When it comes to writing a song, its so easy to play safe. Make something that is easy listening and will appeal to many people. But to create something new, something fresh, something proggresive, you need to dare to push the boundaries a bit. Over the last 3 years I made many songs and most of the time I always made something that would appeal to many people. Something that could be accepted by the majority the first time they hear it. But at a certain point, and this is almost a natural thing for most serious composers, you want to do something else, something different then the rest. A few months ago, Thanh Bui and I sat down and started to write U&I.

 

 

It started with a whole bunch of music pieces I composed and I send them to Thanh Bui. He picked the beat that is now U&I, because he felt that with this beat he could tell a story. A story about him coming back to Vietnam and reconnecting with his motherland. When we sat down to write the melody and the lyrics I had my concern about the chorus. Because the melody is so westernized I was not sure if this would work in Vietnamese. The Vietnamese language is a tonal language, so words flow up and down the whole time. The melody in U&I stays on the same not a lot so not only was it difficult for the Vietnamese lyricists (Le Xuan Truong and Phan Cong Thanh) to write lyrics for it, it would also sound very different from the rest of what people are used to listen to in Vietnam. So the song U&I was for me a big gamble. Either people would like it, or just hate it. 

 

 

Another element was the music video. We all wanted something different, something that has never been done before. So we sat down with Charlie Nguyen, the director of this Music Video, to create a concept, a script that tells the story in a non-obvious way. For anyone who doesn’t gets it the first time. The girl that Thanh Bui is following stands for Vietnam, the mother land that he is longing for. Which is why you don’t see her face because that is unrelevant. Who ever wants to know how she looks like, here she is :)