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Author | Bow up
Lu Xiansen's commonly used rehearsal room is a delicate space of less than 20 square meters, and the carefully adjusted soundstage and the drum stand, which is separated by a separate space, may be one of the best sound effects in the rehearsal venue of this size. It's a place of their own, and he ordered it when lead singer Guo Beibei was still running his own label, "College Rock Night.". This has been their home since Lu Xiansen was founded. In Beijing's Haidian district, which resembles the desert of the rehearsal room, this space is extremely precious.
The band is about to start their first rehearsal for their new album tour, and the performance is scheduled for the Spring Festival in 2021. Not long ago, on the last day of August, they had just released their third album, In a Heartbreak, on the day of the band's 5th birthday. The album's name comes from what Hemingway said in "No Weapons": "The world knocked everyone down, and after that, many people became strong in the heartbreak."
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > new album: Solace in different heartbreaks</h1>
About a year and a half ago, Lu Xiansen began to plan this new record, they wrote 23 songs, and included 13 of them on the album, making it the band's longest record to date.
"This album spans the very special year of 2020, and in this special year, there are definitely a lot of people who are experiencing stress, breakdown and heartbreak. But everyone's heartbreak manifests itself differently. In Doubly's view, the work in "In the Heartbreak" is an attempt to give different comforts to different types of heartbroken people. And in the process, it happens to record many changes that no one can predict over the past year. The theme of the album is not thought out in advance, but comes from the temperament expressed by the works together.
Among the 13 songs, "Born brilliant" and "Return in the Tide" were written during the epidemic, "Stay Away from Them" and "Aquatic" were created in 2019, and "Dancing Together" was created earlier.
Lu Xiansen's new album "In the Heartbreak"
The first impressive thing that followed the opening of this album was the growth of almost every member of the band on a technical level. Compared with the arrangement that may be slightly bland during the period of the famous work "Spring Wind Ten Miles", "In the Heartbreak" has improved a lot in terms of the difficulty of singing and the level of arrangement. While watching the band rehearse, we also confirmed these improvements with our own eyes. I feel the addition of the improved arrangement to the work in expressiveness.
In the eyes of many listeners, Lu Xiansen's works touch their hearts with poetic and delicate lyrics. In the new album, the lyrics have also been developed while maintaining the consistent style and advantages. "'All The Wine Is Not As Good as You' is about emotion, and 'Hua Nian' is about time. So this one we are trying to look at life and life from a wider perspective, there is a grander "Life meets brilliant", and there is also "Aquatic" that pays attention to the individual. Doubly said. On this album, Lu Xiansen seems to want to use a long shot from far and near to express the whole process of life being knocked down by this world and standing again in the land of heartbreak.
For example, Aquatic. This is a lyric with a narrative style, about a young man Guo Beibei met in the 2-chome bar in Wuhan, when Wuhan was not yet shrouded in the clouds of the new crown epidemic, and what we heard in the song was the confusion and tiredness of a boy in the city, and the stranger who could understand him. Late that night, the rest of the guests in the bar took a seat at a table. Everyone talked a lot, it was a very warm scene, after I returned to Beijing for a long time, one day suddenly remembered this matter, and Wrote it down. Doubly said.
Coincidentally, the song seems to have become an observational slice of the city before the epidemic. In the song's commentary, Doubi, Nichome's resident singer, and izakaya regulars told the story of that day from different angles, making the listening process of the song like a non-linear narrative movie.
Whether it is the time of creation, the joy of emotion, or the depth of discussion, the 13 songs in "In the Heartbreak" show a different and intertwined brilliance like a spectrum. Each member of the band also enjoys a different piece of the band. Among them, "Born brilliant" and "When I first saw you, I saw my aging" became the "King of Inner Voting".
Keyboardist Bing Bing and drummer PP unanimously chose "Born brilliant", but for completely different reasons: Bing Bing was touched by the courage of the song to wave and say goodbye to the world, while PP believed that the song could fully display its drumming skills, expressive and challenging. We can see that since Lu Xiansen plus Li Zhuo and Yan Zhongkun have a total of 8 producers, they can actually look at these works from more perspectives and do more things in performance.
Lu Xiansen Band
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > we fell and then evolved</h1>
In the past year or so, Lu Xiansen has experienced a lot of precipitation time. Some are spontaneous, some are forced by circumstances. When we mention the words "Lu Xiansen" and "heartbreak", there is actually no way to get around their situation in the summer of 2019.
In the summer of 2019, in a certain TV show in full swing, Lu Xiansen, who had just completed a concert of workers' sports, was at the peak of morale, and experienced a somewhat awkward journey. They don't seem to have much chemistry with the inherent "band circle" on TV, and the TV clips amplify that embarrassment to some extent. This had a certain impact on the band, and the effect was mixed.
"We had accomplished almost all of the goals we had set since our inception, from the first time we held a special session at the Jianghu Bar, to the third floor of candy, the North Station and the Workers' Stadium. Theater tours also sold well, and we were all trying to do stadium tours before we went. Doubly said.
In the huge flow brought by the God-favored "Spring Wind Ten Miles", Lu Xiansen at that time was soaring. And the awkward scenes on TV seem to give this sharp rise a cooling-down. Both public opinion and the mentality of the members have been affected.
But in hindsight, Lu Xiansen noticed the other side of the matter and said, "Now that you think about it, in fact, in our situation at that time, we would definitely fall, not here, but somewhere else." And this experience was especially valuable to us because it calmed us down so much and then our attention returned to the music. ”
Guitarist Dr. Yang also remembers that period vividly: "We were actually a little confused in the cycle after the second day, like you arrived at an intersection when you were driving fast, and suddenly you didn't know where to go. So during that time, we actually had a state of stopping and self-examination, a bit like getting sick. In his opinion, it is precisely because of this small period of precipitation and refinement that the band has ushered in a certain evolution, and has improved in technology and consciousness.
"In fact, the first few songs of this album were issued, and there were some people who said' that 'how it's still quite like before', but we seem to have smelled a certain change from 'I saw my aging when I first saw you', but not to deny my former self," he added, "It's Evolution, not Revolution." ”
Such evolution is often impossible to complete in good times, but only born in the trembling of heartbreak.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > is an office band, but nothing bad</h1>
Despite the good results already achieved in the market, most of Lu Xiansen's members are still doing other work at the same time. Such a composition of personnel also determines that they have a special style of creation and rehearsal. Between the "Jam faction" and the "co-ordinator faction", they are very determined co-ordinators. Most of Lu Xiansen's works are often doubled by the lead singer, guitarist Dong Bin and producer Li Zhuo discuss a framework based on the song in advance, and then each member fills in his own parts, takes them to the rehearsal room, synthesizes them together and makes some additions and subtractions according to the whole.
Li Zhuo said that during the production of the album, they rehearsed three times a week for 4-5 hours each time. The band has more ideas and requirements for the arrangement, and "Aquatic" alone overturns the three editions of the arrangement: "We often have a lot of conflicts in the rehearsal room, but it is the conflict between the band itself and itself, not the conflict between the band members. ”
"That's the way we are, so we need to try to avoid too many ineffective trials." Dong Bin said, "Many times we come to the rehearsal room after work, we have to wait until after 11 o'clock, and even have to stay up all night when we are busy, once Bingbing went straight back to work after rehearsing, holding the keyboard and falling asleep directly on the subway." ”
All along, Lu Xiansen seems to be a band that "comes from office workers and belongs to office workers". If the bands of Modern and Taihe that are "very bands" at first glance are a world, then Lu Xiansen always seems to travel through a parallel world.
The band always has clear planning, rational planning, strict division of responsibilities and efficient execution; the lead singer speaks clearly and calls himself "our team"; and the members bring workplace language to rehearsals from time to time. During the song selection and production stage of the album, together with producer Yan Zhongkun, they scored each song in an almost "performance appraisal" manner, and after many rounds of discussion, decided on the final track.
Sometimes Lu Xiansen seems more like a startup than a band. This is determined by the past experiences and living conditions of the members, which is very different from the stereotype of the "band", but on the other hand, there is nothing wrong with it. It is precisely because they experience the same life as office workers that they can touch their audience even more.
This temperament is sometimes not sought after by many young listeners with greater voices, but the truth is that a large number of office workers need works that can be sung to their hearts. Although they seem to be relatively silent because they want to focus on work and life, they will silently fill lu Xiansen's every performance.
Compared to many full-time bands, lu xiansen's members are actually working harder to live. While working, they are doing large tours almost every year that are almost the same size as full-time bands, often outside every weekend for most of the year. Maintaining your music in this way sometimes requires more love than focusing on music.
The popularity of "Spring Wind Ten Miles" has long been like a great blessing and a little curse. And when its influence gradually receded, Lu Xiansen handed over an answer sheet such as "In the Heartbreak". It was their evolutionary work of rediscovering themselves in a heartbreaking moment for themselves and the world. They add a new dimension to the picture in poetry, and they also transcend the past self in every aspect. This joy of advancing an inch is sometimes worse than the clamor of soaring.
When the wind was quiet, we heard the deer singing.
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