Blue Street Lights (藍色街燈) - Leon Lai (piano cover)

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Old school canto-pop is so nostalgic.

When I was growing up, my parents would cycle through a few canto-pop CDs in the car as we were driving. While I never really learned any of the songs in the sense that I could sing them or whatever, many of the melodies really stuck in my head because we listened to them so frequently.

One of those songs is 藍色街燈 (laam sik gaai dang) by Leon Lai. Maybe it was because written and sung Cantonese is so different from colloquial that I never remembered the lyrics to any other song, but this one was so straightforward and pronounced that even as a child I couldn’t miss it, and so it stuck.

Now over a decade later I found myself one day wondering if I could find this song on Spotify, and find it I did. The old-school canto-pop atmosphere with its reverb, lack of bridge, repetitions of the chorus, and use of dramatic backing singers, everything was just so nostalgic.

And with the power of the internet, I’m now able to more fully appreciate the song via translations.

But what a sad song it is. I got that blue street lights symbolize something sad because that’s something that perhaps is understandable also in my culture, but knowing what more of the song is about despite it being written in a major key and at times even sounding hopeful made me appreciate it all the more.

In particular, I found myself listening to this song over and over again for about a month as I was going through a breakup. The sentiment of trying again and again yet things not working, of love passing you by as a car passes streetlights on the road, and the sad reflection of a blue light in your mirror as you contemplate how even that fails to encapsulate how you really feel, everything just hits home.

At some point I realized that I wanted to engage more with the song, so I wrote an arrangement for it. It was probably the fastest I’ve ever written an arrangement, in part due to the simpler chord progression and greater amounts of repetition, but also because I didn’t feel particularly compelled to make things complicated.

In verse 1 I decided to deviate from the original because I wanted something that felt delicate and lyrical, which is why it’s a lot more flowy than the rest of the song. Verse 1 and pre-chorus 1 are definitely my favorite parts of this arrangement because they feel like they convey my feelings the best.

Starting from chorus 1 I sought to replicate some of the rhythmic feel of the original, which explains the change in the left hand pattern. It also gets much more expansive.

In verse 2 I decided to place the melody in the middle voice to create more opportunity for movement in other voices. Then at 2:39, completely on a whim, I decided to play it in A melodic minor instead of natural (the original chord progression goes Emin to Amin, but I go EMaj to Amin) with big, tripleted chords, and I feel like it really adds to the tension of the section.

The third chorus, I primarily focused on varying the left hand and didn’t change the right at all. I think it preserves the feeling in the original because they do sing the chorus twice like that almost identically before it drops out at the very end.

And at the very end I knew that I needed another delicate moment of catharsis to end it all, my last good-bye after getting off the rollercoaster, hence why it gets soft and delicate again.

At the end of the day, I went from finishing the arrangement to recording it in 2 weeks or so which is why I didn’t have it memorized. I was also in a place where I really didn’t want to play the piano or practice, which is why everything from that recording day was read on sheets and the things I wanted to have by memory turned out to be duds.

But the one of the things that kept me attached to music in those moments was finishing this arrangement, to finally be able to let people know how I felt. And so, that’s why certain sections are a bit rough and the voicing is a little bit suspect, but I hope that my sentiments through this performance still somehow reached you.

Well, that’s enough 1990s nostalgia for me.

Until next time,

- Watt

Thanks to @Tsuki-Music for translating the lyrics!

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