Why Soft Soft Pillow? A Chat with SSP Producer Kido Lee
Soft Soft Pillow: a strange name for a band, but take a quick listen to their first single and the name quickly falls into place. “Pillowsophy”, to boot for a title as soft rock grooves float in the ether, all topped with analogue synths and Beach Boys-esque harmonies ready to tuck you into a gentle sea of sound – for the Malaysian indie pop upstarts, it’s a name captures the band’s spirit. Since emerging online last year at the pandemic’s tail end with a distinctive brand of smoky, retro synth-laden grooves, they’ve established lethargy not just as the band’s mode, but their message.
Carrying strong affinities with Taiwanese indie sounds – the Chairs, Sunset Rollercoaster, Four Pens just to begin as great comparisons – the quintet is ready to say hello to the world, beginning its steps in Singapore. Amidst their preparations for their upcoming performance at Kamal Arts Gallery this Saturday, and looking ahead to their debut album dropping in June, Big Duck had a little chat with the band’s producer and manager Kido Lee about the band’s online origins, thoughts behind their creative and design process, and teasers from their debut album and upcoming performance here in Singapore.
Can’t wait to see the band finally arrive in Singapore for your their first overseas show! What’s on your mind right now that it’s one week away?
Kido: We’re getting touring started, so we really need to prep everything well, especially on one car! We are really independent, managing all the way from zero to everything, done by ourselves. We’re even prepping all of our lighting, because we really want to have the vibes and atmosphere down good. We have done a lot of things and can’t wait to showcase it in Singapore. If you want to tour … you want to make sure you can quality control: we are doing on our own IEM mixes , and we even solder our cables ourselves, with our own Mogami, Switchcraft, Neutrik connectors. We really try super hard - and hopefully when it comes to showtime, they can feel how we can bring something exquisite, even if we’re just an indie band with just the eight of us. I’m just waiting for everyone to experience our show live.
We’re really excited to finally see the performance happen in person – with that said, how did the band get started, especially during the pandemic?
We [Kido and Wee, lead guitarist of Soft Soft Pillow] were in Taipei two years ago, in 2021 before March. I was very busy, attending conventions, awards, and over thirty concerts, but Wee had nothing to do, and so he began swiping on Instagram. Then, it just so happened the algorithm recommended all his band members to him. When he saw Faridz and into all his analogue gear and stompboxes, he thought: “oh my god, we have the same vibes! I have to get him in my band!” So he DMed him privately through IG and asked Faridz - “are you interested? Shoegaze, dreampop, bedroom pop sound,” he introduced himself with – then all of the members came in one by one.
Kind of funny, when he told me he found all his band members online, that he didn’t know each other at all – I was like, seriously? He had never met them, but they composed and wrote songs all through Zoom for nine months, and they did that to complete the whole album. So once we got back to Malaysia, during that time the pandemic was quite serious, so they came in one by one. They took turns recording their parts and finally… It was kind of like a long-distance relationship. It was like online dating - you never met each other before then they finally show up in front of you. Very complicated, but then suddenly they come in.
Was it different meeting these members in person?
It’s more 3D… even their personalities were more 3D. Not just their silhouette, but their expressions, the way they talk, their voices. We felt more intimate in that way. Wee has been the main songwriter for the band and has worked really hard, but some of the members have been contributing more to the tracks. but everyone was ultimately figuring out what the band was with their many styles and influences. I loved to see it because they pay attention to how they were to be a band before they became a band, even the way they argue and work out differences. They had times when all they did was present different bands to each other, and it’s during those presentations from one another that they got to know about the other people’s repertoire. Before SSP, Wee had released a solo album Traveller, and off the backs of that, he travelled to more than 70 cities to perform with just one acoustic guitar, but it was so lonely. He wanted to make the sound more rich, and when he was composing the song it was not alone.
So what was the impetus on settling on Soft Soft Pillow’s current sleepy dreamy sound?
Actually, at the beginning, there was no intention of settling on that sound – though, I mean the outcome became something like that. But at first, I asked him why sound “retro”? When he answered me, he said he met his parents who actually work and sing as getai actors. Their parents mentioned that his first album was too abstract – they said to him: “We can’t understand it at all. But you’ve already grown up - we are fine.”
But we felt like especially in this generation, the younger generation, they didn’t consider the listening experience for older folks. On that, he’s always had implanted in his mind his childhood memories of his parents playing on stage, an old school kind of Stratocaster- based sound. It was always implanted in his head and he wanted to bring back the sound of that era, all while taking away the expectation that there needs to be an edge to the music. It’s music friendly to all ages, genders and all – so sometimes when listening to our songs you can feel there are a lot of whimsical elements you can hum. It’s cute - no matter whether if it’s the basslines or guitar riffs etc, all of the melodies are sung out first by Wee.
After he made the songs for Soft Soft Pillow, Wee went to interview all of the old uncles and aunties to give feedback. So funny! Some of them who were more involved with the Chinese scene would even say the songs remind them of the works of Sam Hui, or maybe the Beatles or Bees Gees.
I would assume then the synth elements of Soft Soft Pillow’s music was something that came in after the band members shared their influences?
Yes, Wee would do the draft of the arrangement and the members will add to the ideas. It’s all herbs and spices really – especially when you listen to an SSP song you can hear the great 80s, 70s – traces of this golden synthwave era.
But above everything, when Wee and I talk, we always still say that SSP is still a band that is still curious about everything. Curious as in: we suspect whether development is the best way forward for this era – especially for your country or your land? Especially at our age, everything develops very fast. We’re 35, and we realize our friends are all married and have a lot of commitments, even a lot of education fees. So when we ask them: “let’s go camping!”, for example, they often reply with: “Oh, I just got this promotion, I can’t go!”
So we realise that this emphasis on development itself makes people afraid of stopping, to become really afraid of the word lazy. So for our first song, we really wanted everyone to be laid back, to be dumb. You don’t need to be smart all the time. So after that, when you listen to our music, you don’t have to feel a lot of tension. To be frank, I was really an asshole back then, so I asked him, you’d really want to have the entire world become lazy? Then he answered that development itself would always constantly be growing, so Soft Soft Pillow’s music is designed as a balance to that.
Often when I show your first single, ‘Pillowsophy’ to people, people reference that they’re reminded a lot of the Beach Boys. Where did the harmonies come from?
Actually the influences of the harmonies came from P. Ramlee! And in particular, 60s pop yeh yeh! Faridz, our guitarist introduced the genre to us – during the first presentation of influences he introduced to us. He actually wrote ‘Fool For You’, and in that we listened to a lot of P. Ramlee’s early work, and so a lot of the adlibs, a lot of how P. Ramlee uses those sounds – “oooh oooh ooh!” – we put that in a lot of the harmonies. It’s really cute.
The lush production really adds to the comforting feel of a lot of the SSP tracks – being the producer, was there a certain approach you emphasised during the mix?
They gave me so much space to explore and experiment, this time. I bought a Nakamichi cassette player to burn the record on, because we have this walkman and cassette bundle to experiment with. I realised that especially from the 80s and 90s, the listening experience has been changing all this while. From the streaming platform itself, it's been quite different since back in the day. And then they hear the noise from the cassette - it’s so magical! I feel goosebumps whenever it happens. There’s warmth and depth you get from the analog tone.
We recorded at home. Usually in the Klang Valley area, we bring around this Vox AC30 we record with – but we have this Blue Alnico speaker, it sounds so good! They have this sparkling sound but they don’t lose the warmth. We used an SM57 and Beyer Dynamic M160 and mixed and blended both of the sounds all while trying different distances. Everything was done in this room besides drums.
What kind of settings have the band been touring in? Being in your first year, has that shaped the band’s experiences?
Usually, we try our best to prep all of our own equipment, so as to try not to trouble our partners. We bring everything – no matter the visual or the lighting or sound - we have something in our mind and we really want to make it happen. We’ve played small cafes and we’ve played bigger spaces like the Godown Arts Center – we consider it like curating an event and the experience between the crowd and us. Even in Singapore, we’ve watched more than 100 shows in Singapore from big to small live houses.
Managing them and being situated in the Chinese music ecosystem, how do you feel Soft Soft Pillow comes in with regards to navigating these spaces?
We are trying very hard to break boundaries. We really want to know each other so badly, and talk more about topics that are considered hush-hush, considered taboo. For example, for the video for ‘Fool For You’, we brought in the topic of the Hand Angels (a Taiwanese queer charity helping disabled people with sex) in our music video - which is difficult, especially doing it in an Islamic and conservative country. I really don’t want to trouble my band members – sometimes the religious authorities will come up to us to ask questions, so we have to be really careful - but we still want to touch on minority topics. So even though our grooves are really soft and relaxing, we want to be able to hit on these heavy topics.
In fact, in the track ‘Fool for You’ - the you in the title actually stands for the word 誘, the word for desire. Most of the time, people with disabilities lack because their hands and legs lack function – and in that, what’s often hidden for them is also the question of desire. We really want to voice out some topics through our music, and show charming these people are, as well as to try to reach out and know more of them. Wee and I also are a minority group: we’re an LGBT couple, and have been together for 17 years - we met each other when we were 18. So we’ve been trying really hard to come up with something in our minds to share with people.
And for me myself, it's complicated. My mom is from Chiang Mai and I can speak fluent Thai, Cantonese, Hokkien, Taiwanese, Bahasa, English. So our cultural stuff, we have a lot of exchange and we try our best to open up our hearts to understand new cultures. We accompanied Faridz to the Ramadan market, so we get to know why they were fasting. All this while, we’ve always had misunderstandings. Through SSP’s approach, I believe we’re making chances to face and approach these things.
Speaking of these cultural aspects, you said you’ll be performing some covers of classic Hokkien tracks – you previously did it in a performance right in a miaohui (temple gathering)?
Yes, but this time after some changes it’ll be cuter. Our guitarist Faridz he’ll be singing Hokkien, so it’s really fun that he’ll get to dig into it, and we do hope to write songs in Malay. And for me and Wee, the reason why we wrote in English really was that we wanted to learn English so badly. I feel so secure when speaking in Mandarin my mother tongue, but when speaking in English, we always get so insecure about grammar and so forth. We thought it was a good opportunity for us to make our mistakes. I watch a lot of Netflix series to catch up! As for the Hokkien songs in the performance, I don’t want to say anything but we’ll keep it a secret.
I was curious about the visual side of the band as well, which is clearly super cohesively designed. Your debut album is encased in this gorgeous cassette package in an actual pillow - care to share more about the process?
Yes! At first, we had the thought of making a box for the cassette - but then we realized when people take out the cassette, they would throw away the box. I cannot take that! And nowadays, offset printing and die cuts are super expensive, so I wanted to do something super practical – where you can actually get the touch of a pillow. At the back is the logo of the label, Eargasm… you can see the logo doing a 69 – super horny!
There’s multiple layers of aesthetics to it, when you take it out you can see the Walkman player. On the cassette, the band is playing the music together – the song titles are like rain, and when you turn it over, you can see Side A and Side B. And when you turn it over, you see the pillow floating on the cloud. The packaging is transparent, and so when you put it in you can see three layers that make up the image, one the die cutcloud, second the pillow, and third the blue background. And when you take all of it out, we come to the lyrics sheet, one of my favourite packaging cliches, the lyrics are kerned too – when spun around, they look like rain falling from clouds.
And it comes with a custom cassette player – it was so hard to communicate with the vendors in China to get our custom colours. There was only one side that was willing to help us. If you turn it around you can see our pillow ghost. And when you place the cassette in, you can swap the sides instantly with a button. It’s quite fun! Just like my label, Eargasm – I also have another design firm called Eyegasm. They’re all perverted labels, but in the end I just hope it can all bring joy – I feel like the world should have more colour to it.
When we were doing SSP, I was really happy because I felt like I would be ok even if I died the next day. Whenever we do any kind of project I always think about things a lot. I’m a Taurus, but I’m also a Virgo Moon and Leo Rising, so I think I’m a pretty difficult character. So often I feel like I will drive myself to a corner and make things difficult for myself. At the end of last year, I asked myself why I always like to be someone that’s so difficult. When you begin doing it, you’ll be complaining that it’s so tiring and frustrating. But when it comes together and people buy it and people give you feedback - I think it’s so mystical to be able to feel it. It’s so cute. Experience is very important - it becomes a form of collective memory. The album will be dropped in June!
Do you feel like this ties into an overarching concept the band has in general?
Actually, no – the visuals and concepts all came after the music. But I’ve also asked Wee why the band is called Soft Soft Pillow. And he replied: “I found everyone on Instagram they had all something in common with us. Everyone is very namnua, so we needed to find a name that fit all of our vibes!” Then we thought… oh… so as we did it, we found that we enjoyed using these light forms to draw out heavy topics. Almost in the vein of we become soft, we won’t feel the pain. We wanted to bring out this kind of Dada absurdism for everyone - because we believe that the world in general needs to be less loud.
But as we were discussing, there’s also unspeakable chemistry between everything. When you see the colors and design of our works, you will immediately relate to us. Even in the music videos, we made our own props and backdrops, and in the end, wanting to create something great, we keep it small. It’s always just five of us, me our hairstylist and makeup artist, and my mom of course, who does all the wardrobe - or else the budget would have been huge. We also set up this studio during the pandemic, since it was difficult to book any studio, so we didn’t want to be limited by the restrictions. So we recorded by ourselves – it was easier because you could record no matter what time it was.
Any other comments about tracks in the upcoming album you wish to touch on?
Our recent single – ‘Agnes’ – has a super interesting background. It may sound like a straightforward love song – but actually, in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement and subsequent anti-government protests, there was an activist named Agnes Chow. This song is in salute of her. There’s a line that goes: “Don’t worry I’m not here to bring you home”. At the time she had been seeking asylum in the UK, as the Chinese crackdowns on activism and election freedoms began – and yet she decided to return to Hong Kong, because she believed that global media reporting on her inevitable arrest would show that there was no true democracy in Hong Kong. So in the middle when we sing “Why? Why did you have to go? We could be here forever…”, we were lamenting her fate when she decided to return to arrest. Even though freedom would be possible if she stayed elsewhere - we lamented that she had to fall to her fate. I thought it was quite satisfying because it’s through song that we can speak about all of these heavy topics.
Just before the show, we’re also releasing a new single called ‘2019’. We will be performing it in the Singapore show as well - it’s about how we walk away from being fucked up by the pandemic. Actually, the video for that is beautiful, but it’s still in the making. But we’re still putting in max effort for the lights - even now we’re till working on remote controls for it! Ultimately we’re hoping to give an unforgettable experience for everyone.
Quotes were edited for length and clarity.
