A good time to be a Naif fan
I had a special delivery today: a copy of Mesin Waktu: Teman-Teman Menyanyikan Lagu Naif, a tribute album to the seminal Indonesian band Naif. It’s a special album, obviously. Who doesn’t love Naif? (If you just raised your hand, you need to get your ears checked.) Then you have the bands involved, who are just about the cream of the crop in Indonesia’s current music scene: The Adams, Sore, White Shoes & The Couples Company, Goodnight Electric and many more. If you were browsing your local CD store and saw this album on the shelf, I think you’d be sold on it right there and then. I know I would.
If I weren’t involved in the album, that is.
Relatively speaking, of course. I can’t sing or play an instrument to save my life, let alone start a band. So I managed to do the next best thing: I wrote the foreword - or introduction, or whatever you want to call it - for the album. David Tarigan at Aksara Records offered me the chance last October, while the album was just starting to come together. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance.
I finally got around to writing it in mid-February.
Yes, I’m a procrastinator. But several factors added to the delay. First, I wanted to hear all the songs before putting pen to paper, or typed letters to Microsoft Word, to be more exact. Then, I studied the liner notes of every compilation Aksara Records had put out, to get a rough idea of what they expected and how much space I would have. After that, I had to figure how I could say everything I wanted to say within 500 words. I wished to pay my respects to Naif and the artists involved in the compilation, while relating a personal tale involving Naif. To top it all off, I wanted to make it interesting, or at least entertaining.
Think that’s tough? Try actually doing it, while keeping in mind that - unlike my magazine work - this is a piece of writing that people might read for months to come. Maybe even years. But then again, a lot of people might buy sleeve-free pirated versions anyway.
Regardless, I gave it my best shot, and thanks to the miraculous power of deadlines, I managed to get it done in an hour. Now that the finished product is in my hands, I’ve yet to re-read it, mostly because I never re-read my stuff. But just seeing it there gives me a nice, warm feeling inside. If I had a list of things to accomplish, then this would be another item I could cross off, along with coming up with the tracklisting. All those years of making mix tapes and CDs finally paid off. Hopefully I’ve done this album justice.
Incidentally, Naif themselves have also just released a new album, Televisi. I strongly suggest you check it out. A good time to be a Naif fan, indeed.
October 11th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Hello.
reflects the couple’s low-key approach to their royal connections.
Bye.