I was having a conversation with my parents the other day. My father brought up what the Singapore music scene was like when he was young, about all the people who loved 60s pop. At the back of my mind, I was thinking, I was such a fan of 90s pop but you never cared about that.
What were they playing? Somebody mentioned “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”. I knew that one because Dusty sang it. I said, they don’t even write their own songs. Your son writes his own songs and you don’t even have time for that.
And they were saying, “will anybody ever listen to what you wrote?” At the back of my mind, I was thinking, you’re my parents. You should answer that question. If anybody’s going to be interested at all, it’s going to be you.
So I said, those guys, they don’t even write any music. They barely play. Nobody’s going to remember what they wrote. If you have any memories of the music that you listened to when you were young, you’re going to be taking them to your grave.
There’s something very feminine about being an artist. Any kind of an artist. It’s the feminine ideal. You try to be as sweet and pretty as you can, and you hope that somebody will notice you and love you for who you are. But it’s a very very complicated relationship in many ways. I used to think that music was my gift to the world. I was going to be some creator, and I would nourish peoples’ lives. But I’ve come to realise that not everybody will appreciate music the way I do. And more and more it seems that music was a gift to me. By who I don’t know. And if I were to make music and get any kind of satisfaction from it, it would also be a gift to me. I would basically be screaming myself hoarse into the void that way.
And when my mother takes out her ukelele to play, it’s such an awful racket. I just have to get out of the house. I couldn’t stand being in the same room as her.
Music Composition 