Lin Sheng-xiang (photo by Kent Chuang)
 

In 2014 a 15th anniversary concert was held for Lin Sheng-xiang’s album Let Us Sing Mountain Songs. Next, in 2017, came the 15th anniversary concert for the album The Night March of the Chrysanthemums. For the 2018 Lin Sheng-xiang 20th Anniversary Concert, marking 20 years in the business for Lin, several good friends joined him onstage in an unprecedented gathering of talent. Now, in 2020, ­preparations are ­underway for the 15th anniversary concert for his album Getting Dark, and there is great anticipation for the forthcoming new album Water Snowflake Goes to Market.

Few singers in Taiwan can match Lin Sheng-xiang’s career. Each and every album he has released has been extraordinary, with each song played with deep emotion, leaving other artists of his generation far behind.

Child of a Hakka village

Born in Kaohsiung’s Meinong District in 1971, Lin Sheng-xiang was a typical child of a farming family. At the end of 1998, he returned to Meinong to join in the campaign against the construction of a reservoir. He and members of the Labor Exchange Band set up a rudiment­ary studio in a traditional tobacco curing barn, where they recorded two albums, Let Us Sing Mountain Songs and The Night March of the Chrys­anthemums, which are considered classic works in the history of social movements and music in Taiwan.

Lin has worked with several different groups of musi­cians over his career, from Kuan-tsu Music Pit (aka Guanzi Music Pit) and the Labor Exchange Band to ­Water3 and the current seven-man lineup of Sheng-xiang & Band. Lin is the lead singer and plays the yueqin or “moon lute” (a four-stringed guitar-like instrument with a round sound box), and the band also includes Chung Yung-feng, who has produced countless moving lyrics over the years; guitarist Ken Ohtake, a longtime collaborator of Lin’s; and bass player Toru Hayakawa, who has a deep foundation in jazz. Alex Wu, who handles percussion, joined the band for the 2013 album I-Village, and in 2016 they added the drums of Noriaki Fukushima and the suona (a traditional Chinese woodwind instrument) of Huang Po-yu for the concept double-album Village Besieged, thereby completing the group that brings Lin Sheng-xiang’s musical imagination to life.

Lin, influenced by new Taiwanese-language singers like Chen Ming-chang, began to write songs in his ­native Hakka language back in 1993. “I clearly under­stood that the artistic value of the songs I wrote in my mother tongue was higher than that of the songs I wrote in Mandarin. When you create, you want to bring out your best stuff. I mean, who would want to bring out their second best? So I had no doubts about pursuing a career in Hakka-­language music,” says Lin.

Let Us Sing Mountain Songs was an album about the campaign opposing the construction of a reservoir in Meinong. Perhaps music about social movements needs interaction and a connection with the public, so that having the audience join in or sing in response is very important. For example, the album’s title track encourages people who have traveled from Meinong to Taipei to protest at the Legislative Yuan to be fearless. The singer sings “Come! Let us sing mountain songs,” and the people offstage respond en masse by singing the line back again, boosting each other’s courage. Another example is the song “The Night March of the Chrys­anthemums,” which tells the story of a young man from the countryside who fails to make it in the city and returns to the land to grow chrysanthemums. Daydreaming, he ima­gines himself as a commanding officer taking the roll call of the chrysanthemums lined up in rows before him. At every live performance, as soon as the intro to this song is played, the people in the audience happily act as the chrysanthemums, standing to attention ready to call out “Present!” in response to Lin Sheng-xiang’s calling of the roll. Those on stage and off join together as one, which becomes part of the performance: This is the voice of the people, singing their own songs.

Both familiar and fresh

During his time with the Labor Exchange Band, Lin integrated the sounds of traditional instruments like the suona, yueqin, gongs and drums into his works. “During the Labor Exchange era I felt that I had to link my music with traditional sounds. I hoped that when fellow rural folk heard my songs, they would be able to feel some connection to their lives even though these were very contemporary works.”

Building on his guitar skills, Lin Sheng-xiang switched over to studying the yueqin, while “the sound of the suona seems to many people like a call or a summons.” The sonorous, piercing timbre of the suona is present at major events in Hakka villages such as weddings or funerals, so it is linked to important moments in people’s memories.

There is one song that inevitably causes Taiwanese to wave their hands, giggle, and firmly shake their heads, and that is “Ah-Kim Runs for Mayor,” from the album I-Village. It starts with the downhome main melody, played at an upbeat tempo on the electric guitar; then the sounds of firecrackers and of speeches by Lin Sheng-xiang and Chung Yung-feng are added in, while a plaintive yet fervent keyboard weaves in and out. The result is something Taiwanese can identify at first hearing: election music, a genre that is very rare in the world. When this is performed live in concert, Lin encourages the audience to call out “Hurray! Hurray!” in rhythm, raising the atmosphere to a fever pitch.

Recording the trivia of life

Starting with Labor Exchange, the pairing of Chung Yung-feng writing lyrics and Lin Sheng-xiang setting them to music has produced many admirable composi­tions. Chung sometimes uses a wide lens to present people under the domination of the state machinery or globalization, and sometimes focuses in on ordinary people trapped helplessly in the system. For example, in “My Old 125-cc Motorcycle,” he writes about a drifter who is returning home filled with shame: “Earth God, Earth God, your disciple wants to beg your pardon / Please, please / Turn the streetlights off / You needn’t ask why I’ve returned.” The image of the protagonist riding his rickety old motorbike along the county road, combined with Lin’s mournful voice, makes even people who don’t understand Hakka tear up.

Lin says: “When I write music, a basic requirement is that it conjure up images. If there are no images, if there is no sense of scene, then that is not a successful work.” Take for example the song “Planting Trees”: “Plant them so bugs have a place to escape to / Plant them so birds have a place to roost / Plant them so the sun can grow dancing shadows.” The song is based on the story of a man from a rural area who, after each typhoon, takes it upon himself to raise up trees that have been knocked down, and to plant trees on behalf of the community. The poetic lyrics call up a rich variety of ideas and images in the mind of the listener.

Before we set out for Meinong to interview Lin Sheng-xiang, he texts us to say his house can’t be found on Google Maps, and guides us there using roadside traffic mirrors and a papaya orchard as landmarks. Following this trail of breadcrumbs that Lin has laid down for us we find his residence, and discover that this way of giving directions is very similar to the lyrics of “I-Village”: “To the east, fruit trees sweep down the mountainside / To the west, the ancestors sleep in their tombs / The mountain range to the north sends a cool breeze / The canals to the south give our good fields the water they need.” In this way, using the four points of the compass to delineate the village boundaries, and describing the sensations of living there through the four seasons of the year, Lin’s song creates a record of daily life.

A dialogue with the contemporary

In December 2019, during the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, Sheng-xiang & Band performed in that city. Lin says: “I knew that Hong Kong had been in turmoil for half a year, and I thought we should come and perform for the people of Hong Kong at this time.” In 2002, when Labor Exchange won the Golden Melody Award for Best Band, Lin made the following remarks onstage: “If the Labor Exchange Band were a microphone, we would want to turn it over to farmers and workers. We want to tell our society about the things we’ve seen and the stories we’ve heard.” With this one comment, Lin declared whose side he is on.

In 2016, the punk-influenced concept album Village Besieged—whose theme is protest against air pollution—came out, touching on a problem that affects every person on this island. People say Meinong has a clean living environment, but this is not necessarily the case. Lin swipes on an app on his mobile phone to check the PM2.5 and PM10 indices from local air quality sensors. “If the PM2.5 concentration is high, you won’t be able to see the Central Mountain Range. Also, in the evening the air from the coastal area blows into the mountains, and the air quality gets so bad that you can’t even exercise or play sports. This is what Village Besieged is about.”

Dedicated to music

In 2018, during a concert Lin suddenly found himself unable to properly control his fingers. “That day I was super, super sad. It was the first time I’ve ever experi­enced a setback in my musical career, and maybe I was worried that my career was about to end,” he says. As he began to think further ahead, he wondered: Can I afford to retire now? When the conversation reaches this point, it feels as if there are dark clouds over our heads. But quickly Lin changes the subject and talks about the new ideas he wants to experiment with on his new album.

As we talk about the past, Lin’s tone is always calm and cool. But when he speaks of this difficult and fearful time and of how he recovered his spirits, suddenly his countenance becomes more animated, his tone of voice rises, and a childlike excitement appears on his face. “If the day really comes when I can’t perform on stage, I can work behind the scenes, gathering musi­cians together to record music, and I would be very happy with that.”

“However, when I see that my idols are still on stage at the age of 70, I feel like I should work hard to follow in their footsteps.”

“I’m still most completely free and at ease when I’m performing music. I hope that when I’m even older there will still be people who want to hear me sing. I really hope so!”