The story of "Hurry" is not finished, and the motif of foreign land and hometown still haunts forty-year-old Li Jianqing. His debut solo EP "Still a Stranger" is known as the title, and all seven songs look to their hometown.
Li Jianqing has been working as Li Zongsheng's assistant in Beijing from his hometown in Guangxi for ten years. On the afternoon of July 27, Beijing BlueNote media rehearsal, he sang the new songs with the whole band lineup. Li Zongsheng also came, nagging about Beijing and the past of the years, and also pointed out the title for this work: a song for ordinary people.
Musicians are not old. In the song, he was surprised where the youth went (he sang a "short song" on the spot), how Li Zongsheng, who had white hair in the blink of an eye, was not old, and Li Jianqing, who had a thin white shirt, was even more immortal.
He was a teenager who threw out his tongue before going on stage and put his hand in his pocket when he spoke; he was a teenager whose mother's words had not been believed, believed, and gave birth to his own faith, and he had finally reconnected with his grandmother, whom he had never met, by the poet Lan Lan's words.
It's hard not to like the 40-year-old. His sincerity, shyness and kindness, and Li Zongsheng's old master-apprentice relationship, and his willingness to torture each other with the piano for a long time, so that the "strings are always broken", are all reminders of the good old days.
"Still a Stranger" is a good work, and a good musician is always better on the spot than a studio album.
Four violins, two guitars, a bass, a drum, a keyboard, the scene lived up to their years of hard work, and not a single musical sentence was a waste.
As a composer, arranger, violinist and guitarist, Li Jianqing has developed his own musical style.
Shusheng article, a chant and three sighs, Li Jianqing's song is not easy to sing. They are all very personal, coming from an individual tone and emotion. However, although it is not easy to sing, it sounds ups and downs, but the actual and the text have long been embedded.
In terms of thinking, he and Old Li are on the same road. Music is still inexhaustible to them, so whether it is chanting, sighing, singing or whistling, it is born of language and words.
The music of "Still a Foreigner" is arranged by Li Jianqing, and most of the lyrics are from Li Zongsheng, as well as the handwriting of poets Lan Lan, Yan Bin and Highway.
The two Li have cooperated for many years, and Li Zongsheng's singing style casts a shadow on Li Jianqing, so it is inevitable that he will be compared, or compare him with Yang Zongwei, another singer who has fully performed Li Zongsheng/Li Jianqing's works.
Interpreting the works of the two Li cooperation, it is not necessary to discuss the singing skills. Yang Zongwei's skills are superb, and his feelings are deep and righteous; Lao Li's works have been thoroughly refined over the years, and Yizhuang is also harmonious and complex. Li Jianqing is the most bookish and angry, and his voice is clean and his personality is not strong. It is also because of his lack of personality that he can see you and me.
Li Zongsheng and Li Jianqing (right)
Although Li Jianqing did not compose lyrics on this album, it can be regarded as his work. Between the lines is his nostalgia, what he sees and feels when he wanders, and his mother in his hometown calls out his name "full stack". The stranger that the writers saw was None other than Li Jianqing.
Li Zongsheng wants to compose songs for ordinary people he meets in life, and the theme is called nostalgia.
There are good passages, there are wonderful musical passages. The tune of Dong Song and Su Sanqi is added to the music, and the passages he chants alone are like ancient songs. If others do this, they always have to make a big splash. Li Jianqing is not, these passages are more like thoughts flowing out of nature. His music is fluid, and listening to it a few more times becomes an aftertaste.
Each song is beautiful, with close-up vistas, narrative lyricism, empathy and personal perspective, but this work can be done better.
"In The Hometown" begins with a lyrical, a song of the return of the wanderer, back to the hometown that has not kept up with the pace of the times. "The Unchanging Thing" is a musical reasoning, "I have written that you are all you / Love you is an unchangeable thing." The distinction between timeless folk songs and clichés is only between one line, and the moving mood is written with condensed words, and these two songs are still underheated.
"Out of town" and "Ordinary Story" are gradually getting better. The singer returns to his hometown, and the tired and sinking hometown appears in front of him unguarded. Li Jianqing's singing voice was not a strong point, and the sentence "You haven't seen the tall buildings here / They built a new city wall with old bricks" is more moving. At this point, his musical personality gradually established.
The listener sees an emotionally introverted young man returning to his hometown, he watches, sighs, and thinks in his mind. He heard Dong Song, and the TV series was playing Qingyi reading "I am thinking of you." His gaze is purely lyrical, drifting past the people and scenery of his hometown and looking into the distance.
This is Li Jianqing's advantages and disadvantages as a musician. The advantage is his sensitivity, he hears and captures various sounds, distilling them into beautiful melodies; the disadvantage may be that his feelings are too young and bookish, looking at the world as if he were himself, and the world is like a floating light.
"Ordinary Story" is still a small me in the big world, "Take this song to sacrifice the past and dedicate yourself to yourself" is a very heavy sentence, but there is an image of a person without a reason in the west out of the yangguan, as if it can't afford such a heavy sentence.
In the poem "Grandma", Li Jianqing said, "satisfied all my imagination of a grandmother I had never seen before." His music, the emotions in which he bets, have gone far beyond the original poem. At the scene, he sang his grandmother's lame leg repeatedly, struggling to open the passage where grandma was, and he was his eternal peer.
"Hurry" is an old song, there have been several versions, the EP contains Li Jianqing's solo version and recitation version.
This song can move a lot of people. Listen carefully, the lyricist Old Lee also wrote into the song the boy who was worried that he could not get out of his head and could only go home to send gas.
Erli's images overlap with the characters of Er landlord Shuangxi and the girl in the hometown ensemble class, forming a group portrait of a group struggling to break through fate at the cost of going to the hometown. Their hesitation and dissatisfaction, their posture of standing at the crossroads of fate, and their courage to fight hard made Li Jianqing "completely collapse" when he re-recorded a few years later.
A great group portrait, enough to make the strangers resonate and cry. But if Er Li didn't stop at nostalgia and went further, it might be a better work.
Li Jianqing talked on stage about his old friends in the band in his hometown, and the once most stubborn bass player is now happy to sell roast duck. "It takes more courage to go back to the city than to go out, because no one wants to believe that they are just ordinary people."
The difficulties of life and the paradox of fate should not all be attributed to "if a man leaves his hometown / like a tree leaving the soil." Even if you have not left your hometown in your life, you can't escape and collide head-on with fate.
The transcendence of art lies in the fact that it can depict both one group of people and beyond experience and can hit everyone.
Li Zongsheng finally sang two songs, "The Favorite" and "Short Song". This is a divine stroke given to him by God, especially "The Favorite", and Lao Li himself is afraid that it will be difficult to surpass. This is a sigh after the love and youth of the thousand sails have gone, not the story of who and whom, but all of us.