◎ Love the land people
A month after the launch of the physical vinyl record of the latest album "Encore", Luo Dayou's "Encore" has finally been launched on major digital music platforms recently. As the godfather of Chinese pop music, Lo Dayou has influenced generations of fans in the past four decades. Even many of today's A-list singers, as well as famous behind-the-scenes musicians, make no secret of the fact that they were influenced by Luo Dayou's enlightenment music before entering the music industry.
A full cover album
In the Chinese pop music scene, the early Luo Dayou has always been known for his brilliant speculation and advanced musical awareness, whether it is the early "Zhi Hu Ye" and "The Future Master", or the "Love Song 2000" released after the establishment of a music factory in Hong Kong in the middle of the period. Luo Dayou's music creation, in terms of style, covers folk, rock and crossover, and maintains a unique humanistic spirit in the text, a song "When the future world is full of some unfamiliar melodies, you may think of this ancient song now", which even sounds advanced and prophetic.
Since the last album "Home III", Luo Dayou, who has become more gentle in music composition, has begun to have a taste of leaf falling back to the roots. In 2020, he brought a musical team including pipa and huqin musicians to conduct outdoor live performances in Yihua Donglu and other places in Taiwan, which not only returned the music to the scene, but also highlighted the theme of "locality", which can also be regarded as another meaning of the leaf falling back to the roots.
From this point of view, the emergence of "Encore" will not surprise people at all, and it can even be said that it is an inevitable node in Luo Dayou's musical career. As the first album of Luo Dayou's personal music career for more than 40 years, and the only studio album with full cover so far, you can say that this is a kind of memory of Luo Dayou, and it can also be said that it belongs to Luo Dayou's musical return.
Records spanning a hundred years
"Encore" is undoubtedly a "record" spanning a hundred years, and this sentence can have two meanings, one refers to the music content itself, and the other refers to the medium of "record".
"Encore Song" contains a total of eleven (group) works, the last of which is "West Wind Words + Song", which is also composed of two works, and the reason why this work is so designed is not Luo Dayou's whim, but can be said to be Luo Dayou's own generalization of the entire album.
As a re-enactment of classic old songs, "The Words of the West Wind" is also the oldest of them. Composed by Huang Zi and lyrics by Uncle Liao Fu, the song was composed in the 1930s and is considered one of the earliest popular songs in China because it uses the harmonic system of Western pop music. Another song called "Song" is a song composed by Luo Dayou based on Xu Zhimo's translation of the poem, and the original work is the famous poem "Song" by christina Rossitti, a 19th-century British female poet. Published in the late 1970s, it was also the first work published in Luo Dayou's solo musical career.
History here, with a wonderful intersection. From one of the earliest pop songs in Chinese history, to period music works such as Forever Smile and Unknown Qi Luo Xiang, to post-era song classics such as Midnight Fragrant Kiss, as well as from the local folk songs in Taiwan, Grass Borer Chicken and the Hokkien folk song Peach Blossom Transition, to the Japanese classic Happiness Here, as well as Duan Andy's masterpiece Peter Gunn, known as the father of electric guitar, the selection of the entire album of Encore, including Chinese pop music, It also includes classic works from Japan and the United States, which not only constitute a general history of popular music spanning half a century, but also become a retrospective of Luo Dayou's own musical origins.
In this sense, "Encore" can also be called "Luo Dayou Music Prequel".
On the other hand, the album Encore also covers the most original and trendy distribution medium of a modern record. "Encore" first debuted in the most traditional form of vinyl, and then launched on the music platform a month later. On April 8, April 15 and April 21, the album's three singles" "Lover's Tears", "Happiness Here" and "Words of the West Wind" will also be released as "digital collections". In addition to the fact that tapes and CDs will not be released anytime soon, the three most important musical media of the past hundred years, the Encore album, are all available.
Let the classic old song "Smile Forever"
In the album "Encore", "Forever Smile" can be said to be the most frequently sung by Luo Dayou before. In addition to singing in programs such as "Fei Yuqing's Qing Music" and "Kanban Characters", Luo Dayou also put this song on the stage of his Hung Hom concert in 2004. In fact, "Forever Smile" can also be said to be the subtitle of the album "Encore", and Luo Dayou himself has repeatedly said that as an album produced and launched during the epidemic, he hopes that this song can bring a beautiful moral and let more people keep smiling.
Luo Dayou has repeatedly said that music is alive, and music sometimes needs such a kind of singing to complete the relay again and again. Although it is a cover album of classic old songs, "Encore Song" is not simply a reproduction of the classic, but through a lot of ingenious design, so that many old songs show new vitality.
Among them, the arrangement of the Hokkien folk song "Peach Blossom Transition", and even directly grafted with blues-style accompaniment such as "Peter Gunn", not only has no sense of violation, but also reflects the charm of the fusion of traditional and modern, Eastern and Western music.
As early as the Home album, the Grass Borer Playing Chicken, which was covered as early as the Home, was also designed as the Funk style, the brightness and rhythm of the Funk music, and the theme of Old Wind in the song, which was also in the temperament, so there was also a tacit understanding of a match made in heaven.
The song "Forever Smile" this time also integrates "Four Seasons Red", one of Deng Yuxian's four classics. In a previous interview with Lian Mai, I also asked Luo Dayou why he designed it this way, and Luo Dayou said that he hoped to use the "flirting" in the work "Four Seasons Red" to strengthen the love scene of "Forever Smile" and echo the theme of "Smile".
Luo Dayou's musical inheritance of classics but ingenious and innovative practices make the old songs in "Encore" no longer fixed on static classics, but dynamically "smile".
The end of popularity is classical
The album "Encore" is a large-scale musical record, among which works such as "Unforgettable", "Forever Smiling" and "Lover's Tears" are specially set up by musician Wu Qinglong to accompany the strings, which also makes the whole album have a more magnificent musical temperament, like a gorgeous sense of classical music.
In fact, as early as the "Love Song 2000" album, Luo Dayou had collaborated with the local symphony orchestra in Shanghai. Not only Luo Dayou, like Jacky Cheung's cooperation with the Symphony Orchestra in the album "Love and Symphony", in "Snow Wolf Lake" tried to express popular music in the form of musicals, Tan Yonglin also adopted the way of symphony as the main structure when he remade the "Roots of Love" album in 2008, and even rock musicians like Cui Jian and Xie Tianxiao have no shortage of works and performance practices of rock and classical symphony in recent years.
This combination of popularity and classicism is even a tradition in the international music scene. For example, at the 2014 "Grammy" awards ceremony, the famous rock band "Metal" Orchestra once had cross-border cooperation with Chinese pianist Lang Lang, while the British leading singer Sting , in the past two decades of music career, almost became a classical artist, many works are completed with classical music artists.
From these examples, it can also be seen that although pop musicians started with perceptual works in the early days, and took pop and singing as the criteria for career success or failure, the more later, there will still be some musicians who pursue art, hoping to get some kind of artistic sublimation in classical music with more complex structure and harmony.
Of course, for Chinese musicians, there is actually another mission, that is, to excavate and sort out traditional musical elements. Works such as Luo Dayou's Grass Borer Chicken and Peach Blossom Transition in this album are an innovative inheritance in a retrospective way, and the album Encore also has the meaning of the continuous circulation of classical music.