I shall begin this chapter with music and end it with music. I miss my guitar, I miss my songs, and I miss my primitive home studio. This morning, I dreamt of writing the structure of a song (one of my few ways of writing songs) – a simple two chords for the first bar, one chord for the first second half bar, and two chords for the remaining second bar. I could have written it down right here right now but with no guitar to verify the correctness of such a chord progression, I would not wish to embarass myself in the future just in case I have become a big star. In my dream, I was going through the song structure with my band’s guitarist Jason and was showing him how the strumming with distortion was going to be and how the song would transit to a fast pace riff and ended with a clean strum with Jason’s electric guitar using an effect that turned the sound into piano sound. The dream was so vivid that I still remember what the song was like. I so miss my guitar back home in Singapore.
Walked into a supermarket in Hong Kong and I could not believe my eyes to see that a bottle of red wine costs S$8.50. Well, it surely won’t taste that good but it is an alternative for daily consumption. Why the wine in Singapore is so expensive?
Met up with my favourite uncle and his family for dinner. He knows the waiters and waitresses and supervisors so well that I was thoroughly entertained throughout the entire dinning experience. The staffs love him so much that he is conned as The Chairman. This dinning episode reminded me of how dramatic and animated Hong Kong people are. Drama is in our blood, part of our culture.
Walked to one of the park in Central (Central Business District) and the park was turned into a place to celebrate Christmas (digression: why do Hong Kong people love to take photo so much) – beautiful decorations together with a live band. A live band! I was so delighted to see a live band playing in the park. The bassist – a Japanese – was cool. The way he played the bass was amazing. The leader of the band, I presume, played his guitar well. He sang and played saxophone too. The drummer and the rhythm guitarist was pretty good. But the female vocalist and keyboardist was a disappointment. I was so surprised to see that they were playing with the song scores right in front of them. My band contemplated such an option as my songs’ chord progression is quite unique (read: hard to memorise) and of course I still hope to fully engage the audience instead of peeping onto the scores from time to time. I have a feel that this band is from Singapore as they have made a few hard-to-miss references.
Now, add to that “missing” list – I miss my band.