“Country music ain’t nothin’ but three chords and the truth.” - Howard Harlan, songwriter
Prelude: “Springtime”
A single ray cascades from the rafters. The spotlight lands on Linying—yellow blouse, hair streaked in silver, billowing, grey, wide-legged pants—as she basks in the warmth of a captivated audience. The wail of an erhu drifts through the hushed silence. She begins to sing, tone soft and ethereal, as the bodies in the crowd sway, as in a trance:
You just miss the springtime
Where the petals get pearly from your screen light
You got your phone out early to catch the bloom in her hair
While you’re losing your air to the shine
Yeah, you just need the springtime
Because the tides are turning now and you find
I get your insides churning
It’s not that I’m unfazed, yeah, I just know my place, oh
Not a single seat in the Esplanade Concert Hall is empty. Not bad for someone who was once told her music was too sleepy to fill it. She bops and she grooves and she plays the piano. She sings songs she’s written, both released and unreleased, and songs she’s loved. Like songs by ABBA and My Chemical Romance. Voices swell in unison to the music. “I’ve found my people,” she says. It is vindication. It is a moment of triumph.
Chord 1: “Self-Control”
The most enduring impression I have of Linying is from a cover on YouTube, shot during her 2019 US tour. Starting on a dark stage, the video cut to her performing in different venues: bars, small clubs, a café. The song of choice was Frank Ocean’s aching ballad “Self Control”, which had gripped me the first time I heard it: stunning in its anguished rendering of male vulnerability at a time when hip hop was dominated by a masculine bravado. And here was a Singaporean singer, refashioning its longing and its desire to suit the contours of her voice—airy melisma, tasteful precision.
It may well have been a Vice article covering 2019’s South by Southwest that brought the cover to my attention. Strangely titled “The 10 Most Bizarre Things We Saw at SXSW”, Dan Gentile gushed about it as “the best version I’ve heard” of the song. “She even did the auto-tune vocal solo, fluttering between registers without any effects and earning literal gasps from the crowd.”
Perhaps, I felt a kind of pride that a local singer had been given such a measure of adoration. This was maybe indicative of the kind of psyche that many Singaporeans shared: the notion that local artists, especially musicians from the indie and alternative scenes, hardly received the broader recognition that they deserved. Linying represented the first of many younger musicians who would build a more international following, drawn by the intimacy of her performances, the tenderness of her vocals, and the lyricism of her writing.
Chord 2: “Sticky Leaves”
On the day that I meet Linying, I am in Singapore and she is in Los Angeles (LA). Her Wi-Fi keeps cutting out. She is relaxed, dressed in a white blouse, legs hidden from view. I’d seen her at a bar with her friends in the Esplanade after her show but didn’t want to intrude on their moment of celebration with a request for a photo. I tell her that I started listening to her probably back in 2016, at the tail end of my period of indie self-fashioning. She asks me when I got out of that indie phase and I am caught looking sheepish.
At 29, Linying is just a couple of years older than me. Her music formed part of the soundtrack of my life through late adolescence and National Service, stirring feelings of deep yearning for elsewheres. Her vocals, ethereal and nostalgic, glided effortlessly toward a kind of transcendence. Linying’s songs in the mid-2010s often featured her long-time collaborators Evanturetime and Charlie Lim. Her music, which featured her lilting vocals against ambient soundscapes, seemed part of a shift toward an electronic sound in Singapore’s indie scene. I think of Midst or Disco Hue, running in parallel against James Blake, The Internet, or Bon Iver.
Linying played the piano and wrote some poems as a child and began writing songs in her mid-teens, while at CHIJ and then St Andrew’s Junior College. She began releasing music as a history major at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and also spent some time as an exchange student in Paris at Sciences Po. “It just brought me so much joy,” she mused. “Before I made it a career, I feel like I accessed some of my greatest ideas. I was just the most creative then.” She was deeply interested in art and would have continued with painting and art history. Linying’s emergence in Singapore’s indie scene came after she participated in Noise Singapore’s Music Mentorship Programme, in 2014.
Many of her early singles were fast-paced dance tracks. After hearing her covers on YouTube, the French act Krono invited her to feature on their single “Run”. This led to collaborations with the German DJ Felix Jaehn and the Belgian DJ Lost Frequencies on songs like “Shine”, “Eagle Eyes”, and “Summer”. With pulsating beats and energetic runs, as well as Linying’s vocals resembling those of Ellie Goulding or Jess Glynne, the songs seemed a curious contrast to the musical persona Linying has cultivated since. Perhaps they were a reflection of the maturation of her sound, but also of a shift toward songs that she had a hand in writing and producing directly.
In 2016, “Sticky Leaves” would prove to be Linying’s breakthrough single, winding up in the Global Viral 50 chart on Spotify, featuring on an episode of the television show “Industry”, and helping her land a record deal with the Nettwerk Music Group. Atmospheric and plaintive, with gentle, ambient piano and synths, the song is held together, however conspicuously, by the strength of her lyricism:
Is there another world you know?
And do you burn?
If you can tell me how it goes
I will learn
[…]
For every wreck I still believe in the greatest life and the stickiest leaves
And I
You say it in a foreign tongue
You don’t know a thing about the things I’ve done to keep on loving that heavenly face
“When I started writing songs, I probably learned to couch certain things in this way because I wanted to obscure the plain truth of it. I modelled myself after artists like Bon Iver and The National, whose writing was quite oblique,” she explained. “It sometimes embarrassed me to look at how I was reacting to things in my own life that seemed simple or trivial. Metaphors helped protect me from that feeling.”
The key metaphor that anchors “Sticky Leaves” lies in a literary allusion. “It’s from lines from the [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky book The Brothers Karamazov,” Linying explained. “The lines ‘Even if I do not believe in the divine order of things, the sticky young leaves emerging from their buds in the spring are dear to my heart’ and ‘I love those sticky little leaves and the blue sky.’ You see the beauty in the world without fully understanding it.” Published in 1880, The Brothers Karamazov is best known as a philosophical novel and a theological drama of sorts; a novel of contrasts between the Russian Orthodox faith and the encroaching forces of modernisation and secularism. Atheistic and intellectual Ivan, who said those lines, is presented as a foil to his younger brother Alyosha, a novice in training at a Russian Orthodox monastery. Ivan articulated a love of beauty that bypassed rationality: “You don’t love those things with reason, with logic, you love them with your innards, with your belly.” This profundity is contained within “Sticky Leaves”, which, in some ways, has ended up as a vehicle delivering Dostoevsky to the average Spotify listener.
For Linying, this apprehension of beauty, as well as an awareness of the limits of one’s comprehension, arose as a response to theological ideas. “I wasn’t brought up in a Protestant household, but I found myself in church in my teens,” she shared. “I was drawn to the idea of salvation but also had trouble accepting it. To think that the consequences for the decisions that we make, in states of mind that I don’t feel we’re fully in control of, can have such lasting effects—that bothered me a lot in my late teens and early twenties.”
People think that “Sticky Leaves” is a breakup song, noted Linying, and are surprised when she tells them that it’s about “religion and God”, and her relationship with trying to believe. “It’s like Ivan’s way of making sense of the senselessness and injustice of this world but still being able to find beauty in it,” she explained. “That’s what I hope to find and what often comes up in my writing. I have to feel helpless about the fact that I never asked to question all of this and it’s out of my control that I do.”
The poet and lawyer Amanda Chong remarked: “I remember sitting by the Singapore River and crying for two or three hours every time I listened to her music.” Chong, who’s also a friend and creative counterpart of Linying’s, added: “I love how she can evoke an entire mood with well-chosen details and specific images. I think that's the definition of poetry. Having that spareness and being able to evoke emotion. Everything is so believable—your own neurosis to ruining a relationship, crystallising very specific millennial emotions. She really does speak to a generation.” She recalled listening to Linying’s “Paris 12” while composing her poetry collection Professions (2016): “Her lyrics have just enough thickness for everyone to protect all their baggage, which is just incredibly cathartic.”
The intimacy of Linying’s initial crop of songs—“Sticky Leaves”, “Paris 12”, even her soaring “Vultures” with Charlie Lim and tender “Liar” with Gentle Bones—has resonated powerfully with her listeners. “After releasing my first few songs, I started getting messages from people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I felt exactly this way’”, Linying noted. “Someone said they had a moment lighting candles in their uni dorm after a breakup and playing “Paris 12” and crying with a friend with a bottle of gin. That’s like the highest praise possible. I love knowing that a song about my own heartbreak is now attached to someone else’s. It’s a magical thing.” Josh Wei, a producer and friend of Linying’s, quipped, “That’s why I make fun of her all the time. All your listeners [are] from NUS.”
Pensive, she elaborated, “I want people to potentially see themselves in my songs because that’s how I listen to music. My favourite songs are the ones where there’s an experience that is being talked about really intensely…The goal is to accurately represent emotion, but it’s also to make something that sounds good objectively. That takes away some of that cringe from discussing my feelings.”
Interlude: “The Road Ahead”
In 2021, the producer Evanturetime came to his long-time collaborator Linying with a proposition. By then, she had been releasing EPs and singles, performing at festivals across Australia, Europe, and Japan, and contemplating a move to Los Angeles. The task seemed deceptive and different: writing a National Day Parade song.
It is a vexed genre; a uniquely Singaporean concoction with roots in nation-building melodies composed by a Canadian marketing professional. It can be simultaneously the most loved and hated song for a month—blared incessantly in stores and on TV, subjected to complaints that they are hard to sing along to, often pressed through a mould with arbitrary requirements like the conspicuous insertion of the words “Singaporean” or “home”. It is hyper-visible and because of that, extraordinarily difficult to pull off. Linying was tasked with writing it, but ended up becoming the first voice on the track:
One man on an island
One drop in the sea
All it takes to set a wave in motion
Is a single word, an action
A hope that we can be
The change that we’ve been
Longing to see
For our home, our land, our family
It’s all within our reach
See this island, every grain of sand
Hear this anthem, it’s the voices of our friends
Come whatever on the road ahead
We did it before, and we’ll do it again
One sensed the tug between the desire for a stronger poeticism, recalling John Donne’s notion that “no man is an island” and William Blake’s conception of a “world in a grain of sand”, and the pressures of state-sanctioned messages for national self-conception: the beguiling sincerity of friends, family, and optimism.
Yet, for all my cynicism, the song felt exactly right for its time. Singapore had emerged from a prolonged period of circuit breakers—cyclical pandemic lockdowns. The second half of 2021 seemed to portend a more permanent lifting of restrictions. The sense of relief, the ability to breathe, that accompanied this prospect felt right in concert with the pulsating optimism of the song. It was enough to get me past the hipster reflex of having followed Linying before her spotlight at the National Day Parade (NDP), enough to lay aside the usual smugness with which I’d rejected the NDP songs of recent years (save for Charlie Lim’s reimagining of “We Are Singapore”). Even if Linying and her three fellow vocalists on the track, Sezairi, Shabir, and Shye, seemed to mirror Singapore’s beloved CMIO (Chinese Malay Indian Other) configuration, I couldn’t help but be moved by each of their performances.
Seeing Linying swap her introspective persona for one of firm confidence felt both vindicating and jarring, her emergence onto the floating platform, surrounded by dancers, voice gliding through a song of hope. If it was discombobulating to me as a fan, one can only imagine how disorienting it must have been for her. The busyness of recording and rehearsals, paired with the song’s rollout across Singapore and use for workouts and in primary schools, created a level of exposure she had hitherto not experienced. “I don’t think I realised the magnitude of it until later,” she remembered, recalling stories of healthcare and frontline workers telling her how the song encouraged them. Even the return of restrictions seemed to only temporarily contain the buoyancy that the song created. In an interview with Popspoken in 2022, she remarked, “I keep getting sent videos of kids dancing to ‘The Road Ahead’—I get so many baby videos—and now I’m starting to realise that the song would be a part of these people’s childhoods.”
Chord 3: “Good Behaviour”
In January 2022, Linying released her first full-length album, “There Could Be Wreckage Here”. This wasn’t long after she was featured on a massive billboard in Times Square as part of Spotify’s “EQUAL” movement. Amidst snowfall in New York, I listened to “Faith” and watched the music video for “Springtime”, with faces and scenes effervescent in their glow. I remembered thinking back across all the years that Linying’s music had patterned parts of my life, the tenderness of her lyrics, the arresting orchestral swells that felt like they engulfed me.
“Wreckage” would prove no different, swooping low in moments of melancholy and introspection, then high in moments of pure transcendence. The album had been written across London, Los Angeles, and Singapore. “In this collection of songs, I mourn the loss of my excitable self, once so enamoured with the idea of falling in love,” she remarked in an interview. “In its place now are fear reflexes and defense mechanisms, and they do nothing but dull the brilliance that should follow an experience as extraordinary and beautiful. I really want to bask in the glow, but there could be total wreckage here, and it stresses the hell out of me.” Flashes of Singapore appear in her lyrics—shophouses in “Lovers Stay Right for Each Other”, causeways in “Faith”, streetlights and temples in “Springtime”. In NME, Karen Gwee wrote that “...compared to ‘Paris 12’, with its aqueous production and knotty metaphors, ‘There Could Be Wreckage Here’ is certainly a bolder record. Linying’s crisp voice is front and centre, her lyrics by turns vulnerable and wry.” Each producer and collaborator—Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, singer-songwriter MILCK, producer Myriot—would lend their touch to the record, contributing tracks that sound capacious, intricate, and delicate.
Central to this movement is the track “Good Behaviour”, which comes in roughly around the middle of the album. Linying said that it’s her only song about happiness, and also one of her favourite among the songs she’s written.
“I treasure it a lot because in our loneliest, most destitute moments, that’s when we turn to art. But normally, when you’re happy, there’s no need for art, and we’re too busy enjoying the happiness,” she explained. “I think it takes something special to make you want to memorialise it and put it behind museum glass forever.” She cited songs by other musicians that are truly about happiness: “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys; “First Day Of My Life” by Bright Eyes; and “Close to You” by The Carpenters. Writing a song about happiness demands a happiness that overflows from a bountiful supply. The song’s lyrics read:
Let me know if you’re receiving
A message in this mess as much as me
God behind my carelessness and
Heaven in the ways that you see me, ’cause
Everybody love my good behaviour
Everybody love me softer, sweeter
And you don’t really ask for either
You only ask that I believe you
The euphoria, the freedom the song contains seemed to Chong a departure from Linying’s usual style, a transitory song, perhaps. “Her lover will accept her and her flaws, but she’s also come to embrace a joyful courage as well in being able to admit to her idiosyncrasies,” she explained. “Taking autonomy over her romantic life: I think that’s where joyfulness comes from.”
Josh Wei, Managing Partner at Snakeweed Studios and record producer, was living in LA when “Wreckage” came into being as a demo. While staying with him in 2019 during a work trip, Linying played it to him and asked if he was interested in working on some of the songs with her. “To me, lyrics would come second or third,” Josh remarked, “because when you hear a song on the radio you are most likely to be drawn to the music. But when I heard ‘Good Behaviour’, it was probably one of the first times in my life where the lyrics sold it for me. That’s when it hit me. She’s a poet.”
In an interview with Atwood Magazine, Linying said about “Good Behaviour”: “These are the most grammatically incorrect lyrics I have ever written”. Yet, it was for that very reason that she maintained, “this song was given to me by some great muse beyond me, flouting the confines of grammar and language.”
NPR Music listed “Wreckage” as one of its top albums the week it was released, placing Linying right beside FKA Twigs and Earl Sweatshirt.
In June 2022, Linying moved to Los Angeles. Since signing with Nettwerk, she’d taken writing trips to the city every couple of months. On one occasion, after a writing camp in Australia, her friend Jordan Blackmon introduced her to Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie. An offer to work on music remotely turned into an opportunity to work together in person. Linying flew to the US for a month doing sessions and meeting Walla’s friends and collaborators. She reminisced, “I understood what it was like to work with musicians who listen to the same kind of music. It wasn’t just like labels putting it together, but a community of friends who enjoy working together. It was very inspiring and I made a lot of great songs. It got me thinking about moving there.”
Linying had intended to move pre-Covid, but the pandemic put those plans on hold. That period got her thinking about the struggle, as many musicians in Singapore have shared with her, between musicianship and being a “low-key influencer”. She explained: “At some point, it ends up taking so much of your time that you can’t even focus on what made you a musician in the first place.” She added that she wasn’t great at being an influencer and that if she had pursued that path, she would have failed. “My life in music is such a privilege, and such a joy, and it’s the closest thing to magic that I have. I need to tend to this garden. I can’t let it die.” Reflecting on her departure for LA, she remarked, “That’s what made me do it.”
Linying’s move to LA wasn’t difficult. Realising that people moved to the city from all over the world all the time, often temporarily, freed her from decision paralysis. She arrived into a community of musicians she enjoyed working with, who she could see every week and jam with. “I very seldom did that in Singapore because everyone was very busy. Sitting in the studio working on something with no real agenda, that rarely ever happens. Doing that is healthy for the part of me that makes music too.”
But as for the city itself? “Low-level mania is really what LA is,” Linying quipped. “You just feel everything with such intensity, that everyone is going through some kind of big revelation, that some big self-actualisation thing is always happening.” Her days have fallen into a rhythm of studio sessions from 11 to 7, working with collaborators who have been able to tease out dormant emotions. “Sometimes it’s just a very little thought. Typically we’ll start playing some chords and there'll be a progression or some beat that will stick and I'll be like, wait, this feels like something. I need to spend some time sitting in my brain and sifting through what this feeling is attached to.” It is a meditative process, allowing the music to lead, allowing her knowledge of music to inform her choices when playing the piano. “Once you realise this is essential to the process, you get used to it,” she said.
A truth: “Wake Up (If I Was God)”
“For a whole year during the pandemic, I didn't listen to any contemporary music,” Linying said. “Everything I listened to was exclusively from the ‘70s and my top artist was The Carpenters. I still have the Spotify Wrapped screenshot.” These were songs her mother had listened to growing up, which in turn formed part of the soundtrack of her childhood. On reflection, Linying realised that her storytelling impulse could be traced to this tapestry, woven of the Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John, the Beach Boys, Loretta Lynn, and Kenny Rogers. In short, folk, soft rock, easy listening, and notably, country.
Back in 2018, while working on “Good Behaviour” with producer Tentendo in Melbourne, Linying asked him what genre he thought the song was. “He’s like an R&B guy,” she said. His response: “It’s kind of like country.” Linying said that stuck with her for a long time. “It got me thinking that everything I’ve listened to has been so country. Even in my later teens, I grew to love folk artists like Bon Iver and Laura Marling. And it all comes from my mum,” Linying said. “She used to put on these Kenny Rogers CDs and he had this one song called ‘Coward of the County’ that was an entire narrative, just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, barely any melodic variation but you’re so hooked because the song is so visual. It sparked this realisation that country music is part of my roots in a really weird way. I realised, ‘Oh, maybe I only like Bon Iver because I listened to so much Kenny Rogers when I was young!’”
Linying’s mother is named Doris. In September 2023, an artist called Doris Club released an EP titled “There’s Still Time”. In an introductory essay to the record, Doris Club wrote:
Doris grew up in Singapore in the 1960s, in a lively fishing community by the river that she described being filled with music all the time. She talked often about how teenagers would gather at the one house that had a record player and listen to everything from paranormal radio shows to the latest Carpenters records. The culture was infectious: a few houses down from hers, a guitar-obsessed kid fell in love with country music, started a band and flew to Nashville in hopes of becoming a star. My mother’s life followed a vastly different trajectory, although the lulling melodies and melancholic storytelling so characteristic of country music remained her greatest comfort, so defining many of my earliest musical sensibilities as a child.
At age 30, she was diagnosed with a rare and incurable nerve condition that would render her weak and sleepless. Living with trigeminal neuralgia meant jolts of extreme pain shooting to her face in unpredictable intervals, torturous nights kept awake by attacks, drastic weight loss from being unable to chew…and, when she became pregnant with me, a choice between staying on the painkillers or giving birth to me.
[...]
Her relentless faith awes one half of me and angers the other, but it is the awed half — the one I’m convinced I owe to her, that isn’t afraid to embarrass myself by trying, would rather hope and be let down again and again than be bitterly right about a bad feeling, that feels warmth and a sense of return when she sits at my desk with headphones on, crying happy tears to a draft of a song I’ve made — that I know I must devote myself to preserving. With this realization, I’ve walked into every studio session in the past year saying, “I don’t care what kind of song we make today, it’s just got to be something my mum would like.”
Part of me believes that if I honor what it is that makes me capable of making songs she loves listening to, I can never really lose her. Every lens I’ve looked through seems to show me the same truth: Whatever it is that makes me an artist, I’ve inherited from her.
Doris Club is where she lives in me…and the joy it has been to keep us both alive this way.
Though Josh Wei and Linying were friends for years, there never seemed an opportune time for them to work together. A possibility arose in 2015 when Wei was asked to serve as a music director at one of her concerts, which he turned down. The second came when he was asked to work on “Wreckage” with Linying in 2019. On both occasions, there was an unwillingness, a sense of stylistic incongruence, or simply fear of interfering with Linying’s vision. Wei was a pop producer. The prospect of working with an indie artist seemed if not unfathomable, then extremely difficult.
“Artistically, I was ready to be more adventurous,” he explained. “Maybe it was after being friends for more than eight years that we reached the point where I was ready to bend toward her as a producer and she was ready to bend toward me as an artist.” When they had their first studio session, Wei was not without scepticism. “It can be hard for someone with a very strong direction and sense of artistic identity,” he said. But with Linying, “I always felt respected throughout the process. Every time I said something, she would take it seriously. She pushes me because of her perspective and sense of artistic identity and vice versa. I think with ‘There’s Still Time’, it’s some of the best work I’ve done,” he gushed.
“There’s Still Time” arose out of a period when Linying wanted to move toward being more instinctive with her music. Perhaps it was the overexposure of NDP, seeping into her mind in the form of questions about audience appeal and treating music like a business. Doris Club would write of “accidentally fronting nation-building government propaganda.” “I think I miss how instinctive everything was when I was a bit younger. I’m really happy that I wasn’t ever a practical person,” Linying reflected. “Now I catch myself having practical thoughts, and it scares me. I feel like when I was in my very early 20s, I had the main principles figured out, like the meaning of life, you know, to experience everything in an honest and good way, and not be afraid. I think now, having just seen a bit more, I get a bit more cautious. That’s something that I’m actively always trying to fight against every day, to not let fear govern my instincts.”
In the studio, Linying looks to her mother’s example to guide her process. “The guiding principle or prompt was that my mother’s very instinctive. Every time I send her a song, she has a very clear idea of what felt right and what didn’t…I just went into these sessions with this mindset, wanting to be instinctive, intuitive, not bound by genre or period.” The choice of a new moniker, the writing of songs in a new city, and the refusal of practical instinct were conspicuous departures from Linying’s older style. Attempts to feel like a vessel of some grander inspiration. To start a new artistic project, to rid herself of any expectations, to find ways to access creativity she knew existed within her.
Yet, Linying kept surprisingly silent about these songs in her public appearances. One of the first times anyone heard them was at that fateful concert at the Esplanade in September 2022, a full year before their release. “I felt like as my core listeners you guys get it,” she said to me. “I couldn’t bear to not share it with you, especially as a fan of artists myself.”
There was a thrill of secrecy that night, of being privy to new releases. They were different from what I’d expected—upbeat, thrumming, danceable. “The Movie” moves from synths to tambourines and handclaps, laced with the nostalgia that makes it sound like 2000s pop. “The Sea, The Ocean” has a pulsating doo-wop beat, built upon a thick bassline. “Seraphina” has a twangy, driving guitar riff that makes country music’s stylistic influence conspicuous. “Oh No! (Pt. II)” is an anthemic, triumphant pop beat laid upon cries of “I don’t want to be alone!” Chong, who was also there that night, noted, “This is post-‘Wreckage’. It’s a very different kind of persona behind the lyrics—less confessional, and more healing in terms of drawing different kinds of stories and personas.”
“‘Wake Up (If I Was God)” threads carefully the melancholy that Linying is known for with a more upbeat sensibility. The effect is a kind of anxiety, a skittishness in parsing complicated notions of fear, preemptive grief, desperation, and piety. The song begins:
Up all night striking a deal
With whatever god who can feel the way you feel
These days, you don’t ask him why
You just wait ‘til the bad days to pass you by
‘Cause they have to
But if I was god
You’d be home in my arms and it’d be over
I’d say the word
And it wouldn’t hurt any longer, oh
But I’m not
So wake up
It sounds completely unlike how it reads. It is a contrast of substance and form, intimations of dread juxtaposed against effervescent production. The track features recordings of the voice of the eponymous Doris, Linying’s mother, stitched into the song’s fabric. Doris, having lived with the pain that came from having trigeminal neuralgia. Doris Club, having grown up anticipating loss, developing sensitivity to the impermanence of time. “Wake Up” is the clearest encapsulation of Doris Club’s vision of the album as part “love letter to my mother”.
Postlude: “Porcupine”
On November 17th, Linying’s newest EP “House Mouse” was released. “House mouse” was a nickname that her former housemates gave her, inspired by the sight of her standing quiet in a corner eating a slice of cheese at midnight. It reminded her that at her core, she was an intuitive person.
If “There’s Still Time” was guided by instinct, “House Mouse” was guided by intuition. If the former suggested resisting the impulse to think too much, the latter might suggest knowing something without conscious thought. “...both effervescent and emotionally intimate, the result is proof of the wild magic that comes from letting go and leaning into your most unfettered impulses,” explained the copy from Nettwerk. The lead single, “Porcupine”, sounds like a slightly grungy cross between beabadoobee, Phoebe Bridgers, and The Beatles. It goes:
Porcupine, you’re so confused you know
A couple spindles loose, whoa
What you doing?
Nighttime, noon, in the morning on your back
Just looking dumb like that, whoa
You’re losing
Oh I don’t wanna leave myself behind for a feeling
Don’t give it meaning so early on, oh
Porcupine, don’t leave yourself behind in a mirror
You’ll only get bitter, oh
I think you’d better go inside.
A couple of months before the album’s launch, in September, Linying hosted an intimate gig at Snakeweed Studios in Kaki Bukit. The news was disseminated in group chats dedicated to her fans, now christened variously as “Linguines” or “Linyingators”. It was intimate in multiple senses of the word—audience members huddled against one another on the floor as Linying spoke through the songs she was about to play. Her hair was blonde and she sat regal in a black top and pants. It is an acoustic piano set, featuring songs from her earlier EPs and unreleased songs from “House Mouse”, like “Definitely”, released with Charlie Lim and Katz. Her voice cut through, crystalline, in a small room. The audience stood up to sing “Good Behaviour” with her. She expressed wonder at my friend Eden’s phone case, shaped in the likeness of corn.
“For many years, I was thinking, you know, am I doing anything truly worthy with my life? All of us feel that way in creative fields. People only think that way when they’re self-conscious about their work. But as I started getting these messages time after time from people saying like, ‘I heard your song and it saved me.’ It sounds dramatic. Unreal. But it’s very real to them. As a music listener, that’s sometimes how I feel myself. It’s been such a big part of my life and I wonder how much less colourful my life would be without music as the soundtrack to all these moments,” she mused.
“I think she sees music as an extension of herself, not a sellable product. She’s telling you her whole being. That’s why people come to her shows and know her lyrics,” said Wei. “This is her struggle in the world of record labels, commercial success, and streaming. She has to find her balance. I hope she never changes, but I hope she finds that middle ground.”
In the course of making “House Mouse”, Linying began surfing lessons. The waves changed all the time. “I think that act of physical surrender trains the same muscle philosophically,” she explained in an interview. “...you move in tandem with what’s in front of you. And when you’re able to do that, resist the urge to impose and control, you truly reap the rewards: the sweetness and the rush of a smooth ride, and a happiness that feels effortless.” Her social media feeds are dotted with glimpses of a present happiness; on beaches, eating fruit, at the studio, by a sunset.
“Everyone has a gift somewhere and so for me, with music, it would feel like such a waste not to utilise it,” she concluded at the end of our Zoom conversation. “Having this in my life has made me better to people, kinder to people, and I think I am a better person for it.”
With gratitude to Sophie Chew, who first began work on this profile, to fellow Linyingators Eden and Jing Min, to Amanda Chong and Josh Wei for speaking with us, and to Linying, for the songs and the candour.
Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor of poems and essays. He received a BA in English from Cambridge and an MA in East Asian Studies from Yale. He is the author of the poetry collection “going home” (Singapore: Landmark, 2022). More of his writing can be found here.
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