Scott Tang

For Asians, taking photos of the food is like the new saying grace

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:37:00 -0700

OK, maybe it’s less of an Asian thing and just another example of how technology is changing the ways in which we memorialize good times, but does anyone not have at least a few friends whose phones and cameras are cluttered with photos of food?

I don’t mean the title of this post to be taken literally, of course (that would be ridiculous). But isn’t there a similar thing going on? You’re grateful for that beautiful cheap, plastic plate of hot guo tie in front of you, or the bowls of curry and bharta simmering on the tabletop in the dim light, or the steaming, enormous bowl of pho under the fluorescent lights and what better way to show it than by trying to preserve the memory pho-rever?? You’re a food pornographer. You and everyone else at the table who whipped out their phone. You think that someday, you’ll flick through the photos on the Camera Roll in your iPhone and remember exactly how you felt staring wide-eyed at that styrofoam container filled with xiang qiang fan, and you know what: you’re RIGHT! You will!

Take that photo, you food pornographer. In fact, take several from different angles for safety.

"should i also get a i phone? love mom"

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:07:00 -0700

“should i also get a i phone? love mom”

- email from my Mom

“My Heart Plays To A Click” (NEW SONG). Again, not...

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:23:00 -0700

“My Heart Plays To A Click” (NEW SONG). Again, not the 100% completed album version, but more or less. I actually like the lyrical content of this song better than I do the music… This song also has kind of a strange structure; there’s a long extended instrumental part in the last section, and I think I actually like that part better than the other parts. I wish I were a better producer, too… there are parts where I could hear what I wanted, but didn’t have the producing chops (or gear?) to make it exactly how I pictured it. Anyway, enjoy.

I just realized

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:08:12 -0700

that’s two video game-related posts in a row. And I’m not even a gamer. Maybe I should be.

phoenix. the band.

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:05:59 -0700

Scott: do you like phoenix
Quincy: joaquin? bakery? eggs? down?
Quincy: arizona?
Scott: haha sorry
Scott: the band
Quincy: I'm unfamiliar.
Scott: wth is phoenix down
Quincy: a reference that is lost on you. no worry.
Scott: now I want to know
Quincy: it is an item in the Final Fantasy series of games that is used to revive unconscious party members.

gauntlet

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:15:01 -0700

Scott: Elf needs sleep. Badly.
Scott: Ever play gauntlet?
Quincy: haha
Quincy: yes
Quincy: not that they ever "need sleep"
Scott: well, they do in real life gauntlet.

you + me + the lotus festival = tonight

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:00:11 -0700

My band - comprised of the very talented Quincy Surasmith, Helen Hua, Eugene Kim and David Tran - will be playing at the Lotus Festival in Echo Park tonight at 8pm. So come join us.

Never been to the festival before, but I hear it’s a pan-Asian cultural event, which indicates I may be trying to keep my mind off all the awesome cheap, fried food while I’m on stage. The website - http://www.laparks.org/calendar/lotus/lotus.htm - claims this year is highlighting the people and cultures of China. Man, if that includes cong you bing or any other kind of Chinese comfort food, I’ll be very distracted while I’m trying to perform…

"I know I can’t be the only person for which the act of songwriting consists largely of lying..."

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:54:07 -0700

“I know I can’t be the only person for which the act of songwriting consists largely of lying on my bed thinking…”

A rare look into what goes on at rehearsal with my band. ...

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:10:56 -0700

A rare look into what goes on at rehearsal with my band.

Quincy “Johnny Cash-ifying” my songs.

Some thoughts on peer pressure and attraction

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:03:37 -0700

Recently I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine on IM. We were laughing at uh… this. My friend, who’s had some experience with that site, explained to me that the algorithm it uses to decide who’s “hot” or not is actually pretty logical, as it takes into consideration things like how many views a profile got and how it was rated by your peers. My response was, “blah. fuck my peers.”

I think that about sums up my feelings re: a recent study that suggests our feelings of attraction towards someone are influenced heavily by other members of the same sex being attracted to that person. In other words, if you see all the other guys checking out a girl, you find her more attractive.

To which my response is: bullshit.

Have a nice day and trust no one’s eyes but yours.

New song: “Fuselage”… kind of different (just...

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:06:38 -0700

New song: “Fuselage”… kind of different (just a simple, sad song). Enjoy.

Save the date: Saturday, July 10, 8pm

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:05:07 -0700

My band and I are playing the Lotus Festival in Echo Park. Joining the band will be David (Applesauce) Tran on bass. It’ll also be Quincy’s first time busting out his acoustic guitar. Should be a great night, come hang out with us!

My Dad taught me how to ride a bike at a nearby schoolyard on...

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 19:08:00 -0700

My Dad taught me how to ride a bike at a nearby schoolyard on the weekends. I remember one day an older kid came up and pushed me off the bike. To this day, I still remember the image of my Dad chasing that scared kid around the schoolyard. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

My thoughts on music and ego

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 03:06:00 -0700

OK, WARNING #1: Rambling ahead.
Uh, WARNING #2: This post may get pulled tomorrow, as I have a tendency to regret blog posts more than a couple sentences long.

Actually, on that point, the purpose of this post is not to be preachy or judgmental. What is the purpose of it? To help me sleep.

It’s Friday night, you say, why do I need to sleep? Because I have to get up tomorrow morning to get an oil change, and I stupidly scheduled it for 10am. OK, on with the post…

This is something that’s been consuming me lately: music can be entirely way too connected to ego. Don’t believe me? You need to watch YouTube more. OK, but forget the other singers and musicians for a second, I can only talk about myself. I have been struggling with trying to detach my ego from my music. Without getting too personal, as this is a subject I’ve discussed at length with close friends lately, I will say that I detest the idea that I might be motivated to make music for any reason than to express myself. That is - and has always been - my primary motivation and I want to keep it that way.

After my last album, I took a break from music for a while (among other things). I had to take a step back and decide, where do I want to go from here? What I decided was that the next time I started making music, I would do so completely free from any external factors. Who would like it, why would they like it, why would I like that they liked it. It’s tricky cause as musicians in this day and age, we have to wear lots of hats, and some of them are business-oriented or what not. And of course it’s natural for artists to want to connect with other people and their audience(s). But I think it’s easy to let that seep into places it shouldn’t.

I feel that in the past, this connection between my music and my ego has hurt myself and those close to me that I cared about. I can’t go back to that or tend to wounds that old, but I have a lot of regrets. There are people that I miss very much who were affected negatively by my inability to separate the two and to just focus on my “mission” as an artist. I won’t say what that mission is here, but suffice it to say that it’s actually very simple and has nothing to do with my ego.

Anyway… I guess I will leave it at this: When I was a little boy and was writing my first song on my family’s old upright piano, I wasn’t thinking about how I was gonna meet lots of famous people or get chicks or how I was gonna totally put this up on YouTube. I was only thinking of the music and what it was communicating for me. That space - trying to express myself in original and wonderful ways - is where I want to be, all the time, as a musician. That’s the only place that can matter to me.

Alright, goodnight moon (I hope)…

My thoughts on songwriting (on this particular night)

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:16:53 -0700

You’d think that if you’d been doing something your entire life, you would have some degree of confidence in it, but it seems like I still so often experience the same self-doubt when writing a new song. I mean, there are times when I’ll sit down at my piano and be totally calm and it’ll just come out, like I’m playing it from memory. But more often I find that I can’t control how or when the magic happens. There’s a certain degree of skill and craft that gets accumulated after you’ve been something for so long, so I could always write SOMETHING. But I tend to be pretty picky about what I follow down the rabbit hole, so I end up throwing away a lot of stuff. And that’s what’s hard: coming up with something that meets my expectations, that surprises me a little, that feels good to me.

There are two ways I like to describe the process of songwriting for myself: it’s like digging for dinosaur bones and it’s like surfing. Seems kind of weird, now that I look at it, cause they’re so different from one another. But writing for me has always been a mixture of fast and slow, of speeding up the camera and slowing it down and zooming in. So maybe it makes sense.

It’s like digging for dinosaur bones, cause you go hunting around and don’t always find something. Or you think you find something, and it’s nothing. It’s a rock that looks like a bone. And you have to go home disappointed. I feel that way a lot; like I’ve got my shovel over my shoulder and I wipe the sweat off and put my hat back on and have to walk home empty-handed cause it’s getting dark. And then other times, you find something. Sometimes it’s a great find. You don’t know right away. You trip over a bone and have no idea what else is underneath. It could be just a bone or two or it could be an entire dinosaur, perfectly preserved, waiting in all its menacing glory to be discovered and introduced to the world. And you’ve got to be careful and just brush away the dirt and rubble to see what’s underneath. Sometimes you don’t have a whole skeleton there and you have to make educated guesses about what’s needed to complete the picture.

It’s like surfing because you go out and sometimes the surf sucks. Sometimes the surf is rad (I don’t usually say “rad” but it’s apt here, I guess). You don’t always know. I mean, you go out in the morning and you’re not in control of when the surf sucks or when it’s rad, right? But what you can control is how you surf when the waves are good. What you do with a big wave once you catch it. That’s where skill and talent and hard work come in… so in that one moment when the earth creates a huge, huge wave and it’s coming right at you, you know exactly what to do. And that’s often how songwriting feels when you’re totally flying, it feels like you’re part of something that’s so incredibly powerful… it’s not coming from you, but you’re a part of it now and riding it.

Lately a third metaphor has been wiggling its way into my brain and that’s the idea of music as magic. Sometimes I dream music or get woken up and hear music or music comes to me at ridiculously inconvenient times, like as I’m rushing out the door or trying to sleep. And sometimes I can feel when it’s a good time to write and sit down and do it and at those times it feels like magic, like it’s a power I’m channeling and creating from and there’s no other way to describe it than I’ve learned how to conjure up something special.

I’m fascinated by how the process will evolve and change when I once again switch directions musically. Being a singer-songwriter is just a footnote in a long musical journey that started when I was a boy and will likely last my entire life. It happens to be the direction I’m in right now, but it’s not the one I started in (or the one I took after that or even the one I took after that), and it probably won’t be the one I end in. I wonder whether these metaphors will still be how I think of writing music when the music is different.

In the final analysis, I think part of the reason why writing a song I’m happy with is “special” is because I CAN’T do it all the time, whenever I want. And in that sense, I guess I’m learning to trust myself, that if I sit down at the piano and there are no dinosaur bones or the surf sucks or the magic fizzles, it’s OK. I’ll watch a movie or go out with friends or live life and replenish the well that the music draws from anyway. And I know that there’ll be another time for it to happen.

In some ways, I guess I’m glad there’s still some magic to it…

NEW SONG: “At This Hour” (again, not 100% finished)

Wed, 26 May 2010 20:27:00 -0700

NEW SONG: “At This Hour” (again, not 100% finished)

Hi, I'm the future. I'm a little early...

Sat, 15 May 2010 15:26:48 -0700

I don’t know when my parents learned to text me photos, but that is absolutely happening.

photos from Tuesday Night Cafe are up here

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:43:36 -0700

photos from Tuesday Night Cafe are up here

"When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world..."

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:34:22 -0700

“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”

change of venue for tomorrow!

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:33:06 -0700

Tuesday Night Cafe will be happening at Senor Fish at 422 E. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012 due to chance of rain.