Alone Again (Naturally) by Gilbert O'Sullivan
I talk a lot about my mother's tendency toward melancholia... this is a song that I feel encapsulates the spirit perfectly. The hopeless resignation in each verse's narrative, the way in which something experienced in a singular moment, if felt strongly enough, can seem like an all-encompassing truth: this intensity has inevitably influenced the person I've become and therefore the music I've made.
A Horse with No Name by America
A song I grew up listening to in the car as a child, filling my brain with mystical images of deserts that used to be oceans. We would put this on blast and sing every word without realizing how odd and senseless the lyrics were.
Coward Of The County by Kenny Rogers
It still tickles me how integral country music was to my upbringing, considering there couldn't be a more contrasting environment for it: lush, skyscraper-filled landscape in a hyper-modern, tropical Southeast Asian city-state. Doris and I definitely found a way to dream about mountain ranges and ranches speeding through Singapore roads.
Don't Shut Me Down by ABBA
One of the things Josh Wei and I bonded over when making this record was our commitment to the ridiculous and the theatrical in the music-making process. One day while bored in the studio at Snakeweed, we found an original ABBA piano stem sitting hidden in one of his hard drives, likely from a legacy studio somewhere that got passed along on an LA trip. I remember loving this song when it came out, doing a deep dive into their career and thinking how nice it would be to release album after album for as long as I live.
甜蜜蜜 by Teresa Teng
Teresa Teng was one of the most influential Asian pop singers of all time whom we listened to for hours on end growing up. This song, the title of which translates to "honey-sweet", talks about the sweet smile of a lover one meets in a dream. I'm an avid dreamer, and the images from my dreams often make their way into my songs. I can't help but be drawn to the unabashed, sickly-sweet nature of the instrumentation and vocal delivery: here's a soft woman who knows exactly what she likes (makes the three of us).
