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Clever, creative, quirky

Joanna Wang in concert at The Script Road
by

The second annual The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival filled the month of March with a great array of cultural events, and among them, as in last year’s inaugural edition, were two evenings of musical performances. Headlining the March 15th concert at the Venetian’s Cotai Arena was Taiwanese singer-songwriter Joanna Wang, who delighted audiences with her refreshing original songs and a sultry splash of jazz-infused standards.

Joanna Wang admitted to feeling flattered, when the offer came in to perform at the Script Road Macau Literary Festival, and excited to be able to share her songs with what she imagined would be an open-minded and adventurous audience. 

“Other events and even festivals that I’ve done have been largely commercial in nature,” she said, adding that she had performed in Macau once before, but as an entertainer for a wealthy private affair. “My brand new album, along with the last one, ‘The Adventures of Bernie the Schoolboy’, are truly artistic projects, ones in which I’ve given free rein to my creativity, so I was really pleased to be invited by such an arts-oriented festival.”

Wang thrilled the audience at the Cotai Arena with poignant, nuanced renditions of classics like “Moon River” and “Qin Mi Ai Ren” (Intimate Lover), displaying the breathy, deep vocal delivery she’s known for. These jazz standards were interspersed among her own songs – primarily drawn from her last album, ‘Bernie’ – and the hopes she had pinned on this festival audience in Macau were realised. 

“What a great crowd!” she commented between originals. “People are rarely so enthusiastic when I do my own material.”

She was at ease with the public, switching effortlessly between English and Mandarin as she set up the story behind each of her songs, many of which involve unusual personas from fairy tale lands. 

“I hardly ever write lyrics from personal experience,” she explains. “That’s so mundane. I draw on fantasy and adventure.” 

Indeed her lyrics feature a whimsical cast of characters, including a regretful villain and a hopelessly devoted servant, in narratives delivered with a childlike enthusiasm for storytelling.

Wang says that staying true to her creative voice can be “quite frustrating” at times, especially in the context of an East Asian music market dominated by commercial pop. Even in the West, where tastes are generally more eclectic, her music falls outside the mainstream. In fact, her brand of smart, quirky synth pop, at once futuristic and antique – juxtaposing jazz and baroque counterpoint, video game and folk music, adult themes and childlike imagination – would be unique anywhere in the world.

“If you consider your market when you write, you might as well not do it at all,” Wang proclaims. “If you’re making a fifty-fifty compromise with your ideals, then neither you nor your audience will be happy, and you’re wasting material.” 

Nevertheless, she has struck a balance within her discography, between projects faithful to her artistic vision as a songwriter and albums of jazz standards, more accessible to general audiences, while still showing off the expressive beauty of her voice.

Her new record, entitled ‘Galaxy Crisis: The Strangest Midnight Broadcast’, was released March 16, the day after her appearance in Macau. Like ‘Bernie’ before it, ‘Galaxy Crisis’ is dominated by classical and video game music-inspired synthesisers, a sound somewhat different from a live Joanna Wang show, where she typically accompanies herself on guitar. The synth programming is musically sophisticated, with clever chord changes, and her vocal lines are a blend of melody and angular leaps.

Both albums were written and produced by Wang, who was never trained in classical music but displays an obvious grasp of the finer points of harmony and counterpoint. She describes ‘Galaxy Crisis’ as happier than ‘Bernie’, in a more pop rock vein, and it features live drums on many of the tracks, which evoke the exotic jazz of 60s lounge and space-age pop. 

“Bernie was darker, Tim Burton-esque,” she says, “and with Galaxy Crisis I wanted to write something lighthearted, irreverent and youthful, a tribute to my childhood in the 90s and the soundtracks to my favourite modern cartoons.”

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