This month, Good Sister released their new album, "So It's Good."
Fingers crossed, it has been exactly four years since their last original album, "Real Name System".
Of course, in these four years, they have not been idle: singles large and small; made a "star chasing" ultimate form of the "Dream Chaser" old song re-singing album; Xiao Hou and Qin Hao respectively completed their first solo EP. For them, it may be a little regrettable that the tenth anniversary of the founding of the army is blocked by special circumstances, and many ideas cannot be fulfilled. In short, the first decade of Good Sister has turned over, as they themselves put it, it is now the "Good Sister 2.0 era", and "This is Good" is such a landmark album.
Before the release of the album, Chunsheng Studio's Weibo began to count down, and the daily PO produced a warm-up map with the words written by the two good sisters. There are complainers, there are conspicuous ones, and there are regrets. One of the most impressive is this paragraph: "After doing a personal EP, the discovery after doing it does not represent myself." It is also found that 'self' is not a great concept. It feels like one step away from 'knowing yourself', but one step away forever. ”
This is an interesting passage. At the end of 2019, Qin Hao had "Swan" and Zhang Xiaohou had "Berlin", one was digging deeper into the heart, and the other was showing the B side of electronic music and disco. The two who were inseparable in the past were running in different musical directions, and it is reasonable to say that the solo albums of the members of the group must be cool and satisfying. You don't have to be on the other side, completely by yourself, what else do you want? But the good sister said that it was no big deal to find the solo after the solo was completed; after the solo was completed, it was found that the identity of the "good sister" had become an inseparable part of their respective bodies. I suspect that "This Is Good" may have been an album that should have been released last year, but it was postponed to 2021 due to force majeure. Or, all of humanity is like a nap, and the good sister can also think about how to iterate on her "2.0".
But to my surprise, the "next generation" of the good sisters jumped back to their "first version" all of a sudden?
The album's opening eponymous song "So Good" goes like this: broken down with the simplest acoustic guitar chords, without even the modification of chord accents, and after two bars, the good sister begins to sing. The whole song is a wooden guitar and a harmonica, the producer is a good sister, in the documentary, they frankly say, "is to make it easy for others to learn to play the feeling". If life is only like the first sight, isn't this what a good sister looked like ten years ago? Does that sound like "two singing-loving seniors in a college boys' dorm"?
(Sure enough, the guitar score came right away)
Not only is this song "This Is Good", the sound of the whole album reminds me of "Spring Life". Since "North and South", the music production of the good sister has become more and more exquisite, and the "real name system" four years ago has completely got rid of the hat of "campus folk song combination", why did they wear it back?
I think this is the solution of "Good Sister 2.0". In the past decade, they have broadened the territory of music with the determination of "watch me change seventy-two", and after a large circle around the world, they have found that the simplest folk songs may be the most suitable way for them to express. As in the documentary, Xiao Hou said: "This is the good sister you are good at, the way we are good at expression, our self-consistent personality and language communication, but not too many preset goals, but will be comfortable." 」 And Qin Hao said: "The two words of freedom are very interesting, it is the song of our first album, 'You are a teenager who is as free as the wind, flying farther between heaven and earth than dreams', at that time it was indeed quite comfortable, because barefoot people are not afraid to wear shoes, they have no ambition, and they are young, and you have nothing to lose." But slowly, you will have more pressure, back to this album, ease is that you know your own existence, you know what form you exist, like an adult with a little bit of childishness doing what you like, this is the way we exist now, this is freedom. ”
So, they can hold a wooden guitar and he said: "That's fine." That's a good sister.
The lyrics of "This Is Good" are partly from the poet Yu Xiuhua. She is the best-selling poet in China for nearly 20 years, with the exception of Haizi. In 2015, Yu Xiuhua's "Across Most of China to Sleep with You" was retweeted more than 1 million times on social networks, and with the addition of labels such as "peasant woman", "disabled" and "female poet", Yu Xiuhua became an overnight hit.
Shen Rui, a writer in the United States, once commented that Yu Xiuhua was "China's Emily Dickinson", "surprising imagination, the striking power of language, compared with most female poets in China, her poetry is pure poetry, poetry of life, is the meteor shower of language, brilliant you are stunned, the depth of feelings hit you, making your heart ache." "Xiao Hou Ziyun, Yu Xiuhua's poems are very powerful, while good sisters usually appear to be more "warm". But in "This Is Good", this kind of "warm swallowing" is just right. "Spring is gone / There are thick birdsong on the branches / So it's good / There is no bird song in heard / But there is a dewy morning / This is not bad", the song is sung with three beats, there is a sense of end-to-end whirlwind, and the good sister gently chants, outlining the situation of slowly awakening from the darkness. It's not a sunny day, it's just a day of ordinary ordinary existence. "I don't know who you're talking to / But I know the accent you use / As if I hear / There are many sorrows in the world / I bear not all of it / This is good", the object of observation in Yu Xiuhua's original poem shifts from the sky to the self, which is the true color of her poet, breathing with the times, sharing the joy of the times, and also bearing the pain of the times. This is a sentence full of pain, but the good sister, in the case of not changing the word, uses their "warm swallow" to render Yu Xiuhua's poem into a warm color, especially after experiencing the upheaval of 2020, the "accent" is no longer the original poem in which outsiders look aggressively, but the language of the world, the praise of the beauty of living, the whole song is mournful and unsettling, and makes people believe that the sun is about to send us hope, this is the good sister.
In the good sister's past works, poetry is one of their most important ways of expressing it. "May I Die in the Fall", "The Rain in the West Window", "I Said the Moonlight Is So Beautiful Tonight, You Say Yes"... They have a lot of creations that are written in colloquial language, comparable to modern poetry, and it is precisely because of their "warm swallowing", the "thick feeling" in their music, they like to write the sound of the wind and the sound of the rain into the song, the kind of aftersound that wants to say goodbye, which is the poetry that runs through the music of the good sister. So, in this album, they composed and sang the works of many modern and contemporary poets, and Yu Xiuhua had another song "The Distance Between Me and Spring" in addition to "This is Good":
I'm going to cut off my feet and get close to you
I'm going to take off my arms and hug you
I want you to step on my body
I want to hear an echo of iron
Let the thunder and lightning whistle through my chest
Let the lightning bolt go back from my left eye back to my right eye
There is also no prelude, and it is sung as soon as it comes. As Liu Nian, the editor of the Poetry Journal, and Yu Xiuhua's Bo Le, said: "Everyone else is dressed neatly, coated with fat powder, sprayed with perfume, white paper and black characters, and cannot smell a little sweat; only she is smoky, hot, muddy, and there is obvious blood stains between words." The violent expressions of "cut off your feet" and "untie your arms" are indeed very bad sisters, and at first glance, it is more like the Moxizi poem in "If You Want to Die in Your Hands". No problem, the good sister's soft fingers can dissolve love and hate together. The song begins with only the sense of determination outlined by the acoustic guitar sweeping strings, as the band slowly enters the romantic web, especially the intertwined strings, the beautiful melody composed by Qin Hao, so that the focus of the song all falls on "I and spring / just / a gesture / a shout / a promise", even if the electric guitar behind him with a split rhythm to hint at the "iron echo", but these are not important, the world is broken, each of us opens our hands to embrace, regret can be less, spring can be more.
The good sister also chose a short poem by Feng Tang, "Yin". Speaking of Feng Tang, what we are most familiar with is the sentence "Spring Wind Ten Miles Is Not as Good as You", this modern Yuppie who is also solemn and harmonious and vulgar and elegant, in fact, there are some similarities between his personality and his good sister. How can a businessman, a man who pursues wealth every day, become a writer or a poet? Is there a contradiction between this and the good sister on the one hand, while moving and dodging, while doing sincere and pure music?
"Yin" has also been composed and sung by another famous rock artist, Zuo Xiaozu, which is a very Feng Tang poem:
I poked the moon into the sky
The heavens are mine and mine
I stomped my foot into the ground
The earth is mine and mine
I kiss you
You are mine
Such a straightforward expression of the chest, if taken out separately, will actually have such a little "daddy" or "greasy". But I must say that Qin Hao is really a genius in writing melodies, and he has written such a wonderful melody with his ten years of youthful feeling, a man is a teenager until death, and he is a teenager who is romantic to death. In the arrangement, the piano is used as the base, the strength of the keys is used to express the waves of emotions, and in the second half of the song, it develops into a synthesizer symphony, and finally repeats the sentence "I kiss you / You are mine", and the end of the song falls into an unstable chord, and the bow vibrates violently, and it stops abruptly. By the time you react, you've already jumped to the next song. This is poetry.
In addition to Yu Xiuhua and Feng Tang, the good sister in the album also chose to sing two works by Suzhou writer Tao Wenyu, "With the Wind" and "Love Poems". Compared with the first two, Tao Wenyu is not well known, he lived in Suzhou for a long time, and spent his life in literature, calligraphy and painting, poetry, and Go, and published a number of prose collections and poetry collections. Just looking at the paper and singing Tao Wenyu's poems is a rather unexpected choice.
But soon you will know that the good sister is singing herself through Tao Wenyu. Tao Wenyu has always been regarded by friends as "the inheritance of Suzhou's cultural context", his works "Garden on Paper", "Tea House", "Taihu Lake", "Su-style Taste", "Huizhou Ten Records of Taihu Lake", etc. are all the conditions of Suzhou and Hangzhou, and the good sister accurately captures the leisure relaxation in his words, and applies it to his own "free with the wind" world. "With the Wind" is Tao Wenyu's posthumous work that passed away two years ago, which was his eulogy for another friend, suzhou painter Wei Benxiong:
Mulberry trees bloom only when they hear you're coming
The white horse is familiar with the road
Only ever since
All home
All passing by
I saw bees along the way
Waiting for you to let go of their hands and feet
I saw them flying with your voice
Can't take you anymore
Brewed in a cup like tea
Stored in the phone like a number
Keep it in your pocket like a phone
Nor can you ask where you are going
In this song "With the Wind", I still want to praise Xiaoqin's chorus composed with great vulgarity, which must be another golden song that will cause a chorus after the recovery of the good sister concert in the future. As for the color of Jiangnan Water Town created with pipa, Chinese percussion, and the old uncle's mouth, and the chorus sounded at the interlude, showing the compassion and compassion between heaven and earth, these ingenious designs come from the song's producer Li Zhuo, you must have heard his super hits "Spring Wind Ten Miles".
Finally, I would like to say that in addition to folk songs, poetry, and what makes the good sister feel at ease, there is the last cornerstone, that is: the tradition of the Golden Age of Chinese records.
A few years ago, Good Sister released a "DreamCatcher" – perhaps the highest-spec cover album in the history of Chinese pop music. No, it can't be defined by a cover album, because they did find Qi Yu to sing "Boat Song" together, Huang Yunling to sing "Like The Way You Are Now", Wan Fang to sing "Try to Understand", and Chen Mingzhen to sing "Where to Find Such a Good Person". Even the good sister herself jokingly said: no no no, never chase the star again, the cost of chasing the star is too high.
In fact, from the very beginning of the creation of the good sisters, you can hear the influences they received in the 80s and 90s. The way they are presented in combination is BTW. How many young friends now know about this combination? You may only know that Lin Zhixuan's brother sings very well), and the bloodline of the Chinese pop music men's group has been from Zhang Chongji/Zhang Chongde, MUJI to the good sister; their songs have always sung about youth, and sentences like "When you return, do you still have the face of youth" ("You fly to the other side of the city") is also the DNA that has been inherited from Luo Dayou, Su Rui, Sanmao, Qi Yu, etc. In "This is good", you listen to "The Shadow of the Bird", "Fly Away", I don't know how everyone feels, for me, in 2021, I can still hear this way of writing, singing, singing in the way we have heard countless times in the voice of the times such as "Echo", "Camel Bird and Fish" in those years, which in itself makes me extremely moved. It's hard for me to express in words how relieved I am to hear that "you'd better forget my name, like the shadow of a bird."
Finally, I would like to recommend the song "The Man Who Slipped through the Net" to you individually. It's one of the best pop songs I've heard in 2021, and it's the crown of mainstream. From the restrained main song to the emotionally uplifting chorus, from Qin Hao's singing alone to the addition of Xiao Hou's harmony, "The wind blows and breaks / The wind will forget you as soon as it passes", with endless youth, romance, and the fatalistic sense that the feast is coming to an end. Qin Hao is a first-class and good at writing popular songs at the moment, he can suddenly hand you a red knife in the neat structure, and suddenly plunge into your chest, seeking a delicate balance between commercial resonance and personal temperament. The arrangement of this song also has many remarkable points, its sensitivity, slenderness, I said how to hear the shadow of Ryuichi Sakamoto, a look at the production list, the arranger / producer Qian Lei is impressively listed, he is the composer and arranger of "Mo", "Big Fish", hey, prove that my ears are not bad.
The entire album ends with "Watching the Sun Go Down on the Roof", which doesn't seem to be much different from the good sister of ten years ago, "We enjoy evenings like this / I want to dance / You just spin / On the roof / Watch the sun go down". In this way, unhurriedly, the good sister stepped into their 2.0 era, the era of still being as comfortable as the wind.