關於 fresh kid songs ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

Welcome to my 2nd blog.

I guess you can say that I'm your classic Virgo - perfectionistic, idealistic, a little anal and OCD. Which to me is ironic, given my early musical alter-ego or public persona, has been mostly sunshine, beaches, ukuleles and chill acoustic music. With artistic and musical expression, sometimes you discover new facets of yourself. I love that about art and music. But as chill and as easy all of it looked, I definitely was so not chill about it behind the scenes. From how we chose to combine different instruments for each song, to keeping it fresh and creative and slightly different each time, to picking the locations, to getting the perfect takes, to video editing. I could be glued to the chair, forgetting to eat, drink or pee... all day all night until the work is done. That was my flow.

Flow is always easy, when you can catch the wave. When you feel like you know what you’re doing, when you feel like there's a clear direction. When you catch the wave, you can just ride on the momentum, and everything seems to go smoothly because you can simply function on "what feels right". But then you have those roadbumps, or even those walls. At those points, time seems to move way slower. Everyday becomes a drag, and you start to feel lost, unmotivated, and stuck. But they are necessary. They are there so you can be better. They are there to give you a better board to ride the wave on, because waves all die off eventually. And I always have to remind myself that it's called life, and it's totally normal. But before I got onto it, I had no idea what it was, or what it would look like.

I still remember when "flow" didn't exist for me. I still remember the time when I had my first ever professionally produced and published solo song, before the whole R&K phase, when I worked with the first producer I had ever worked with. I remember winning a certain competition hosted by a certain label, thinking all of it was so exciting and so cool, before the scary reality struck. And then after all the congratulations, he sat me down, and told me the harshest things, but also the most real and genuine words that I still remember today.

I remember going through hours and hours worth of meetings with him, and feeling very discouraged after all of them, thinking that I suck. But I know all he wanted was to try to fire me up. I still see it as tough love till this day, but I guess I was too soft and meek back then to take it like a pro. It definitely took me a while. I remember typing out something he said to me, as a status on my personal private facebook account, and I posted it only really to have it serve as a personal reminder. Essentially, the point was that I had to step up my game. But it wasn't just "step up your game". It was a creative metaphor. Amongst a lot of other things, he said, “Ok, so you won the competition, you’re just the fittest kid in a fat camp. Now you have to go run the olympics. It’s a different playing field completely." I remember posting something like “fit kid in a fat camp”, just because I found it very tongue-in-cheek, and was a good reminder. I was fired up, determined, inspired, motivated, I had an imaginary bandana around my forehead, and I’m like, heck yeah, let’s do this. And then… One day later, with his index finger pointed towards my direction, and with a firm, but calm kind of assertion, he said “Hey, don't quote me on facebook." Ohhhh-kay. Ooops. *Delete.* (I guess all these years later, I just quoted him again. Oops.)

But I can say that whether or not you agree with his mentoring methods, he was, kind of, my first music industry mentor. I remember a lot of the comments he had on a lot of the songs I had. I remember him finally liking ONE particular song that I had, that he ended up arranging and producing for.

I remember sitting on his producer chair, listening to the finished arrangement of my song on the large speakers he had, and being moved to tears. I remember internally freaking out about the crazy makeup on my face for the music video, but was too chicken to say a word about how much of a freak it made me feel like. I remembered from the first time I walked into the studio to record the song. I showed up with a large mug of tea and honey. He told me immediately I should not have had tea, because if it’s caffeinated my voice will drain and die sooner. Darn. Lesson learned. I then found myself in the recording room, and I was so nervous my voice was shaking. My vocal muscles did not listen to me, at all. I didn't realize a professional microphone can pick up so much of my vocal imperfections... But I stuck it out anyway; I only had one session, I had no choice. Walking out of the studio at the end of it, I really thought he was gonna be so harsh with his words. I mentally prepped for it. But he actually was nice for a change. “Hey, not bad for a first time. You should be proud of yourself.” Phew. okay.

And there it was. My first song ever published.

My stories and memories will always be something I can look back on with a smile, no matter what they are. I’m proud to look back and realize how much I’ve grown, thanks to this producer of harsh words, and many other mentors of mine, I hustled hard and was unapologetic about it when I caught my first wave, in the early stages of R&K. It maybe one of many road bumps right now, but when the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th wave comes, I’ll have new experiences, new stories to share, and new waves to ride on yet again, musical or not, and I’ll enjoy them and cherish them with new perspectives in place. I guess my point is this - Enjoy the ride, enjoy the flow, and be chill with your road bumps or walls. Even if there are no waves to ride on at the moment - still know and have faith that new ones are coming your way. To me, “hope” and “faith” are different. Hope can sometimes produce false expectations, and leave us in despair and disappointment; but faith, on the other hand, keeps us going against all odds. Know the difference. At least, it’s what I know I can always hold on to, and it’s still keeping me going.


Till next time. Choose love, and bring light.

Love,
R

#RobynnBlogs #WelcometoMyMind #BlogNumber2 #人生第一首出版的歌

下一次寫什麼好呢？
Inspire me:
你們想知道的故事
Let me know what you want me to share!
你們的故事
Tell me your stories! I'd love to read/share them too!

I'LL BE ON RADIO IN 2 HOURS!!! Tune in to my very 1st #Lushlist today from 1-2pm on Lush99.5 to hear all my favourite songs. 📻🎤🎸🎷🎶

There're lots more bands I adore / wish I could share with you, but it was impossible-and painful-to try squeezing them all into an hour. For now, expect beautiful music from Giants must fall to Kimbra (from #TheGoldenEcho fresh out this week!), B-Quartet, Thundercat, Vandetta, Amateur Takes Control, Hiatus Kaiyote, Pleasantry, Snarky Puppy, Mew and many more!!!

I desperately wanted to be a radio deejay as a kid, so thank youuu Michaela Therese for the lobang <3 Keep a lookout for this girl, guys, she's got exciting things up her sleeves.

Nobody’s Fool　　( January 2011 )

Yoshitomo Nara

Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.

But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.

While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.

As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.

In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.

Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.

Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!

I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.

Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.

By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.

And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.

Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.

But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.

The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.

Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.

After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.

Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.

After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.

I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….

Produced by ILL MO
Composed/Lyrics by ILL MO, ABAO
Arrangement/Beat by Oskrr
Recorded/Mixed by Yi Zhang
Recorded at Yi Z Home
Photography/Cover Art by Jerrythepopper
Font by Jhih-ning, Wu
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OFF THE WALL

ILL MO:
Fresh off the boat I couldn’t fit in
calm on the outside but burning within
New York New York big city of dreams
The out-of-placeness made me write reams
A skinny Taiwanese kid all alone
With the earphones on playing 2Pac songs
World crumbled when 2Pac gone
Then the parents decision got me flew back home
回到家 回到了台北
飛過了雲 也飛過了海水
還是格格不入 怎麼做才對
做自己的路上沒有人排隊
Off the wall 他們說我奇怪
但我學會不再活在別人的期待
Off the wall 別再說我奇怪
Be original yolo不會留下遺憾

ABAO:
izuwa nu sekapalak itjen
有時懷疑困惑迷惘
kipakimi tjen tua niya vuvu a djekuac
試著追尋祖先的腳步
izuwa nu misepi tjen ta gadu i tjumaq
有時夢見家鄉山的樣貌
kipaqenetj ta na i tjumaq a kavulungan
試著找尋似家鄉天空的畫面
aza djalan na seljekuya
前面的路很崎嶇
maya mavarung
無須擔心
maya mavarung
無須擔心
maya malekutj
無須害怕
kigaljui a djemavac
慢慢的小心走
zangalu.*3
加油吧
（東排灣古調）
i ya ne lja lu ne
qe ma i ina na a ~ya u

MO:
It’s ok to be different
It’s ok to be you
你可以做你自己
It’s ok to be you
It’s ok to be different
It’s ok to be you
你可以做你自己
We gon always stay true

ABAO:
（東排灣古調）
i ya ne lja lu ne
qe ma i ina na a ~ya u

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FOLLOW ILL MO:
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/illmoisthename
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ill_mo/

FOLLOW ABAO:
https://www.facebook.com/ABAO825/
https://www.instagram.com/abaotw/