After a three-year hiatus and a single later, singer Shea Ng is sticking to what he does best sonically with his single “The Bird and The Fish” — thoughtfulness and honesty.
Interestingly, it is quite tough to find any information about Shea Ng — an anomaly compared to his contemporaries. Even more interesting would be how he seems to have a different “vibe” from them. His personal Instagram is private (his musician account @sheamisenmusic is public), he seems to rarely give interviews and frankly, he does not seem bothered by the “fame game” — so much that he took a three-year hiatus after his critically-acclaimed debut single “Ivory Fields” exploded on the internet.
“Lights of the Fireplace” — Ng’s single that dropped in May this year — feels like closure for him, akin to the final stage of the Kubler-Ross Model of five stages of grief. If “Ivory Fields” (With the things we’ve seen, o what could this have been) felt like shock and denial about a relationship lost and “Smoke” (But you lit the cigarette, I watched you fly free, As you rose up in smoke) was about pain and guilt, then “Lights of the Fireplace” would be about acceptance and hope — a tabula rasa for Ng to explore a new frontier of sounds.
“I hoped that it will evoke emotions of grief and loss, and yet, an appreciation that such pain is but the perseverance of a love towards something once beautiful.”
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“My next single is called ‘The Bird and The Fish”, an evocative musical narrative with indie-folk stylings featuring lush orchestral instrumentation. This song is a collaboration with my close friend and fellow singer-songwriter Enya Lim (who goes by @nyalimusic on Instagram). It is essentially a metaphorical sketch for a conversation we had, contemplating our place in the world, and it explores the idea of self-actualisation and self-discovery.”
“It also delves into the idea that being raised for a certain role may not necessarily mean that is who you are truly meant to be, yet it may be the dissonance that makes the journey beautiful.”
Like the tragic story of Icarus the winged god (The wind is tearing you apart, And then one day you’ll find you weren’t built for the sky) and the nymphs of Homer’s halios geron (Little fish under the sea, You think you wanna be above this watery blanket), “The Bird and the Fish” is a modern allegory about what it means to find one’s self. It is not a rose-tinted view of life and neither is it formulaic in a Disney “Go the Distance” type of way.
“With Enya and I both being artists at heart, but having taken very different career paths (me being a medical doctor, and Enya being a full-time musician), we are faced with our own set of joys and challenges associated with our very different professions; this song thus probes the ‘what-if’ notion that commonly surfaces during one’s process of soul-searching.”
“We intend for the music — coupled with the cover art — to evoke the nostalgia one would feel when reading an old storybook they once read with a child’s simple wonder many years ago — hardcopy, slightly yellowed and ruefully delightful.”
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“Besides the EP (which the most recent release ‘Lights of the Fireplace’, and my debut single ‘Ivory Fields’ belong to), I also have other ongoing projects, one of which is with my four-piece funk-pop band ‘Oakë’, consisting of fellow singer-songwriter Irwin Zephyr Tan, producer/bassist Daniel Wong, and drummer Joel Hong. We have an Instagram page @its.oake.”
“Our upcoming song is an upbeat, retro-funk tune titled ‘Magic Clock’. The playful song flirts with the idea of going back in time to win back someone presently losing interest in you. While ‘Magic Clock’ will be rather different from our launch track — ‘Where the Heart Will Stay’ — it will be more in line with our band’s genre and love for ‘funk-pop’. We really hope that it will be a bop for listeners!”
This story about Shea Ng and his latest single “The Bird and The Fish” first appeared in our August 2021 issue.
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