SINGAPORE, Sept 8 — Google JAWN and you might stumble onto the website of one Jonathan Chan, who describes himself as a “designer, musician, friend”.
The site ably showcases the first descriptor — with Chan’s design work for several local music luminaries, including Inch Chua, The Sam Willows and Gareth Fernandez on the main page.
As for the second descriptor, well, Chan recently released his debut single Fade To Black, a smooth country-folk number that was accompanied by an eye-catching music video featuring popular local artistes such as Narelle Kheng (of The Sam Willows) and Joel Tan (Gentle Bones).
To the general public, Chan may have come out of the blue, but he has been ploughing a consistent furrow for some time now beginning in 2011, when he was a finalist at the Noise-Timbre Singer-Songwriter Programme (along with fellow singer-songwriters Jaime Wong and Deon Toh).
Two years later, Chan was mentored by Sara Wee (53A) under the National Arts Council’s Noise Music Mentorship programme, and it took another two years before Fade To Black came about.
“Music came in all sorts of bits and pieces through my life, but my earliest memory of it was starting to learn the piano when I was eight,” said Chan.
The young artist also credits Kings Of Convenience’s track Know-How as a catalyst to explore acoustic folk music. “Well, I remember that the first band I’d ever heard ... I knew that I liked it. That’s one of my favourite things to happen, you know? Those rare, crystalline moments when you find music you really resonate with. There’s nothing quite like it,” said Chan. “It’s like saying: This is me. This is what I really, really like. This is who I am.”
Anyone who has followed his postings on social media will certainly attest to his creative mind. However, Chan disagrees with the stereotypical definition of creatives. “I think that all people have an innate capacity to create and make something ours, whether it’s the best cup of coffee in the office or the neatest file in class — it’s in our blood.”
Chan, though, appears drawn to the visual and musical arts. And to help him with the latter, in translating big ideas into recordings, he has employed the assistance of music professionals he had characterised as “some of the best and most talented people on the island”. These include ace producer Roland Lim of Sync Studios and stellar musicians such as guitarist Mark John Hariman, drummer Bani Hidir, vocalist Lisa Haryono of Enecdote, guitarist Sano Shimano, violinist Kim Eun Hyung and bassist Tim De Cotta.
More impressive is the music video for Fade To Black, which features production values that set the bar high for local music videos. Chan puts it down to his friendships with the people involved.
“I’ve worked together with some of the people on set for literally more than a decade,” he said. “We’ve grown up together and we were graduating together (Chan studied Visual Communication at Nanyang Technological University), and it was kind of a beautiful, bittersweet thing to work on something together for the last time before life took us into unknown waters.”
Fade To Black has allowed Chan to express an emotional perspective through creative mediums. “It’s about letting go of someone gracefully, even if they might have hurt you, even if you have the right to be angry. It’s about wishing someone well,” he said of the song.
Chan aims to develop these feelings in his upcoming EP. “Each song is about a different thing. The EP deals with love, loss, death and religion, and all the things normal people think about when nobody is there to think about things with you.
“It’s about these universal, human themes that we all struggle to deal with.” — TODAY
* Fade To Black is available from iTunes.
