"Music Gave Me a Place to Learn How to Be Myself." (an interview with Anh Le)
For the first entry in Half Mystic’s interview series, we’re so delighted to introduce to you a musician whose covers are as gorgeous as her original songs and whose work is overflowing with simple, resonant hope. Please give the most beautiful of welcomes to Anh Le!
HM: So many of your songs are deeply relatable, and they focus on a wide range of seemingly simple yet universal emotions. Do you usually base them on your own experiences, on your imagination, or something in between?
AL: Usually, my own experiences. My favorite songs are the ones that say something that everyone’s been thinking but nobody’s said out loud (either because we’re too afraid, or it’s too embarrassing, or we’d rather not face that truth ourselves). So I always strive for that when I write. I also think that we experience such wonderful human moments all the time—we just don’t notice them or talk about them in a normal conversation. I try to be self-aware about how I’m feeling on a day to day basis and during conflict and times of change. I find my best ideas through those little feelings. If I’m strategically listening to my crush’s problems and learning all his secrets so that he’ll be my best friend and fall in love with me… I’m pretty sure someone else has done the same thing too. Everyone has gone through a bad break-up at some point in their lives (or they will, I imagine), but there’s very different types of break-ups and reasons for why people become unhappy. I feel like my mission as a songwriter is to find all of those different layers. Someone with a broken heart is going to listen to the radio and want to hear a song that “gets” them. Instead of being too general about unhappiness, I want to find those really specific but—as you mentioned—universal experiences.
Of course, since I haven’t experienced everything, sometimes imagination has to be used. And in that case, I just try to listen to other people and hear their stories. I may not be able to relate to it at the time… but I trust that I’ll come across something where I finally go “ahhh, I get it now.” I try to keep my ears open and make mental notes of things I find interesting.
In the end, though, what I think ends up happening more often than not is that I’ll sit down and write a song because I’m having an emotional reaction, and I’ll try to write what I think I’m feeling. I’ll sing some filler lyrics and then sometimes a line comes out that is definitely not what I thought the song was about… but it just feels right. And as I’m writing it, I figure out what I was actually feeling all along—sometimes it works like that.
Do you think having an audience on YouTube has impacted your work? If so, how?
Having a YouTube audience has definitely impacted my work. Covering songs taught me so much about how to write better music. I started gaining a following on YouTube when I covered these K-POP songs in English. The thing is, I don’t speak Korean or know anything about the language, so I relied a lot on these word-for-word translations that usually made no sense. I also didn’t like how a lot of other English covers had this weird flow to them. It didn’t sound like an American pop song—it sounded like someone was trying really hard to fit these literal translations into English. My goal has always been to write the lyrics in a way that if no one knew the song, they would think I wrote it. So I paid a lot of attention to the stresses in words and why some words just fit better with different melodic lines than others. I learned how to make choices about what to keep and what to change in order for the cover to still hold its original meaning, but not be held back by those ideas if it just didn’t work. It forced me to have a deeper understanding of the song as well as developing a more technical skill, or knowing what words, syllables, and sounds to use.
Not to mention, I learn a lot from the YouTube audience as well. I’m fortunate to generally have really kind people giving me feedback on YouTube. It’s definitely made me more aware of what works and what doesn’t. Lots of people on YouTube also give me suggestions of songs to cover, so I’m always on my toes about what I should be listening to. On the other side of that, I have also found out what I’m more passionate about and what styles of music I don’t like as much.
Most of your music is accompanied by piano. What draws you to that instrument in particular?
Piano is just my main instrument. I can play a few chords on guitar, but piano is really the one in which I have a command. I think I just got lucky that my parents introduced me to such a versatile instrument. Even if I knew other instruments, I think I'd still write at the piano because of all the choices you can make. I feel like you’re not as limited with the piano. If I want to write something more soft and delicate, I can start my intro on the higher part of the piano. If I want to write something really angry and rocking, I can hit a bunch of loud octaves on the lower end of the piano. With a piano, I feel like I have an entire band backing me up even when it’s just me.
Are you planning on experimenting with any others?
Not sure if this counts as an instrument, but I’ve experimented with production and I'm learning how write with different sounds on a laptop. I guess that’s still pretty keyboard-based—but I’ve written songs that sound nothing like the ones I wrote on piano because of all the additional liberties I can take with tracking a bunch of instruments at once.
Also, as a Media Writing and Production (Commercial Composition) major in college, a lot of what I have to do involves composing for other instruments, so I have written for string quartets, horns, and the occasional vibraphone and piccolo here and there. I may not be able to play them, but I am learning about all of the things I can do by adding these instruments in my songs.
What has music taught you about yourself?
Music gave me a place to learn how to be myself. You know how dyeing your hair and changing your appearances can make you feel like a new person? I feel like I develop a new side of my personality and voice when I finish a song that I’m proud of. I feel like I get to experiment with who I am based on what genre or what lyrics I write. Through various songs I’ve written, I’ve learned that I love straightforwardness. I love blunt honesty over flowery or poetic words.
I also learned, through music, that what other people think of me doesn’t have to define me. I think a lot of people who don’t know me very well might perceive me as being shy or maybe even a bit cold. Some people might think I’m really nice all the time and maybe they think I’m a pushover. But with music, I know I have more than enough to say. I know that I’m a pretty—most of the time—a pretty good judge of character. I know that I have a lot of passion and conviction when I get to a point where I want to speak up. Music taught me this inner confidence and trust that I know myself.
Recommend three songs by other musicians to fans of your work.
Ah I’ll give you five just because I can’t narrow it down.
Kate Davis, "Keep an Open Heart": So simple and creative. The metaphor of a doctor giving you a new heart and telling you that it’s going to be bad but you’ll heal—it’s so clever! But also makes you feel better about being down.
Vienna Teng, "Level Up": Motivational. Moving. The production and arrangement is great—it really gives you this feel that something big is going to happen if you just let it.
Brooke Fraser, "Who Are We Fooling": This is one of my all-time favorite songs. This is one of those songs that explores the difficulties of love and all of its layers. And it does it in such a simple and beautiful way. There’s no good guy, no bad guy. It’s not a dramatic break-up... it’s just saying that love is hard.
Train, "Drops of Jupiter": I thought this was one of the cheesiest songs ever for the longest time. It’s about a breakup because some girl needed to “find herself,” right? WRONG. There’s so much more to the song and I encourage anyone to look up the story behind “Drops of Jupiter” and be blown away by its depth. And plus, those strings in the chorus? Make me want to stand on a canyon and really live my life, you know?
Sarah Close, "Singing Your Questions #4": Okay... so this isn’t really a released track or song. It’s actually a YouTube video from a YouTube musician who also does covers. She takes all of the questions that people have asked her throughout the year and writes a song answering all those questions. The melody sounds like something you could definitely hear on the radio, but the questions asks stuff like “do you like cheese”—and yet it all kind of fits. I’ve been very inspired by this girl.
Generally, how long does the songwriting process take for you?
The timeline changes depending on why I’m sitting down to write. There’s definitely a different process for when I’m assigned to do something, when I’m co-writing, when I’m just writing for myself, or when I have an idea and I want to follow through with it. That being said,I usually write songs by sitting at the piano and playing some sort of groove while singing random filler lyrics. I try to sing out filler lyrics that fit with the mood I think the piano accompaniment is giving off. And I will continue that until I have a definite melody for a verse, pre-chorus, and chorus. Then... I let it sit for a few hours before coming back to it. If I still like the music, then I go ahead and do some surgical work on the lyrics. That may take a few hours, days, weeks. It really depends. Sometimes I know what I want to say; sometimes the biggest battle is being honest about what I want to convey in the song.
A cliché of a question, perhaps, but an important one nonetheless: what do you love most about music?
A couple of things.
The first—and sorry for sounding really maybe slightly crazy—is the different world you get to be in when you listen to a song. I’m positive I fell in love with music in the window seat of a bus or a car on my way to school when I was younger. Because for those 20 minutes in a moving vehicle, I was transported out of my central Floridian suburb and into an epic movie where people are renouncing their ex-lovers, or I’m in a club where P!nk is “getting the party started.” Life just has so many more possibilities. Or at least that’s how I felt and still feel every time I listen to a song. It makes me appreciate the raw human emotions that make songs feel so darn good even when they're sad... while also keeping me imaginative and hopeful for an exciting place somewhere outside where I’m living or sometime in the future.
The second is how... persuasive it can be without preaching. It can change your mind and make you who you are without telling you what to think or what to be. I can’t help but think it’s okay to be young and be reckless when I listen to a Ke$ha song.
What would you most like your listeners to take away from your work?
I hope anyone who listens gets a sense of who I am. I hope they get taken away for those few minutes that they listen to the song to the world I lived in when I wrote that song. I also hope that the song finds them when they need it. I hope I say something that is helpful. I hope I give them ideas for how to get over someone or to win someone back. I hope I can comfort them. I hope I can be their friend to rant to when they’re angry. I hope whoever listens knows they’re not alone. More than anything, I want them to feel.
Haha, I guess I want a lot of things.
If your music were an ice cream flavor, what would it be?
Ooh, I literally just ate some Ben and Jerry’s “Tonight Dough” before answering this and it was delicious. So that’s the flavor of ice cream it would be.
What's next for you as a musician?
Producing! My biggest goal right now is to be the best songwriter/producer I can be. I want to be able to take the next step after writing a song and creating the sound world that comes with it. I feel like that’s where so much of the magic happens. You get the story, the emotions, through the music and lyrics. The production is what makes the difference between feeling like you’re on an exploring rocket ship in outer space or in some Parisian Cafe.
But really, who knows? New YouTube videos every week. Eventually releasing an album. Maybe writing a musical? I’m up for whatever.
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