Brett Callwood
Linying Sees the Lights: LA-via-Singapore artist Linying told us about her Francis & the Lights experience.
Linying: As an ex-perfectionist taking great measures to undo what feels like a hard-coded impulse to maximise, I’ve come to realise that what is best is only as true as what feels best… which then becomes an exercise in listening to yourself.
The best gig I’d ever been was the one I hadn’t known was happening until it was in front of my eyes — it was SXSW in 2017, and my guitarist and I had just stumbled out of a church in Austin where an up and coming artist named Billie Eilish had played a solo set on her ukulele. On the way out we spotted Chloe Grace Moretz sitting on the steps and, while gawking, nearly collided with a tricycle Questlove was sitting in. As musicians from Singapore growing up in a city state in which life was by and large predictable and sterile, it blew our sheltered little minds that we were turning corners every five minutes and seeing people whose faces we recognized as pixels, but now in flesh.
We turned another corner and walked straight into a song I had been playing nonstop all week so that I recognised it in seconds — the almost meditative symmetry of the verses shocking you into the euphoric swell of the chorus, shouting “May I Have This Dance?”. Francis Starlite was surprisingly tall and disarmingly animated on stage, and I watched him stumble and stagger while I pushed my way to the front in excitement and delight, shrieking every word. The vividness with which I remember that brief performance is rooted so much more in emotion than in objective detail: I don’t know if he had a live drummer on stage or if he was playing an instrument — all I remember is the glow of pride I felt knowing (and proving to everyone in a 10 foot radius that I knew) every word to Friends, the arches of my feet sore from jumping to I Want You To Shake and my cardigan, discarded and likely trampled somewhere on the floor while I thought about moving away from Paris and for the first time toyed with the thought of making America my new home while he sang about a Frenchman losing his restaurant in My City’s Gone.
Being equal parts planner and daydreamer, what I have learnt fantasising too long about any experience I look forward to is that to live too much in your brain will always be an impediment to that which can be lived outside of it. I have been and will be many more times to concerts in beautiful venues with state of the art sound systems where an artist whose discography I know more intimately plays their very best of the tour that night, and it will somehow never hold a candle to the sweet surprise of walking into an accidental rapture, both fresh and familiar, a testament to the beauty of coincidence, instinct and serendipity — with sore feet and a forgotten cardigan to show for it.
Linying Sees the Lights: Linying’s EP House Mouse is out now via Nettwerk. She performs at the Resident on December 3.
Editor’s note: The disclaimer below refers to advertising posts and does not apply to this or any other editorial stories. LA Weekly editorial does not and will not sell content.
Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.