13 August 2009

Kay Tse



The hedgehog adventurer is spending a lot of time compiling a list of English songs recorded by mainstream Hong Kong artists for our research (now around 3,000). Most are covers, but quite a few are written. This is The One and Only written by Lam Sze Chung for Kay Tse and included on her Kay One album in 2005. Kay Tse is one of the four big female singers in Hong Kong right now, together with Joey Yung, Miriam Yeung and Denise Ho. She is also a good example of how it is becoming more and more important for East Asian singers to speak English. Kay is a graduate in American Studies from Hong Kong University and everybody knows that!

12 August 2009

Hocc x Paisley Wu



My last post mentioned Faith Yang's Falling Slowly. This is Hocc (that's 'ho-see-see', aka Denise Ho) and Paisley Wu singing California Dreaming and Falling Slowly on TV. As the hedgehog adventurer points out, the Hocc and Paisley version is better if only because they noticed that it is a duet. Not recorded as far as I know. Nice comment from jocelyng87 - 'luv it...hocc english soo good....胡蓓蔚 kinda so-so lol'.

10 August 2009

Perfect day



This is not quite what it looks like. Perfect Day (Lou Reed) by Faith Yang ft. Eason Chan over a few minutes from the Japanese movie Taiyou no uta. Just to confuse things, the girl in video is not Faith, but J-pop star Yui who plays the lead in the movie. But I guess that's the kind of thing people do on YouTube.

This is from her Self-selected album of English covers released on Sony BMG in April, which definitely ups the ante for my-favourite-songs albums.
Other tracks are Fake Plastic Trees (Radiohead), The Drugs Don't Work (The Verve), Halellujah (Leonard Cohen), 20th Century Boy (T-Rex), Diamonds Are Forever (Shirley Bassey), Falling Slowly (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova), Song 2 (Blur), The Scientist (Coldplay), After Hours (The Velvet Underground) and Miss Underwater, which is not a cover but a song written for her by Maximilian Hecker.

I think Lou Reed would like this version and he would like this badly recorded live version even more.