|
Kit Chan breaks free in new album Singer revamp Attitude with a capital "A' describes Kit Chan's new album. And that goes for the new Kit Chan, too, flamboyant, and slightly rebellious KIT CHAN has a new name these days. You can call her Lola. In Lola, her latest recording effort, the homegrown songbird takes on the persona of a flamboyant traveller who goes by the name of -- no prizes for guessing it -- Lola. ""Lola is the heroine I play. She is a carefree spirit,'' says the singer in a phone interview. ""This comes closer to who I am, the real me, more than any of my previous albums.'' She hastens to add: ""That is not to say that all the ballads I sang in the past were false. Those were more subdued versions of me.'' Like a blast of exuberant music -- with frenetic drums beating in the background -- she breaks free from her signature mould of power ballads. ""The lyrics are not so poetic, more matter of fact. The mood is very urban, like that of a pub or part of sleazy night life,'' she says in her breezy manner. The changes to her style and image have been brewing in her head for some time, and she admits that her last two albums, Mandarin compilation album That Day That Night and Cantonese effort The Best Of Kit Chan, are compromises. ""The poetry book was a big catalyst,'' she reveals. She had penned her thoughts in the form of poems for a book, Cork Out Of My Head, earlier this year. (The Taiwanese version is available in bookshops, and it will be re-packaged and released here in August.) In the book, she confessed to committing ""crimes'' and having ""secret pain'', and her forthrightness gave her producers a glimpse into the gutsy, slightly-rebellious and very articulate woman behind those torn, aching ballads like Heartache and Worry. In fact, producer Benjamin Lin even put the book on the must-read list of all those involved in the project. Baring her soul a little bit more, the 27-year-old wrote her first Mandarin song, a saucy, taunting number, I Have Finally Forgotten About Your Birthday. Laughing slightly, she says: ""Obviously, the line did come about because I did forget someone's birthday. Obviously, it was somebody special. I wrote it down in my notebook, and I thought, "It's cool.' '' ""There are two ways to look at it,'' she says. ""You know it has been hard, but you finally did it. And then there is this slight rebellious tone to it as well.'' After more than five years as a singer, she has sung enough love songs to acknowledge that they tell ""the same old story''. ""The girl falls out of love and tries to forget,'' she says. ""I wanted to get it out a different way, be more flamboyant about it. ""When things get very sad, the only way is to turn it upside down. That's how I react to things.''
|