Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
Linying – Bruno Major, A Song For Every Moon
There’s a dozen or so albums that somewhat explain me as an artist and serve as prefaces to the music I myself make, but asked to elaborate on a record that soundtracks a pivotal moment in my life, I’m temporarily halted.
Outside of admiration, jealousy and reverence for all the records that I’ve looked up to, I realise that with the things we love and why we love them, as with all experiences that make us human, there are inexplicable, irrational things in which we hardly have a choice.
I tossed and turned trying to decide between I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning by Bright Eyes, which taught me how to put the things I felt into words; there’s Bon Iver’s self-titled second album, which taught me to house the words in songs; there’s Coloring Book by Chance the Rapper, and there’s Blonde by Frank Ocean, both of which opened my eyes to how raw, unobscured emotion put plainly and bluntly, if acute and accurate, can hit you like a tonne of bricks.
But whilst all of those came to mind, there was one that just stood out to me. I don’t really know how A Song For Every Moon by Bruno Major became the soundtrack to me falling in love for the second time – in itself a frightening, irreversible process, to alter the course of which is futile.
I heard endless parallels in things I felt. Indulged in pessimistic and unfounded melancholy to “Places We Won’t Walk”, mourned imagined but potential loss with “Just The Same”, watched myself grow soft and pliable against my will to “Home” as I felt the first jolt of realisation that I had something I was deathly afraid of losing.
My days and nights mirrored “Second Time” lyrics almost mockingly, in the same week it was released, down to every detail: we were dangerously tangled, drank warm wine in paper cups outside against the pitch black of a country night, even nearly crashed a car. Even I have my doubts when it comes to the divine, but this sometimes makes me think twice.
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Singaporean indie-electronic pop artist Linying’s Australian exclusive new single ‘Paycheck’ is out now!
Catch her performing live at BIGSOUND 2018’s Hear65 Singapore Showcase.
