Monday 20 May 2013

Shaun Jansen: Rising Like A Supernova?

(Pic by Nathanael Tan)
 

The world needs help, but it doesn’t look like Shaun Jansen needs help getting more views for his winning song for the Eco Music Challenge! His original composition, “The World Needs Help” was viewed 456,634 times in YouTube since it was uploaded in Nov 2012. If nothing else, it looks like he has to spend more time ignoring haters. Especially now that he’s also in Mediacorp Channel5’s “The Final 1” and has been dubbed as one of those people who was just born with it. So who is Shaun Jansen? I had a chance to sit down with him, and find out more about this rising star from Singapore.

How did you get started playing music?

I played piano when I was young. I started when I was 5, all the way until I was 12, that’s when I stopped, ‘cos I wanted to concentrate on my studies. I didn’t really like playing the piano. I wanted to play guitar when I was very young actually, but my Dad asked me to learn the piano first, to go through the theory. Later, I asked my Dad to teach me the guitar. That’s when I was 14. So that’s how I got started. I was in St. Patrick’s Secondary School, so it was a very normal thing to do. Everybody in school was playing guitar. I had some friends who liked to play guitar, that’s when some of the members of my band started as well. My guitarist and drummer have been with me since I was in Secondary School, all the way till now.

What kind of music do you enjoy listening to?

Basically, rock, I would say. Maybe with certain deviations to blues, rock, hard rock, soft rock, but most of the time it’s rock.

Are there any particular bands that you like to listen to?

There are a few favourite bands that I have. My all-time favourite would be Third Eye Blind. I like listening to Aerosmith too, but most of the time, the rest of the bands that I like listening to will come and go. What I’m listening to now is a lot of Muse. It depends on my mood. Sometimes I have different phases. Then sometimes you listen to this band, then you stop listening, ‘cos you’ve listened to them too much. Then after a few years down the road, you come back to that band again, so it’s basically that.

I understand that you’re the lead singer for a band called Supernova, can you tell us a bit about your band? (Supernova is Shaun Jansen on lead vocals & guitar; Adriel Chan on backing vocals & guitar; Jasper Lim on drums; and Shane Carroll on bass)

Three of us – me, Adriel the guitarist, and Jasper the drummer – we started this band in Secondary School. We graduated in 2001, and our first gig was our Graduation Day. I wasn’t singing back then, I was playing the guitar. We had a singer who left halfway down the road, and I started singing after that. Then we found another guitarist, who’s left, so recently we found someone to play bass for us, Shane the bassist. So that’s the history. About the band, we listened to and liked to perform the same kind of songs, songs that are rock-based, a little bit more heavy, and I would say, songs with more energy, songs that are thumping, with heavy roaring guitars and screaming, not like the singing kind of screaming though. We don’t play a lot of Aerosmith, ‘cos it’s a bit too high for me, but maybe some Bon Jovi stuff, from that era until today, a bit of hair metal, or a little bit of modern rock, something along those lines.

How did you come up with the name Supernova for your band?

That’s a very long time ago. In Secondary School. And it’s stuck with us all the way. We thought that it’s a very nice name. Supernova is like an exploding star, it’s supposed to be representative of what we want to be as a band, but it’s really because we really really liked the band Oasis when we were in Secondary School, and there was that song, ‘Champagne Supernova’, so we thought, “OK, let’s just name ourselves Supernova, let’s just go with it,” so it’s pretty much stuck with us, ‘cos we couldn’t really find a better name than that.

What was the most memorable gig experience for you?

Memorable in a good or bad way? A lot of bad things have happened. There was once, I think it was in ’04, we joined this competition, Power Jam organized by Power 98. During the finals, I think we just had a little bit too much to drink, ‘cos we were drinking Baron’s Strong Brew, and that can make you go whacked, that was before the finals’ gig. So we went onstage, everybody was high, the music sounded alright to us, but I don’t think it was good at all. We were acting like hooligans onstage, during one song, I kicked my gadget, so it went off and for the rest of the performance, I was playing with no sound at all. I think I only noticed it at the end, when I was trying to keep my stuff, like eh, why is this thing unplugged? So that was one of the worst experiences I would say I’ve ever had. But other than that, the best thing about performing is how people receive you. It’s not every time you’re gonna get a crowd that enjoys the kind of music that you play, but when it does click, it’s very good, because you can feel the energy when you’re performing, and you get it reciprocated, I mean you get people singing along, people screaming, people dancing, I would say that’s actually the best, to be able to connect with the audience.

What are some music-related things that you enjoy doing?

Other than performing and writing music, I secretly also like to edit and mix music, recording my own stuff, and having different mixes to it. I enjoy doing that when I’m free.

So have you ever thought of maybe taking this little interest of yours and making it more professional, like going into music publishing?

Not yet, but it’s an option, I would say.  Probably if I wasn’t successful in performing and writing, I would go into sound engineering. But it’s already something that I do for my band, like when we do demos, we’ll write our own stuff, we’ll do our own mixes, we’ll do home recordings. That’s something I enjoy doing as well.

And what do you enjoy doing for fun, other than music?

In recent years, I started liking to write actually. I used to write in a blog. But recently, not much time to do that. Sometimes you just wanna write stuff, like in the morning when you wake up, you spend 20 minutes writing whatever comes off the top of your head, then it just flows from there. I also like to read, hang out with friends.

Let’s talk about the Eco Music Challenge. What made you join the Eco Music Challenge?

I work for a company called Interface. They basically sell carpets, but they’re also a champion for sustainable business practices, so everything is about being green. One of my colleagues, she knew some of the people from NEA, and they were sending out this mailer to everyone, asking people to join the competition, so my colleague came up to me and persuaded me to join it. At first, I didn’t want to. But then I thought, “OK lah, why not? Just try lah.” So I took a couple of days, wrote a song, and I submitted it. And the funny thing is, I submitted it 15 minutes before the time was up (he laughs). I was trying to submit it at home, but my computer was going whacked. Every time I submitted, it brought me to a blank page, so I didn’t know whether it was submitted or not. So I just gave it a try at my friend’s place, and it went through. And I think there was a voting system or something like that, and I had one vote, ‘cos when the time is up, the voting ends and you cannot vote, so it’s like OK, it’s in now, and whatever happens happens. Lucky enough, they gave me a call, I went through the semi-finals, and the next thing is, I got to the finals. So I think I was quite lucky.

So you mean people actually had to vote your song into the challenge?

At the start, there was a certain percentage where the judges would judge on it, and a certain percentage based on votes, if I’m not wrong, I cannot remember exactly now.

Can you tell us about your creative process as you were writing what would later turn out to be the winning song for the Eco Music Challenge, “The World Needs Help”?

When I wrote this song, I thought it was something that would have to appeal to a wider audience, so I refrained from writing anything too heavy, like the normal stuff that my band Supernova plays. Something that was easy to listen to, not too fast, but not too slow as well. Something that’s a bit upbeat. Something that a wider audience could listen to, so I would say it sounds a bit poppy. I just started playing around with chords, and I kind of had an idea, I wanted to have an acoustic guitar strumming, that’s not the normal stuff that we play, because there’s usually a lot of distortion and heavy stuff, so I thought maybe I’d go acoustic with the guitar, the running rhythm, so it starts like that, then there’s a little bit of singing, and it picks up during the chorus. When I first wrote it, it sounds a bit like that song by 4 Non Blondes (he’s talking about “What’s Up”). The chord progression is similar to that (he starts singing the chords). When I wrote it, I thought it sounded a bit like that song, so I thought ok lah, never mind, maybe I’ll just put a different tune to it, I’m gonna make it my own, so that’s how it turned out the way it did.

What was it like having Jack Ho from Jack & Rai as your mentor?

Actually, that was fun. He’s a very bubbly guy. He’s always jumping around. The cool thing was, we kinda clicked. I think he was the best judge to help us, because our musical tastes clicked, he liked the songs that we liked, a bit more mainstream music, so when we were working together, he was telling us, maybe you could put a pause here, or add another line of harmony somewhere. They were very good comments, so it was very smooth flowing, and it was fun as well. At the same time, I got to ask him about how the music industry is like in Singapore, how he goes around doing things. I had good insights as well, from someone who’s experienced.

I just checked online, and the shorter version of the music video for “The World Needs Help” (which was published in YouTube on 2 Nov 2012) has since received 456,634 views, how do you feel about that?

I’m quite happy that there’s actually a lot of views for that video, ‘cos I would say that our normal videos that go up get maybe max 500 views, so this is a huge jump. And we’re kinda like seeing ourselves everywhere, and everybody’s telling us, “oh I saw you that day on TV”, so I think everybody in the band is quite happy with it.

Can you share with us about your experiences filming the music video for “The World Needs Help”?

It was very hot, because we were wearing jackets, but I think it was a once in a lifetime experience, It was something that we’ve never done professionally before. We’ve shot videos before, like in school, but not something that involved a professional team, so I think everybody enjoyed it, even though it was tiring, the process was fun. We tried to make it fun while we’re waiting. We were running around doing stupid things. For those 3 days, we felt like we were a professional band. And kudos to the team as well, they managed to get us pretty nice sites to film at. We were on top of the Swissotel, and very nice scenery, so we went crazy with our cameras.

What were some of the locations for the video shoot?

We were on the roof (of the Swissotel Stamford), that’s one. The second one was at a reservoir, I think it was Seletar Reservoir. And then, we were actually shooting at Gardens By The Bay, but I think some of the shots didn’t come out so well, so we didn’t use that. Then the last place was on a trailer, we were driving through the city. That was fun. Very nice scenery everywhere.

Recently, we saw you appear in a new music show on TV called “The Final 1”. How did you hear about "The Final 1", and what made you decide to go for it?

I heard about the competition through some friends, a couple of different friends, who asked me to join, and then I saw the advert on TV, but I was a little apprehensive about joining at first. Many things, or rather, many bad circumstances were running through my head – I would be up to a lot of scrutiny from the judges (I didn’t even know who they would be at the time), and from the rest of the Singapore viewers as well. There were work commitments too. If I joined, I figured it would take up a fair bit of my time and I wasn’t sure how that would fit into my schedule. There was also my band – I didn’t know what their reaction would be towards it. If it had to come down to one deciding factor though, it was a simple conversation with the rest of Supernova, in which this topic popped up, as if by fate, on the night before the deadline. Thanks to the guys for being extremely supportive of me joining the competition. They were like “hey man, you should go join the competition!” and so I thought I’d take it one step at a time, anything could happen.

Can you share with us your experience auditioning for "The Final 1"?

The audition was really, really relaxed because I was doing it right in my own home! The audition was done via YouTube. All we had to do was to introduce ourselves and sing a song into the camera, post it up, fill up a form on “The Final 1” website, click submit, and wait!

What were your first impressions of the judges, Ken Lim, Kit Chan and Taufik Batisah?

When we first met Ken, it was our first briefing session. He seemed nice enough, although he possessed a tone of authority when he spoke. Amidst that air of intimidation and his extreme frankness, what he told us about the music, the industry and performing made quite a good deal of sense. We only found out that Kit Chan and Taufik were the other two judges on the morning of the first round itself. They were less intimidating. They gave good feedback to the contestants. As singers themselves, they could definitely relate to being onstage, and thus, gave opinions and comments from a performer’s point of view.

Do you have any interesting stories to share about your experience being in "The Final 1"?

Hmm what do you mean by interesting? An interesting thing would be a Whatsapp group chat we have that has almost everybody from the top 40 inside. This chat is like a conference and it goes on non-stop! So in a day, if you didn’t check your phone often enough, you could get like a thousand plus Whatsapp messages at a go! A little overwhelming, especially for someone who types as slowly as me, but it’s all good! It’s a great way to keep in touch with the rest of contestants nonetheless.

What did you learn from being on the show?

That there really are tons of great singers in Singapore. They’ve just been hiding all this time! Haha. Well, I could go into me learning how important it is to pick right songs for your voice, or how connecting with the audience is important, but after having said all that (all of which are very true), what I think I’ve learnt is that once you get out there onstage, get into your zone, start performing, everything will just fall into place. Give your all, be true, and the audience will love you for it.

If you were made a Tourism Ambassador for Singapore, what would you say is your favourite place of attraction, and why?

I wouldn’t have a particular place. Actually, I feel, the thing about Singapore that foreigners should know is not the Singapore Flyer, or Sentosa, or all those tourist places. I think the thing that people should know about is how life goes on normally, like how you eat at 2.00am at a prata stall, or how you hang out at the coffee shop, taste the local food. I think those are the things that make us Singaporeans and make Singapore what it is. That’s what I would recommend.

OK, let’s do something fun right now… really quickly, the first thing that comes into your mind:
 Fave song: “Semi Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind
 Fave movie: “Inception”
 Fave TV show: “Friends”
 Fave actor: Johnny Depp
 Fave actress: Keira Knightley
 Fave superhero: Spiderman
 Fave food: Ham & Cheese Panini
 Fave travel spot: For now, it has to be Italy
 
What would you say your dream is right now?
 
Right now, and for many years, I’ve always wanted to be a musician. My Dad’s been a musician his entire life, I think ever since he was in Secondary School. I would say I want to be able to live comfortably living as a musician. And my perfect dream would be to play to tons of people, and when it comes to the chorus of the song, everybody’s singing the exact same words you wrote when you were a nobody. After that moment, I could just die. So that’s pretty much what I have in my mind as to where I wanna be.
 
What are your plans for the future?
 
For the band, our bassist has just joined us this year, and I think he brought with him a new kind of energy for the band, ‘cos previously, I think we were getting a bit jaded with what we were doing, just going through the motions over the last few years. This year, with him joining, he’s got a bit of enthusiasm and that picked the rest of us up as well. We’re trying to do more things, write more songs. Now with the internet and YouTube, we’re trying to build more videos, put them up, share them with everybody. We finally have a Facebook page this year. So we’re trying to keep up with the digital age.  Maybe we’ll look into doing an album next year?
 
Find Shaun Jansen online at:
 
Find Supernova online at:
 
Be sure to watch Shaun Jansen on “The Final 1” on Wednesday nights at 8pm (Performance) & 10pm (Results) on Mediacorp Channel 5.
 

Welcome to SG Music Mine!

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to SG Music Mine (& other musings)... I decided to name my blog "SG Music Mine", because this blog is going to focus on the music scene in Singapore (aka SG) and will include concert reviews, celebrity interviews & feature articles on Singaporean and Singapore-based musicians, as well as foreign artists performing in Singapore... and I used the word "Mine", because it has 3 different meanings:

1) Mine = the possessive term, as in this belongs to me, because as a Singaporean, Singapore music is mine, and it belongs to all Singaporeans.

2) Mine = a place where treasures are found, and in this case, I mean to say that Singapore music is like treasure waiting to be found, and since my blog will help you find it, my blog is a SG Music Mine, and these treasures are meant to be shared with the world.

3) Mine = explosive device, because Singapore music is explosive, and it's just lying in the ground waiting to be found, waiting to blow up with a loud BANG!!!

As for the "other musings", from time to time, I'll also write about other Asian artists; talk about performance venues, restaurants, bars, cafes and other interesting places in Singapore; share about events I've attended, movies I've watched, people I've met, things I've seen and done, stuff I like, and more... let's just call it my "Wild Card", eh? ;-)

My first entry will be a never-released-before interview with a Singaporean singer-songwriter-musician who is on the rise... so watch for it!

I am a freelance writer, and if you would like to use any of my entries and/or publish them anywhere else, I would appreciate if you could please email me at JediJean@gmail.com to let me know where my entry will be published.