One Day in May…

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prevent the songs of a big name artist from leaking before its release. A new Mayday album is coming, and the band and their company is trying very had to prevent any further leaks. (BTW, and sort of off topic, for people who always click on the source links, most of my sources are in simplified characters these days, because a huge number of the papers from Taiwan just won’t load. I generally prefer to read traditional characters just out of force of habit, but it’s a lot easier to pull up the local papers/websites for the time being.)

Pre-orders for the new album start on October 8. The release date has been changed four times already, with the band insisting that they will keep working on it until they are fully satisfied with it, no matter how long it takes. To protect the secrets of the other eleven songs on what they call “Album No. 7,” no more than ten people in the whole company have heard them to date. They’re making a lot of James Bond jokes about the album being No. (00)7, and they’ve nicknamed the measures undertaken to protect their secrecy “5007.” The actual name of the album and the track list is also being closely guarded. (I realize I’m mixing spy movie franchises here with my title. I don’t particularly mind, though.) The recent song leak was a major disappointment for the band, though unlike Jay, they have not actually tried to sue. (I’m not saying anything against Jay taking his latest album’s leak to court – if someone violated a secrecy agreement and leaked the album, I think he should sue.)

I keep wondering if it is meaningful in any way that the album is reported to have twelve tracks, with the first release being the Taiwanese “To Flourish (出頭天).” Of course, the song isn’t new to anyone whose been paying attention to Mayday news and advertisements, but at least we know there’s one Taiwanese song on the album. The overseas branch of B’in Music wondered initially if there’s not a big enough market for songs in Taiwanese, but the band persisted, saying that this song is not only the first completed song from the new album, but it represents the fact that over the course of their nine year career, their “fool”-like spirit has never changed. They want to join everyone in rediscovering that courage to keep moving forward, and facing the economic problems that plague the world. (The article makes repeated references to hope in the face of the global “economic tsunami.” Gee, now if only we could get Mayday to weigh in on the bailout package just passed by the U.S. Congress… maybe they’ve got a song on the topic, we’ll have to wait and see.)

Moreover, the most impressive thing to the band in the last few years has been discovering that no matter where they’ve traveled in the world, no matter what the dominant local language (be it Japanese, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Beijing dialect or English), they’ve found fans of all shapes, sizes and colors who can sing along with songs like “Fool,” “Motor Rock,” and “Peter and Mary.” This has fed a belief that language need not be an impediment to sharing music. They hope that “To Flourish” will be a sort of “Fool” or “Stubborn” that fans can all sing together.

The MV director, Chen Yu-Hsun, usually does movies and advertisements, but he did film the videos for Mayday’s “Fool,” “Nobody Else in My Heart,” and Jay’s “Garden Party.” To convince him to film the video for “To Flourish,” the band brought him the demo and lyrics. In the video, they recapture the old Mayday, still uncertain about the future, still trying to break out from being an underground band. (Okay, I’m confused: does this mean there will be a new video completely divorced from the recruiting advertisement for which the song was used a few months ago? It seems like there will be, since the video won’t be released until Monday.)

On the joint concert with Linkin Park coming up next week, there are still reports about the two bands cooperating on a song, which may or may not be the children’s song “Two Tigers.” Part of the motivation for the two groups cooperating on a song is the fear that fans of one group might not come for the performance of the other. So there’s also talk of working together on the Mayday song “Sun Wu Kong” or the Linkin Park track “One Step Closer.”

Update: Speaking of “Two Tigers,” this is too funny not to share. I’ve caught a nasty cold, and so I’ve spent the last few hours sitting on the couch and watching Chinese variety shows. (Note: I also posted this on the Chinese Music Blog forum, because I thought it too good.) Today the guests are Wu Chun and A-sa (of TWINS fame) talking about their new movie. They asked Wu Chun to sing a “traditional children’s song from Brunei,” and he came up with “Three Tigers (三只老虎),” which he sang this way:

三只老虎 ，三只老虎， 跑得快，跑得快， 一只没有眼睛，一只没有尾巴， 真奇怪! 真奇怪!
(Three tigers, three tigers, running quickly, running quickly, one has no eyes, one has no tail, how strange! How strange!)

After teasing him about a Chinese-language children’s song being somehow traditional in Brunei (he’s pretty, no need to be smart…), someone summoned the courage to ask if it shouldn’t be two tigers, actually? You know, one with no eyes, one with no tail? Two altogether?

No, he explained; one has no eyes, one has no tail, and it’s the *third* one who comments, “How Strange!”

I laughed myself into a coughing fit. So painful, but worth it.

Update2: There’s a lot of support for Wu Chun’s version, which shouldn’t be all that surprising, I suspect, once you realize that there are also a couple different ways to sing this song in both French and English. I maintain, however, that his description of the third tiger saying “How strange!” and the tv hosts’ reaction to the idea was quite funny.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Mayday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.