Sonic Bloom: Linying leans into vulnerability and finds power in the making of ‘Swim, Swim’

When The Road Ahead began to echo through Singapore in 2021, it carried with it an intimacy rarely afforded to a National Day Parade (NDP) theme song. Written in a single day, then honed over nine months, it spoke about hope and overcoming adversity together. For singer‐songwriter Linying, the commission—which she worked on alongside music producer Evan Low—was, as she puts it, “one of my life’s greatest honours”, yet it also came with a paralysis she did not anticipate.

“When you’re being tasked to represent the voice of people other than yourself, it’s a tall order and you don’t want to say the wrong thing,” she reflects. “All my life, I’ve always written from my own experience.” The song’s scale and symbolic weight placed her in front of audiences who did not necessarily know her work or her way of making sense of the world. Visibility, once intimate and earned song by song, suddenly became immediate and impersonal.

Performing the song at the NDP that year, alongside contemporaries Sezairi Sezali, Shye-Anne Brown and Shabir Tabare Alam, only amplified that shift. (The quartet would later perform it again at the swearing-in ceremony of Singapore’s prime minister Lawrence Wong in 2024, a rare continuity between two national milestones.) Feedback arrived instantly; the expectations—spoken and otherwise—felt overwhelming. “It made me feel exposed,” Linying says simply. For an artiste whose practice had been built in bedrooms and small rooms, the scale was disorienting.

Her response was not retreat so much as recalibration. Soon after, she relocated to Los Angeles, with an interlude on the remote Philippine island of Siargao. The detour came through an invitation to write with a Filipina actress seeking privacy while pivoting into music. The island, currently reachable only via multiple flights and absent of studios, demanded improvisation: equipment carried in by hand, songs shaped in villas. What it offered in return was anonymity. “I needed to protect my inspiration, protect my creative impulse,” Linying explains. In a place where no one knew her, she felt free to define herself again.

Siargao’s rhythms—surf sessions, stargazing, long stretches of solitude—began to bring about an internal shift. She discovered capacities she had not claimed before: a comfort in physicality, an openness to play. “Who said I’m not an outdoorsy person?” she quips with a laugh. She left the island for Los Angeles after one month, but returned to it repeatedly over the course of a year even as her life in the American city gathered momentum. The two geographies could not have been more different, yet they began to speak to each other. In the ocean, she learnt what it meant to surrender control. In the city, she learnt to recalibrate ambition.