians don’t really know how to do this: a lot of people can make demo-quality music, but to push the music up from that level to something that can pass of as a recording would require a professional engineer to do it.

In between living in a foreign country and holding down a day job, I wasn’t able to do that. And as time went on, I gradually, then suddenly lost that day job. It was one of the biggest shocks of my life. For the first time in a while I had been cast adrift. I didn’t know how to get back to a place of financial security. The disappointment was so great that I hadn’t tried to get back on the train. I just took time off to travel and read, occasionally to work on my music. But I wasn’t making much headway. Then the pandemic hit, and I decided to give up on my life in the USA.

There were a few things that I managed to see. While I was still in the states, and still working, I managed to catch a few concerts. Maybe I should have gone for a bit more, but maybe around 6 or 7 of them were right for me. They were name of people who had a certain cache in the 90s, and it was a time when many former heroes of the alternative music scene of the 90s were finding that their popularity was enhanced to the extent that they could get back together for one last big payday, even though they were in their 50s or their 60s, playing the music of their youth.

I attended some of their concerts. In the main, it was wonderful. They were not a-listers, which meant that I never had to shell out more than 50 bucks for a ticket. I didn’t really have that much of a social life, so I just went about my business and went there alone. And this was 90s alternative rock, so I probably was one of the few Asians in the audience. It was less fun that I had hoped for. I came to realise that concerts were supposed to be treated as events, that it was always better with friends, that they were usually late, up to half an hour late, and that time was supposed to be for you to engage in idle chit chat with your friend or date.

The shows were usually pretty good. There had been very few shows which just plain sounded awful. These guys were all touring around the USA, and there was already in place a system where all the sound, all the equipment was handled properly. These guys were well respected musicians in their youth, and if time had robbed them of some vitality, they were still at almost peak levels in terms of performance.

And after the performance, I usually drove home. It felt a little squalid. I suppose I wasn’t used to the streets being dingy and dark. I usually felt grateful that I got to listen live to one of my musical idols. But I didn’t like that I had spent 3 hours in a dark room interacting with nobody. One of the concert halls I went to was an old movie theatre which had been converted: all the seats were stripped out, just a concrete floor for the audience. Very bare bones. But it attracted many names. Dinosaur Jr, Godspeed You Black Emperor, X. It was in a hipster neighbourhood, all the shops – many of them anyway – had good fashion sensibilities. In a way it was wonderful. But also in a way I never not got reminded that I was some kind of an outsider, even amongst these purported outsiders.

I did think to myself: in the extremely unlikely and extremely optimistic scenario that I were to transform my songs into real music, real albums, I might go on the road to fulfill my rock / pop / soul / whatever performing musician dreams. What could I expect? Would I like it?

And then there were a few more things that occurred to me. One of them was the implication of no longer getting any younger. You’re just not going to enjoy rock music the way you used to. It’s not going to be heaven on earth anymore. You’ve already tasted the sweetest taste. You can try to get your music back to what you thought it sounded, but maybe a fitter, younger person might cover you and do a better job.

You’re not going to find that audience that you’re looking for. You might not find the collaborators you’re looking for. Or the time you’re looking for.

You still need to go out and eat and earn a living. And in the past you’ve tried to balance your art and your finding a living, and it didn’t pan out.

There are so many neglected aspects of my life that I have to force myself to face up to them. It wasn’t easy but I have to use my mental strength to go live up to that, rather than dividing a portion up and putting it in the service of music.

I looked at what I was doing around 10 years ago, when I was planning a departure from Singapore. I had a solid, if unspectacular job. All my aspirations were hobbies: music, running, maybe even that engineering degree seemed to be a hobby. And it seemed that having a job was in the bag: what I needed to do was to fulfill myself in many other ways that I dreamt about.

Now, I just need to survive. To take my engineering skills to an acceptable level, to future proof myself, and just merely survive. Because it’s going to be a rough road ahead.

I’m not going to deny that songwriting was fun. I’m not going to pretend that it wasn’t tremendously exciting to pump them out, there’d be one every month or so, or sometimes they just came a few within a week. This was a good musical phrase. That was a good musical phrase.

It felt like some kind of wisdom. You knew that certain combination of notes was good, and other combinations were not that good. It was wonderful being creative and coming up with stuff over and over, being artistically creative.

But later on, something else sets in. And it feels like some kind of decline. I reached a point where I stopped getting impressed, stopped having that sense of wonder. It felt a little mechanical. I felt like I was repeating myself. It felt like I was no longer doing something that was fresh and new. Maybe I felt my muse slipping away from me. Or I stopped loving music passionately.

What you have to remember is that even a guy like Stevie Wonder falls out of love with music eventually. There’s this sense that you’re not going to get anything more out from him, that he’s permanently burned out. Or the 70-something Stevie Wonder finds the 20-something Stevie Wonder too intimidating to compare himself with.

Songwriting was fun. I remember Julie Andrew remarking that there are only 7 notes of the major scale, but you could arrange them into millions and millions of tunes. I’d say that maybe you’d be lucky if you can write 100, 1000 that people actually remember. But it’s like playing a video game, or solving a Rubik’s cube. The really great part is getting the hang of it. But there will come a time, you will get to the point where it’s “been there, done that”. A lot of people who I know as songwriters will have maybe 20 years of pumping out great tunes, and suddenly everything flat lines.

Because this is not a journey of a lifetime. It is an epic journey, but it’s one that has an endpoint. This is not like becoming a professor or an academic where the learning never stops. I thought that I was climbing Everest or Kilimanjaro or Kinabalu… no, it was just a hill, not a mountain.

There’s a conversation 10 years ago that still haunts me. My sis was like “done anything lately?” I said, yes. Long distance. Teaching myself to write music. Got into grad school. Read hundreds of books. But then she was like, I mean, real things? Well, actually, no. Maybe I didn’t want to think about “real things”. Financial planning. Working. Career. Maybe I just wanted to treat those things like they didn’t exist. Maybe I just suck at things that aren’t fun.

I will have other musical journeys ahead of me. Maybe one day I’ll even be let somebody hear my musical visions. But the music will have to take a hiatus for now.

Maybe I just have to get my life back together again, get back on track. I still have these musical dreams, I still have these compositions, and I have to store them somewhere. They are seeds, and it will take the work of a farmer or a gardener to make them into fully fledged musical works. But I can’t do that now. I have to have more focus on my survival and I have to know that I’m going to make it in the real world.

Music Biographies 2 – R.E.M.

I would mark the year that I was 14 as the beginning of my deep fandom of pop music, and over 1 year, I bought 3 REM albums. It was the beginning and probably the apex of my love affair with that band, although later on I would acquire all of their stuff up till “New Adventures in Hi Fi”. You could say that my love affair with them was a story of diminishing returns, but it was really great, really great while it lasted.

During those few years, I was a voracious reader of anything and everything that was written about some of my favourite artists. I ended up reading up a lot about REM, and I suppose, in a large sense, that shaped how I looked at rock music in general. I read a lot of stuff later on, but never with the same level of obsession again, which is why I’m documenting those few music biographies that stuck in my memory. Because they shaped my relationship with music in general.

In effect, REM were the band which was the prototype for what a band was going to be like. Later on, I would delve into the mythology of the Beatles. I would have access to some of the “all time greatest” lists, and they would make me creepy and uncomfortable and I never knew why. I could never love the Beatles and the Stones the way that I loved REM, but I suppose I could never love REM the way that I loved REM: the first cut was the deepest.

The first album that I got was “Out of Time”, obviously. It was their first big seller, and not only was it their breakthrough, it got a lot of attention and press, because it was the first time one of the biggest bands on the alternative scene had a major hit. It was a few months before they would be overshadowed by Nirvana. It meant a great deal to me, because like them, I was a person who simply did what I wanted to and didn’t necessarily go along with the mainstream. “Losing my Religion” was one of their best pop songs. I liked “Near Wild Heaven” and “Belong”. But a lot of the album was mystifying to me.

Later on, to capitalise on their success, IRS released a greatest hits collection, focused on their early years. And that was the true start of my love affair with REM. At that time, I hadn’t yet understood the real history of the South. But it was this complex place, this mysterious place that had this great weight of history all over it. Maybe it being hot and humid like Singapore made an impression. But one trick that REM was very good at was that they always blended this surreal dreamlike free associative set of lyrics, and it sounded like you were sleeptalking. And yet it had this wonderful gravitas that Michael Stipe’s voice imbued it with. And of course, back then, they were great songwriters. They had some of the most wonderful tunes. And it was truly wonderful that there was an alternative to all that dreck that was playing on the radio. I guess I wasn’t really in sync with the sort of stuff that Singapore radio liked. The Richard Marxes. The Michael Learns to Rock.

Even as I didn’t really like country, I totally didn’t mind it mixed with rock. If it were more overt that REM were essentially a country rock band, I would have been more cautious towards them. In a way, REM could be compared to yet another band that was closely associated with the South, The Band. But what set REM apart was that they were both deeply steeped in the past and at the same time thoroughly modern. At least, being an alternative band was pretty modern for the 1990s. They made great music videos. They sounded like the Byrds. They sounded country. They also sounded like the Smiths, back when the Smiths were cool. And yet they were so idiosyncratic that you couldn’t really name a band from further back that they could be accused of ripping off. They put together their influences in a way that was completely unique, and it was more like other bands were ripping them off.

The greatest hits record had classic after classic. “Don’t Go Back to Rockville”, “Driver 8”, “Talk about the Passion”, just to name 3 at random.

But at the same time, one of the most romantic aspects of the REM story was how, during their first few years, they went on the road and toured relentlessly. Four out of their first five albums were classics. (And “Fables of the Reconstruction” is also not too bad). And as they toured, their fame snowballed by word of mouth. The cover of “Murmur” showed weeds that just grew and grew until they overcame the landscape, and I thought it was brilliant. It was so like them: slow, low key, but all conquering. They had it all. They never had to sacrifice their artistic integrity, and still managed to build up their fan base. Perhaps all bands have artistic integrity, and even teenyboppers like Britney Spears had some version of it, but to my teenage mind, the one that mattered was the one that looked like REM’s. The paradox of an alternative band becoming big was that at some point you had to stop saying that you were defying the rest of the world.

The back cover of REM’s Murmur was also something that struck me. It showed an old bridge. It was something that was very, very American, something that was deeply rooted in the past. At yet, “Murmur” was one of the most carefree albums I’d ever heard. Or maybe I was living in a carefree environment at that point in time. It sounded like it was made by a young person who was an old soul.

Their masterpiece was “Automatic For the People”. Also the third album by REM that I bought. It was absolutely astounding that a band could make their breakthrough album, and then follow it up with their masterpiece. It was a bit like the Rolling Stones following up “Sticky Fingers” with “Exile”. And it was another one of those old / young dualities. It was a bunch of guys, at the apex of their lives, and yet contemplating their mortalities. It was playful or whimsical. “Star Me Kitten” referenced 10CC’s “I’m Not in Love”. “Drive” referenced David Essex’s “Rock On”. “Man on the Moon” referenced Andy Kaufmann. Maybe they were love letters to youth, and they were set against the impending doom of old age and death. “Ignoreland” looked at the Reagan years in a harsh and unforgiving light – those were REM’s years, and their adult years. And the album closed with a one two bang of “Nightswimming” and “Find the River”. Two of their most deeply spiritual songs.

Unfortunately, it was a high watermark for them, and they never quite made anything as good ever again. Maybe they only had it in them to do it once. There was a time when I was entranced with another song on Murmur, “Perfect Circle”, and I literally played it to death and unfortunately now I’m quite sick of it and I can’t listen to it anymore. But that was about a moment of elysian happiness and joy that came about, quite mysteriously, and then vanishes like a vapour trail. So that was the other aspect of the magic of REM – even if it sometimes served to remind you of ancient and archaic things, it also sometimes expressed the most fleeting moments of joy.

REM was the prototype for a band. Four guys met up in Georgia, near the University of Georgia in Athens. Their first single was “Radio Free Europe”, and it was already a classic, as was their first EP, “Chronic Town” and their first album, “Murmur”.

They were a lot of things to me, at one point. They were old Southern fables. They were the scent of flowers in bloom. They were the slightly wild landscape where strange flora and fauna existed. There was this cassette shop in some old HDB block, and I would go down there a lot after school. It only lasted for a couple of years, but everything there was cheaper, and it was just astounding that you could find music from across the world in a setting that was as parochial and local as they came (ie ground floor of the HDB, a notoriously foreigner free zone back in the day). Unfortunately, as you might expect, the fact that its existence was quite unlikely also probably meant that the shopowner was barely breaking even, and it eventually folded. But I always find it funny that something as dank and drab would be some kind of heaven to my teenage brain. It’s almost as though the street corner where you procure your drugs suddenly turns into some kind of heaven which is paved with gold.

Another reason why REM were quintessential to me was how they seemed to use their mouthpiece to advocate for liberal causes. We never saw much of that while growing up in 90s Singapore. But they spoke for pro-choice, for feminism, for environmental causes, against poverty. They didn’t really speak up for black guys but they did bring KRS one for a rapping break. That cemented for me something that alternative bands had to be doing. Up till around 1992, the end of the Bush years, they were pretty political and pretty outspoken about liberal causes. But once they broke through to the mainstream, a lot of that politics went away pretty fast. So I was at a tail end of a small wave of protest music.

Something that was very refreshing about REM was they were in many ways the ultimate “anti-image” band. Although I would later on catch on to the fact that some of this was clever posturing. Michael Stipe was, by his own admission, a pretty capable pop star if he wanted to be. But they were after all an alternative band, and their version of cool was a very subtle, studied, albeit tasteful one. They seldom had a loud image. It was always REM, never Michael Stipe and REM. Image was important, but it never overshadowed the music, and for whatever reason, this was only true during the 60s and during the 90s. And it was also true for many of the great jazz ensembles. I liked this no- nonsense attitude, as well as this casualness.

I think there was something glorious about the 90s. It wasn’t just REM. The grunge scene, the rappers, the DJs and producers of electronic music. Everything they wore was functional. They never messed around. Unfortunately, our current millieu is an extremely image obsessed one.

I liked how they were all average joes, and Mike Mills even seemed like he had some academic talent. Peter Buck and Bill Berry had talent in spades, but they were reticient to a fault. Michael Stipe was the strange, enigmatic showman, and yet had this shy, elusive quality that showed up in the music. I liked that they always credited everything to all four members. Were relentlessly creative. They had a lot of ideas that at that point in time I still found new and refreshing. I like how they were grounded and never put on airs, but I guess that’s what made Peter Buck’s air rage incident so perplexing to me. Maybe they were like the Hamburg era Beatles, they were hardworking, charismatic (in their own subdued way), creative, and managed to hit the jackpot at the end. They were an inspiration for the whole alternative rock movement that followed in their wake, although, being the good Gen X-ers they were, everybody stayed in their own lane, and they would never be leaders of whatever movement.

REM changed. They started becoming popular in the mainstream sense. “Monster” by REM was the first time they disappointed me, although it was still a good album, as was “New Adventures in Hi Fi”. By then they had become a postmodern band, some magpie cobbling together plenty of influences, and yet no longer issuing stuff that had a compelling structure behind them. “New Adventures” was a millennial album, in the sense that it conveyed time speeding up as we raced on to the year 2000. The touring would have been relentless. They came to Singapore as part of their world tour, and I wasn’t able to attend because my “A”s were around the corner. Then Bill Berry had his aneurysm and left REM, and after that, they weren’t quite the same.

It’s important to note now that REM does have its limitations, and they are usually the limitations of indie rock bands. They weren’t great at covers. They were a band that was set up to explore the limits of their capabilities, to make music that suited them to make, and they couldn’t stretch themselves beyond a certain point. They were idiosyncratic precisely because of those limitations. So they gave great performances of REM songs and unfortunately not much else. They were never that creative with harmonies, and towards the end, they were repeating themselves quite a bit. They signed a big deal with Warner Brothers just around the time of “New Adventures”, and maybe they had sold out (which was precisely what alternative rockers were not supposed to do.) I think they did put in the effort and the next decade was a sad story of their fulfilling their contractual obligations and growing rich and making their fuck you money.

So when “Up” came out, I suppose that was the end of me following them. I had listened to enough music up to that point where I knew that some bands had to carry on and keep on making money and never stretching themselves. After all, they had to cash out on all the goodwill they had earned. The Beatles never stayed together long to reach this point, but as individuals, that’s probably what they did. They still did their tours, they still entertained everybody around the world. They still hung around long enough to remind a whole new generation of listeners that they existed. They just stopped being the same band they were when they were my heroes. They became the embodiment of that infamous John Mellencamp lyric, “life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone”.

I look at REM and I think to myself that there are two types of creativity and growth. The first type of creativity involves mainly self-discovery. What happens is that what you are capable of and who you are start to interact with each other, and they find some kind of modus vivendi with each other and build and support each other. You “grow into your own” and achieve self-discovery. But after that, there’s still another phase, where you stretch who you are, and push the boundaries and make yourself even better, beyond who you really are. It’s my contention that, in spite of all the good work that REM did, that they didn’t manage to achieve this second part. Perhaps “Up” was an attempt to be like that, where they tried to be more like Beck or the Beta Band, and somehow that didn’t work out too well.

At the same time, I look at how a band that gave me hours of listening pleasure when I was a teenager… and they ended up content to tread water for the better part of 10 years. There was a lot of talk about REM breaking up during the year 2000 and if they had done it, it would have been the perfect legacy. But I suppose I have no right to judge what they did thereafter. In fact, Michael Stipe came out and named his favourite songs, and a lot of them were dated after the departure of Bill Berry. I don’t know if he was just trying to make the point that the later stuff was good, or maybe he felt that he had just become a better lyric writer in the later years.

I don’t really know what REM are doing. I’m not sure if the stuff that the individuals are doing will change the world like their earlier stuff did. But they once were a great influence on my life and surely they ended up a much greater band than they had initially bargained for, and that’s good enough for me.