The Singapore musician shares how social isolation has helped him to fall in love with songwriting all over again and why boredom fuels his creativity
The opening lyrics of Gentle Bones’ latest song, Positive Procrastination, are thoughts that you might have had in the last year as your city opened up—“Busy making these plans / Say I miss all my friends / But today I don’t want to move / So I’m muting my phone / I would leave me alone / Believe me I ain’t playing it cool.”
While last year’s lockdowns were difficult to get through, some of us have gotten so comfortable with staying in that dressing up and going out no longer have the same draw as before. Covid-19 has made the homebody mainstream.
As expected of the Singaporean singer-songwriter, whose real name is Joel Tan, his bop nails this feeling, while also letting us know that we’re not alone in wanting more time to ourselves. The 27-year-old’s relatable songs often describe matters of the heart, from heartbreak to self-love, paired with contemporary pop tunes. They sometimes also feature other artists, such as Charlie Lim, Benjamin Kheng and Myrne.
Tan first debuted on the music scene in 2013 with the single, Until We Die, and has been writing music since he was 16. By late 2011, he was pushing out covers of other musicians’ songs onto YouTube, where he gained thousands of followers.
His self-titled debut EP reached number one on the iTunes chart and got the attention of Universal Music Singapore, which signed him on as the first Singaporean artist in 2015. Major milestones after that include seeing more than 34 million streams for his 2018 single, I Wouldn’t Know Any Better Than You, on Spotify and releasing his first Mandarin single, 你还不知道? (Don't You Know Yet?), with fellow local singer-songwriter Tay Kewei in 2020.
As much of the world felt languished during the pandemic, Tan's creativity remained on fire. He pushed out 13 songs—eight of them in 2020 alone—and an album. With live performances on pause for the moment, he took advantage of the extra time to dive deeper into songwriting.
“I fell in love with writing music again during this time. I felt like I was 18 again, when there was no expectations of music being a career and it was just a hobby.”