So as you may have gathered from one of my recent entries, I was going to collaborate with a lovely Chinese artist Sen. Here is her CD cover:
She lives in Bejing, but was coming over to NYC for a little bit… I meant to meet her in NYC, but my schedule got all twisted around, so I could not go.
But no fear, she came down to LA for a couple of days and created a masterpiece of a Chinese lyric for my song Odi et Amo. And sang it, too! It sounded beautiful and gave me extra inspiration to keep learning Chinese (to be honest I have not been that good at it because my attention has been elsewhere).
Sen has an amazing voice, and her debut EP was produced by the brilliant Guy Sigsworth back in London. Actually it was through Guy that I got her contact information. And she is such a lovely spirit! And very, very talented. We had some fun communicating because my Chinese is non-existent, and her English is still in the learning stages. But she kept getting better and better! There is nothing more fun than having fits of giggles and using sign language over sushi, in my opinion. She did say that I was very quick at grasping the tonal nature of the language, as we both read through it, so hopefully it won't take me too long to learn the lyric and be able to sing it.
What I did not know was that unlike in spoken Chinese, the tonal nature of the language does not completely command the singing. What that means is, in Chinese you can have the same word, but depending on how you say it: with rising inflection, or falling, or -haha-rising AND falling, it becomes a different word.
However, with lyric writing, as apparently it should be done, ideally, if you write a Chinese lyric for an existing melody, you have a double job in front of you! Writing something that actually makes sense and works with the song, but ideally also pick the words that are by their tonal nature suited to the melody! So, if the melody is going up – use the rising inflection word, if the melody goes down, use the falling one… you get the picture.
Sen was very conscientious about the whole thing… she stayed up till 5 am to write the words, apparently:) And she wanted to do it the right way. As she informed me, very seriously, in a lot of pop music these days, writers slack off and do not follow the above rule. BUT – she said – the proper way of doing it is in matching the words to the melody, and that is how she went about it…
I can't wait to go visit Beijing now. If we lived close to each other, I think we would have become fast friends and collaborators. But thank goodness for the Internet! We are still going to collaborate. I have some very cool ideas, and I can't wait to take this futher…
Incidentally, as I was visiting her blog again, I saw that she posted the same pictures on there!
It is so lovely to make random connections that turn into these magical music and friendship moments. I look forward to many more.
