I started playing music in Tokyo in 2010 but I discovered myself as an artist between the mountains and the ocean on a tiny little island with both city and village life 10 minutes apart from each other by bus.
Xiamen was a heaven on earth at that time. Artists and explorers from across the country were gathering there to escape the rat race and live a slow life, drinking tea with neighbors, shooting the shit with travelers, and jamming on acoustic guitar and djembe in the garden of Airbnb style hostels.
There was hardly anything to do there because so little of our activity was monetized. Parties formed sporadically without plans. Most of the time we wouldn’t even bother calling up friends. There was a street with 3-4 cafes and bars that played post rock and Chinese folk and traditional music from Africa and Asia and underground hip hop from the US. There was a reggae hamburger stand and a hostel with a library of books on meditation and Jungian philosophy and every night you could just show up for dinner with the guests, staff and boss if you were willing to help cook or chip in to buy groceries.
The ocean was a little smellier than it should have been, but only when you were in it.
I wanted to stay there forever. It felt nothing like anywhere else, a makeshift paradise of our own making, locals and foreigners of every artistic and entrepreneurial persuasion. Far from ambitious but always comfortable.
Most of the musicians hadn’t recorded their music. They just jammed and played their songs live once a month. The painters didn’t have exhibitions, they had studios on the mountain you could sleep over at if you ended up in a long conversation past 9 PM.
My room cost me $80 a month. I shared an old stone house with a friend who was way better at music than me and two of his friends and 2 dogs and 6 cats.
I’d wake up at 3 AM and a semi well known touring folk singer would be jamming in my living room. My friend would hand me a guitar or a bass or a banjo and I’d join in.
That was Xiamen in 2010-2015.
That was where I wrote this next song:
To Know Where
After traveling around Asia for 6 months I discovered Xiamen as a place to visit as often and for as long as possible partly mostly because of all the casual musical interactions I had when I first visited, but also because it was a great place to practice Mandarin with people from all over the country.
I played acoustic guitar at the time and was slowly abandoning my old songs which felt so rigid with the smell of subway and traffic jams and crowded shopping malls.
I wanted to make music that felt like the ocean, and so sometimes I’d go sit on a bench at the beach while fiddling around by myself or with a friend.
This was the first and last song I wrote during that period. I went on a little tour soon after in 2015, wrote one last song “Speaking Leaves” on that tour, and after that I went on hiatus for about 8 years for various reasons, only playing in private.
This song sounds very much like the kind of music we would jam together back then. I remember playing it on mountain tops with trek djembes, a banjo, an Asalato, a golden retriever wagging its tail and smiling at us as it played with rocks.
I remember playing it in that old stone house with sand in my pants from a quick swim.
I remember playing it on tour in Guangzhou where friends from 4 cities gathered in a cafe that never officially opened.
I remember playing it in the mountains of Dali where time stopped for 6 weeks and all that existed was the sky and the earth.
This song embodies all of that. It was an attempt to clean off the stench of the city and I still feel those mountains, that ocean, and that old stone house coming back to me when I play it in the crammed bars of Tokyo.
In 2017-2019 I tried to update my surviving songs into the style of “Speaking Leaves” and “To Know Where” and put out an EP called “Sun Shone Blue” on streaming platforms.
“To Know Where” was supposed to be on it, as was “Speaking Leaves” but both needed re-vocals to be re-recorded and I wasn’t set up for that, so they went unreleased for a long time.
Later I would learn that they would play a very important role on the concept that later came to me for an album. Just around that time I cashed out enough to build my little makeshift studio corner.
To me this song represents transition. It’s about my adventure outside of the confines of society and my journey back. It ties together three different eras in a way no other song could.
In many ways it is The Fool card. The hero sets off on a journey which all the other cards in the tarot represent the ups and downs of. Then when the journey is over, you return to the fool, ready to set out on a new journey.
It’s also meant to be a bridge between nature and concrete.
I hope you can feel even a tiny bit of this when listening to the song. The album version is exceeding my expectations, and hopefully you’ll be able to har it in the first week of November. For now there is this live version.
As mentioned many times these past two weeks, I have been doing a campaign to promote this live album before songs from the new studio album start coming out these next few months. If you listen to the song and then login ant @scrobble.life and leave a comment there, I will buy $5 of Hive for every song you comment on and upvote your comments and possible your posts too.
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To hear the live album (with songs from the upcoming studio album) in it’s entirety or the EP with songs reminiscent of those days jamming between the beaches and mountains, click the link below 🌞 🌞
