Hey, congrats' on the album release! How was the launch at The Sportsman?
It was a blast! The Sportsman was the perfect fit for us because it's a small bar where the packed audience gets right up close and in your face, just the way our music was meant to be heard. The owners Gina and Billy go all out to make it a friendly, homely place for audiences and musicians alike on a daily basis and were brilliant in making our launch a success. Billy is also the frontman and guitarist for the resident band Crozzroads and they play our favourite brand of blues and rock, which cements its reputation as an unpretentious rock and roll joint. Victor has been stealing guitar licks from Billy since before he was legally allowed to be in the premises!
General Lee obviously has a unique and distinct style – melding Singaporean life and experience with Americana influences. How did the band arrive at such a particular music style?
Thank you. We believe our musical style to be one big melting pot of influences that we have been fortunate to be exposed to since childhood. The fabric of these influences are much broader than any of us could ever understand. Our individual influences span across so many genres and artistes so much so that you never know exactly what is going to truly seep into our music. We did discuss how interesting it would be to hear what people would eventually classify us as.
Victor, for example, is primarily a blues guitarist so that comes out in everything he plays and writes whether intentional or not. Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Lightning Hopkins, and many others we could list out but then we'll never finish...he’s also big on other traditional American genres such as bluegrass and this led to him dabbling on mandolin and banjo, instruments which you'll be able to hear in our album. He’s probably that one guy who'll go into record stores in Singapore and ask if they have any Bill Monroe, and they'll all look at him funny like a cheeseburger was just ordered.
Certain influences or artists that we listen to tend to overlap in one way or another. Lin is a fan of Son House and Robert Johnson, delta blues musicians, whom he discovered through listening to Led Zeppelin extensively and in turn trying to find out their influences. That creates that connection backwards with the blues and Victor. It also creates that connection forwards since obviously Ken studies John Bonham (drummer for Led Zeppelin), on top of other evergreen artists and old school funk and soul groups which in turn has a further connection with Isaac. It’s especially evident when the rhythm section of General Lee go in depth when discussing about their favourite jam or groove bands from the past eras like Grand Funk Railroad, Tower of Power, Average White Band and many more. Like earlier mentioned, General Lee’s music is one huge melting pot of influences that has its roots in Americana. Even British rock and roll pays tribute to this historical and culturally linked form of music.
If you look at the family tree of American music, blues and bluegrass are strong influences on Southern rock, another sub set of roots rock and roll which is where we converge as a band. Add to that the fact that we all grew up in Singapore in a time before the Internet (Yup, we're dinosaurs), we felt that our country deserves songs that tell our history and commemorate our local legends beyond the cliché-ed sleepy fishing village narrative.
The album art is amazing. The colour red and the rooster are clearly deliberate and intentional choices that resonate with the band's style. Do you want to speak more on the artwork, and the decision for a physical release of the album?
The band has always been quite particular about capturing the raw energy that we are known for, so it was only natural that we decided on a physical release to preserve the high quality of the recording. Having committed to that, we then decided that we’d turn the physicals into part of the creative representation, a sort of extension of the music. We approached a close friend of ours, Soh Qiuling, who does brilliant artwork and photography, to design the physicals. Together with her husband, who is also a long-time close friend of the band, we knew that whatever they came up with would be a close representation of our personalities. Red and white were chosen as the primary colours, as we’re all patriotic Singaporean sons As for the rooster with the vintage microphone, it was a tongue-in-cheek take on the local colloquial term ‘Talking Cock’ – which incidentally is something we spend too much time doing.
It seems like the track “Little Miss Judy” has a quite a rich history, spanning the length of almost a decade. Would you like to shed some light on the song's history, and how the four of you came together to form the band?
Yeah, we took a really long time to write that song! It started off as one of Isaac’s ideas with a single riff and you could probably argue that the hook is in the first chord but it just evolved every time we played it. It’s one of those tunes with a seemingly uplifting melody and raunchy lyrics but the true meaning of that song is one of tragedy and loneliness, very much in the vein of how Gilbert O Sullivan writes his stuff. A happy-sad song if you would call it. But you’re right, the song has its beginnings in a tertiary band competition called JamX organised by NUS about ten years ago. This was way before General Lee was formed but coincidentally, all four of us were there during the finals, either as part of the band that played an earlier incarnation Little Miss Judy, or part of another competing band, or as an audience member. We were all friends already back then and did gigs together in some way or another so it was pretty natural for the four of us to come together as a band finally. Maybe you could say it took us a really long time to form General Lee too!
Singapore's military history also seems to be a significant theme for the band, especially in the track “Opium Hill”. Could you talk about what inspired the song and its local historical context?
None of us are historians but arguably every major civilisation with a long enough history will have written songs about its events, a sort of oral history in musical form. Unfortunately, wars tend to make up a big part of it and the American country music that we love has a longstanding tradition of ballads about monumental battles and its' key figures.
Singapore is a relative baby on this planet but we personally believe there is plenty of material for the music scene to draw on, having been through WWII and post-war modernisation at breakneck speed. The Battle of Bukit Panjang was the first to come to mind and occurred not very far away from NUS, in fact you can still see pillboxes along Pasir Panjang road. Defying all odds to hold their ground to the very end, the legend of Lt Adnan and “C” Company is well-known to Singaporeans and we felt that it deserved a song of its own.
It's often all too easy for people to think of it as just another paragraph in a history textbook, so our aim was to present this legend in an alternative form that will trigger their latent memories from long-gone exams, making them curious to read up about it and re-visit it without the urgency of memorising for regurgitation. Through this song, we hope to make up a small part of Singapore’s oral history, no matter how infinitesimal.
Once we had the ominous guitar riff and the rockabilly beat, the lyrics fell in place and it was probably one of the songs we took the least time to write!
After this debut release, what does General Lee have planned? When is the band going to perform for us at NUS again?
We’re planning to hit all the usual places in Singapore so you’ll see General Lee on stage soon at some of the more familiar pubs and live venues in the coming months. Our target is to bring our music to the region as well and spread our brand of rock & roll to as many people as possible. That’ll be fulfilling. And well, hopefully we’ll be back in NUS soon. We spoke to CFA a while ago and maybe we’ll work out something exciting. We have our roots in Kent Ridge Hall so it’s always great to share our brand of music with the younger audiences in NUS, most of whom have never heard anything like that before, so we hope to be back again.
One last thing, where does the band get their plaid shirts?
The same place where The Sportsman gets their checkered wallpaper! Ok but seriously, we’re not trying to create some sort of fashion statement if that’s what you’re inferring cause that’s just what we wear on an average day, although it does save time spent since these shirts don’t need ironing. Ok the ironing bit probably doesn’t apply to the whole band!
https://general-lee-sg.bandcamp.com/releases
