Album

You're looking at the cover of my CD. That's right. It's the one with lots of white spaces on the front. I have been wondering for the longest time, 'why should I make an album?' when recording individual songs will do, in doing what it is I really liked about 'music'.

I liked music because part of it was therapeutic, and partly a way to encapsulate and express certain things. I came to a tentative conclusion that what inspires me most, is to capture and express the gist of something that I have been thinking about.

In a way, putting the songs on record is also a sort of closure, to put on record certain defining and shared moments with others, as experienced, that looking back in memory, helped shaped that time in life, not necessarily mine.

I guess it is also for the times when people asked for my CD, for something tangible, and a way to get my songs out there recorded in the best way possible in which its essence aren't compromised.

It's nice that different people can appreciate the same song differently- perhaps an unintentional result of the way the songs were written or titled.

Most of the songs were written in the quiet stillness of the night. While a title like Sunny Days suggests a pleasing song, I'm afraid it is anything but sunshine. 'Good intentions' is about bigotry, chauvinism, with some inspiration from science, and 'Sleeping' is about crossroads and life's choices. 'Beautiful minds' was inspired by a writing class, about different realities, and 'My time' and 'Do you see me like you' were written for documentaries; 'my time' about a man who lost his family and his resolution in fighting an unjust law that led to that tragedy, and 'Do you see me like you' is about prejudice.

I sometimes imagine my songs as individual cartoon characters, and how they feel having been to places unimagined at time of writing. 'Feels like falling' is an honest song, primarily written for private therapeutic reasons, but ironically went on to win an award for being the most downloaded song on a Malaysian music chart. But my hero would be 'do you see me like you', who despite being used for an AIDS campaign, and one against child abuse, somehow found it's way, as part of an anti-racism educational video series, into an infamous racially tinged party's general assembly, where the Vcd was waved around and wrongfully accused to incite racism, when it's purpose was exactly the opposite.

I couldn't quite decide on a title for my CD that would not impose upon what they are about. So there you go; it's a 7-track CD of the above songs that has gotten heard at the 'mother-of-all' women's music festival in 2008. But I think they're just glad that after being kept in the sidelines for a bit, and having been messed around with one imposing and conniving music producer, they finally found a home that appreciates them for what they are.