Brett Anderson and his former band Suede stirred up the British rock scene in the 1990s with pop-rock music full of David Bowie-esque glam and suburban angst. Considered the inspiration for a generation of groups referred to as “Britpop” bands (a term and category Anderson doesn’t like), the band was notorious for indulging in the excesses and pomp associated with the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, played out in tales of drug addiction and in-fighting.
Things are calmer today for the 41-year-old singer-songwriter, who released his latest solo album this past summer and appears in Taipei on Sunday at the Urban Simple Life festival. Anderson holds no regrets about Suede, but is happy that those days are over.
“I had a lot of fun, but there was a lot of darkness as well … but you know, there’s no better way to spend your [20s] jumping up and down in front of thousands of screaming kids — there really isn’t,” he said earlier this week on the phone from London. “I heartily recommend it to anyone but I don’t want to still be doing that, I’ve done that and it was great, but I’d be really sad if I was still trying to look like a 25-year-old, still trying to act like a 25-year-old.”
One won’t find such youthful exuberance on Anderson’s second solo work, Wilderness, but instead a quiet, intense passion. Anderson stepped away from the standard pop-rock instrumentation, whittling down the album’s overall sound to just his voice, cello and piano, and the occasional acoustic guitar. This minimalist approach allowed him to focus on the album’s mood: melancholic and darkly romantic.
“I think successful albums are one mood, one sort of feeling, [where] you’re taken to a world, you’re taken to a little universe in 45 minutes, and I think that it’s really an interesting kind of way of making a record,” he said.
For Anderson songwriting starts with melody. “That’s what music is to me. Words in music are secondary to the feeling, because music is all about feeling.”
He sought to capture a feeling of raw immediacy by recording each song live with minimal takes and little overdubbing.
He also used older technology, cutting the tracks on 2-inch tape instead of a computer hard drive.
“Yeah, I just wanted to make an album that sounded really natural. I think modern musicians have too many options. I mean, you have [all sorts of] those computer programs … and they’re great if you can use them in the right way but if you get seduced by them, you end up making very plastic-sounding music,” he said.
After six months of writing and rehearsing, Anderson finished the album at the recording studio within one week. “It was really a quick album, and there was a real energy in making it. I didn’t want to sit around, poring over it in the studio for hours because sometimes you lose the energy when you’re doing that,” he said.
He enjoyed the process so much that he might do it again. “There’s a real freedom to it. I’d like to try and release an album every year from now on till the day I die,” he said.
With his own record label now, there’s no reason why he can’t. “I’m not beholden to some record company telling I can’t be released until 2012 because they’ve got other artists they want to release. I’m my own boss now, and I like that freedom that I have with that.” On his next album, he says he is “interested in working with electric guitars again,” but for a more “ambient” atmosphere rather than a traditional rock sound.
While Anderson may oblige die-hard fans with a few Suede songs arranged for guitar, piano and cello on Sunday, his live set will revolve around the new album, as “that’s sort of relevant to me now and I think it’s a good album and I think people should hear it.”
“I don’t have this sort of thing where I want to reject my past,” he said, noting that he already did that with another post-Suede band, The Tears. “It’s just about moving on, and wanting to do different things, wanting to be a different kind of person. I’m a much happier person than I ever was then, and I’m much happier with what I’m doing musically, to be honest.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist