Monthly Archive for May, 2006

黄韵仁/小寒’s Blog : Funkie Monkies Blog 猴子部落
http://www.fmmusic.com.sg/blog/

Part 7 : Working with Jonathan Lee (5/18/06)
http://www.fmmusic.com.sg/blog/?p=31
Thursday, May 18th, 2006

At that time, Jonathan Lee was with Sandy Lam, one of the very few divas in the Asian music scene, she was looking for another direction in her music, one where in she could be involved in, not just be the music puppet controlled by producers… So Jonathan called me up… hey… I suggested to my wife that U work with her laahh, write some stuff for her, arrange some music for her… Free holiday! why not?! So I packed my bags… and my Gibson ES-335 electric guitar, and went to Shanghai…

Part 8 : Sandy Lam (5/19/06)
http://www.fmmusic.com.sg/blog/?p=32

This was 2002, when I went to Shanghai to work with Sandy, Jonathan had rented another place as office near their house for us to write and had a Protools set up for me to do my arrangements.

Prior to this I did have some experience of ‘co-writing’ before, in my previous bands, but last time, I was just involved in the harmony part, not the melody part. So this was a fresh experience for me..

So.. U may ask… How was the working experience? It was great!!. The whole process was natural and fun, and there was no ‘forcing’ from both of us to write, we wrote what we felt… and lucky for us, what we felt turned out quite nicely!

The moment I touched down, I got in the office and she was already ready to work. And so, we trashed out a song in less then 15 minutes of me being in the office. with my luggage still lying at the front door. And that song was track 1. in the Truly Sandy album. The next day, I wanted to play around with the piano, so Jonathan arranged for us to jam in this big ass government funded studio in Shanghai. It was part of a TV station and it was HUGE with all the equipment U can dream of. Subsequent days we worked there, so that we had a choice to write piano or guitar based songs.

In the following 4-5 days, we wrote about 8 songs, and out of which we chose 3 to be in the album.(4 including one song that I wrote myself even before I went to Shanghai) Then we thought we were done, so we were happy, and during a 15 minute break, I started playing this little acoustic guitar ditty, some shiny happy progression, and Sandy caught on, and poof! 15 minutes later. The song Paper Plane 纸飞机, was born, and that became the 1st lead single in the album and it became a hit in Asia. In Singapore, it was number one for quite a bit… and that was actually my breakthrough into the mainstream songwriting scene. Coz before that, I was more of an arranger and album ‘side tracks’ songwriter(side tracks meaning that no one ever hears of them). After writing, I took the tracks back to singapore and finished the arrangements and music recording of the 5 tracks from the ‘Truly Sandy’ album. and Xiaohan was given the task of finishing the lyrics for them.

After the album was released, and seeing the response. I also realized… yeah I do have a little talent in writing commercial songs for the masses and not only that… I enjoy the support I get from the masses for songs like these… the feeling of that, is vastly different from writing English songs here and then watching the demos disappear to nowhere…

Thanks Fei