“I don’t think any creatives could get away with not writing a part of themselves into their pieces.” — Liti Nguyen, Music Director
And so we asked January about herself.
Little Miss Sun grew up with her family and their Sunday Pub as her emotional anchor. When life takes a treacherous turn, the pub is all that’s left for her to hold on to. But when a dashing new world suddenly enters, orders a drink and invites her to ask whether there could be more to life, it is also Sunday that ties January back down. She doesn’t have time, or more precisely, doesn’t even allow herself time to be with her feelings. The sole idea of risking her pub — the home of her working class, her family legacy, her utmost priority — for something she isn’t even sure about, is terrifying. So she chooses to not entertain it. And that choice in itself, is both timid and brave.
It takes a certain courage to put others before yourself, knowing that it is what may be expected of you, what may be right for you to do. This peace of mind you create for your loved ones is the least you can do; they’ve already given you so much. Then one day, you’ll find yourself wandering alone, wondering whether this is all that there is to life. Eventually, you are scared and you turn away, but you unlearn a blueprint you thought was yours. Because it takes a certain timidness to accept that this blueprint is all that you are, and it takes a certain courage to ask yourself what it is that you actually want.
Stepping into January’s strappy white flats, we realized we were just as scared to face our truths. We’d find the right emotions but refuse to explore and write about them. We were scared. The Sol Town that we were trying to be a part of, to get to know, was a place we had been living in this whole time. Loss, casual discrimination and transgenerational trauma do not only exist in Sol Town. We too live in a society where talent and hard work, or even a combination of both, cannot guarantee safety more than a full stack of money can; where pursuing what we dream about could mean leaving behind everything we ever knew. But slowly, as we let one or two of these keywords in, sometimes that’s all it took to start telling a story. We’ve found that any type of work, especially work one holds so closely, could be spontaneous, messy and without order. There were days of jumbled ideas and days spent putting them into boxes.
This being our first original soundtrack, pretty much every step of the way was experimental, including the use of Musescore, the fantastically odd Tim Minchin and enough guts to believe that we could write three songs in one day. We learnt to find inspiration from the most trivial occurrences, in the weirdest contexts and from the greatest people. It can feel like a vicious loop of trying and failing, but other than buckling down to delete and write until it feels right, there seems to be no profound shortcut. Composing to us is not an automated manufacturing process where new songs are seamlessly churned out, but rather a constant chain of contemplation and realization. And from this nonlinear discovery, we gradually learnt to respect our feelings more, even when they are not easy to sing about.
This chapter of Sol Town has been written and introduced to you with the notes we scribbled between 9-5 shifts and after school rehearsals, but we ourselves are still getting to know January Sun. Given the chance, we hope that you’ll revisit with questions and your own interpretations of the songs. And whatever you may find, we hope that like her, you will be scared and brave, all at once.