Melody Menu

Image: Đăng Lan and Toby Martin by Lyndal Irons – supplied.

Author: Melody Menu

Lan is telling me about young love in Vietnam and the multiple meanings of language: ‘It’s a lovely lie. Because you know in Vietnam, traditional custom, the girl, if go out with boys, people look at you, they gossip. So…she lost her things, she lost her hat, her ring, everything. but actually, they give to each other for souvenir. But I can’t tell the truth to my parents, otherwise I will be punished. I say ‘oh, I drop my ring into the river’, or ‘I lost my hat, the wind blow it away’ but actually I give to my love, ‘don’t forget me.’’

This is the basis for ‘Qua Cầu Gió Bay (The Wind on the Bridge),’ the first single by Đăng Lan and Toby Martin from their forthcoming album Song Khúc Lượn Bay (Two Sounds Gliding) and a tense reimagining of a traditional Vietnamese song. In the song, western guitar and eastern đàn bầu come to meet over a single chord in a striking drone, complete with changing lyrics that don’t quite add up sung in both Vietnamese and English. As Toby explains, the song follows a common feature of folk songwriting across many cultures: ‘That whole ‘Wind on the Bridge’ – you lie to your parents, and each verse is a slightly different iteration, there’s the ring, the hat – so many folk songs across cultures have that. You make up a story, you’re trying to lie to someone about a love interest; that form is very common. It’s also very easy to learn the song and to continue to add new verses as you go along.’

We’re sitting by Bankstown Art Centre, where Lan and Toby met and where Australian ravens crowd in the trees, calling their own insights into our interview. Initially brought together by Toby’s album Songs From Northam Avenue, the two have known each other for ten years and this comes across in a tight friendship that Lan says is down to karma: ‘Since I met him and then I have more idea about music; about how to harmonise between western and eastern music. I like to find something new and combine music – western and eastern.’ This is surprising, considering Lan turned down Toby’s first offer to collaborate, which Toby mentions: ‘I was commissioned to do a residency by Urban Theatre Projects in 2013, which turned into Songs From Northam Avenue. And when I was doing that, I met Lan because I just started reaching out to musicians in the Vietnamese community…It’s very difficult to get the western guitar and the Vietnamese instruments working together and Lan was recommended to me, but was particularly attractive because Lan played both đàn tranh and đàn bầu and so it meant one person could play both instruments.’ A residency at Bankstown Arts Centre, here where the crows fly, then lead to bouts of songwriting at Lan’s house and a creative partnership where Toby and Lan began writing songs from scratch.

Both have enjoyed the creative challenge of cross-cultural songwriting, and there have been interesting discoveries along the way. Most surprising to Lan was a realisation of hidden talents: ‘I couldn’t believe it – he found what I could do. I never trust myself that I could play the đàn tranh and đàn bầu in western style…so you see, it’s karma. To make him tied to my karma.’ This made sense to Toby, who trusted in Lan’s skills and instincts: ‘The big breakthrough was that Lan changed the tuning on the đàn tranh. With a đàn tranh, it’s got these little wooden pieces and you slide them up and down to change the tuning.’ They both explain that it is uncommon for đàn tranh players to change their tuning, which highlights Lan’s inventiveness with the resulting new sounds complementing a more western style of music.

Collaboration, especially cross-cultural collaboration, is all about opening yourself up to the unexpected. Songwriting took on a new light for the duo, where inner mantras and traditional poems inspired new creative works. Lan wrote ‘Flowers in Hand’ in thirty minutes after reflecting on the intensity of the news earlier that day: ‘I can only write a song when I sing the truth, the true things. I can’t use my imagination about something to write music. I have to see the truth.’ Whereas other songs were the result of conversations recorded by Toby: ‘Some of the other songs we wrote, we just had conversations and I recorded them. So ‘God’s Will’, which is about Lan’s son, was really a long story and talking that we recorded and we were trying to sing what we were talking about.’ Other songs like ‘Qua Cầu Gió Bay (The Wind on the Bridge)’ and ‘Two Shoes,’ were rearrangements of a traditional Vietnamese song and a Lord Byron poem translated into Vietnamese, respectively. These reimaginings, steeped in so much history, often sound like they are reaching across time as well as culture.

“You take for granted – well I do, anyway – in the world of rock, how everyone’s so on the same page. But that is just one page of a very big book. And that’s what makes it super easy to start, but it leads to a very known destination.”

– Toby Martin

Lan has a long history of singing in Vietnamese and English, and this has been well utilised on the album, with Lan contributing vocals in both languages. Toby predominantly sings in English, either a translation or an additional part, such as in ‘Banyan Tree’ where he wrote a contemporary bridge to the traditional song in English. But there is one song on the album where Toby challenged himself to sing in Vietnamese: ‘That song ‘The Stork’ – Lan sings in English and I sing in Vietnamese and we don’t swap. So we reverse roles. And once again, that was not what I expected in the project. It was like an extra task of ‘it would be nice to learn a Vietnamese song.’ But actually, it became a really important part of doing it. It was like – of course I should try and sing in Vietnamese; Lan is singing in English.’ For her part, Lan loves singing in both languages and especially enjoys Toby’s part of the song: ‘I like to listen to his singing Vietnamese. It sounds innocent.’

The crows are cawing louder now, signalling it’s nearly time for us to leave. When asked their final question – to describe what the album sounds and feels like in their words – Toby and Lan seem to sum up all of the challenges, opportunities and sheer ingenuity of cross-cultural creativity. For Toby, the album sounds like the relationship between the two songwriters: ‘What I hope people get out of the record is that rather than things being added as a flavouring, the collaboration is fundamental. It’s right there at the very first note of the music and the very first word sung.’ To Lan, the album achieves exactly what it set out to do – to provide a meeting place between two cultures: ‘I’m quite happy with what we do because we introduce to the audience the new way. We find the new path. We want to go to the new path and we want to discover the beautiful things between western and eastern music. And also, the more we work together, the more we discover the beautiful things between two styles. That’s why we get the title for the album Two Sounds Gliding.’