“Oh I See What You Mean” Part 2: Is It Childish? Forgive Me for Not Understanding Your Sorrow — Time to Say Goodbye, Friends (Feb 2024, Week 2 Playlist)
Recommended Playlist, 2nd Week of February 2024 – Intro
” How many more unremarkable days have slipped by, how many more flavorless dinners have I eaten. And it still rains through this lonely winter, the city at night just as solitary as ever. “
Two years later, on December 24, 2014, the album ” Nobody Cares About the Things You Care About ” was released. But at that point Hsiu-tse probably wasn’t doing well inside at all. Even with all the fame he had then, he wasn’t the least bit happy. ” As a singer, you’re always supposed to have that kind of swagger, to imagine that the music you’re making is unprecedented, the best ever, like a news story that needs a sensational headline. ” Everyone wanted him to be ambitious, but he wasn’t.
“To me, creating isn’t such a complicated thing. It’s like cooking. Today I’m the person doing the cooking, the listeners are the people who came to eat, and that’s all there is to it. But the difference between creating and being a singer is… the difference is…”
“Do you want to open a restaurant?”
“Yes!” he shouted. “Whether or not to open a restaurant. I might be someone who can actually cook something up, but I have no idea how to run a restaurant.”
Even though he was a chef who could cook up just about anything, he didn’t know how to run the restaurant. In the band, he had always been the soul of the group. He wrote one incredible, flawless song after another, yet he didn’t know how to perform them for everyone — or maybe it was because his songs were too sad and too real, so every performance dragged him right back into that emotional place. It’s like forcing someone with PTSD from a car crash to drive every single day. Even a brilliant chef would find it hard not to burn out being asked to cook the exact same dish day after day, right?
So for him, spending every day with his girlfriend — maybe in the café where she had just started working — and gathering with their one private circle of friends was Hsiu-tse’s favorite thing when he was running on empty. To him, that group of friends was his safe harbor. But then the worst thing happened. Nine months before this album came out, on March 18, 2014, Chen Hsiu-tse’s girlfriend at the time passed away after sixteen days in a coma. The doctors said the fatal aneurysm in her brain had been there all along — only no one knew, like a silent ticking time bomb.
” I treated her and life with her as a place to escape to, but suddenly all I had left was the band. ” Hsiu-tse didn’t frame his girlfriend’s passing as the reason he left ” the band, ” but I think her death must have had at least some effect on it, one way or another.
The album ” Nobody Cares About the Things You Care About ” moved me deeply too. Counting the intro, it has 13 tracks in total, and honestly I love every single one of them. But I’ve still picked out 7 that I think are a bit more special to share with you!
Haven’t read Part 1 yet? Hurry over here and check it out!
YouTube playlist:
Spotify playlist:
Yes I’m in Love
For our first song, I want to introduce ” Yes I’m in Love. ” This one is like a guy who keeps saying out loud that he doesn’t really like you, while inside he feels nothing of the sort. He lists off her flaws one by one — how she sulks, how she always asks whether he’s been thinking of her — and yet he still can’t help thinking about her. ” Oh I don’t know, and why do I have to keep listening to you talk, keep listening to you talk, keep listening to you talk. Who can give me a reason to stop being so infatuated with you? I don’t want to let the loneliness spin out of control again, I don’t want to end up unable to do anything again. “
Every time you accidentally fall deep into love, you try to be rational, yet you just can’t tear yourself away from that “lousy person” you don’t even think is any good.
The second song is ” Forgetting Isn’t Our Specialty. ” What made me fall for it at the very start was its groovy rhythm and that feeling that makes you want to sing right along — especially the opening, which has no instruments at all and instantly grabbed my attention. This song makes you imagine you’re a teenager who’s already grown up, looking at a world that isn’t the one you wanted. You work a job you don’t like but it’s just a job, you live in a shabby house, maybe you even have a family. Everyone envies a life like yours, but you’re not the least bit proud of it — you know perfectly well this isn’t the life you longed for.
Forgetting Isn’t Our Specialty
” Can I say no, surely I can say no, at the very least I don’t want to forget the self who once said no. Hey, are you still there? Can you stand beside me, clap your hands and sing out loud — forgetting isn’t our specialty. ” Everyone envies that high-paying job of yours. They say just forget it, they say just forget it, but you’ve always known that forgetting isn’t your specialty.
This song is built from all sorts of instruments you’d find around the house, like the percussion of buckets and the notes struck out of drinking glasses. It’s not that no one’s ever done this before, but those non-instrument tones make the song all the more extraordinary.
We Have No Dreams
Up next is ” We Have No Dreams. ” This one is just over a minute long, yet it simply wraps up every emotion inside and then screams it all out — like words you’ve held pent up in your heart for a long time bursting out in a single instant. This is also the song Hsiu-tse loves most on the whole album. He even said it’s exactly how he’d been feeling all along.
” Our bodies hate us, our minds went bad long ago, we’re all idiots, we’re all idiots. Shut up, what the hell do you know. ” It’s as if, the moment you don’t walk the road everyone else walks, you’re a freak. Fine, maybe I am — but what gives you the right to point fingers at us?
In one interview, Hsiu-tse mentioned the concept behind this album. He said the album’s setting is a grid city, a city after the apocalypse. The world outside the city has already been destroyed, and the rulers inside the city preach that within the grid there’s no shortage of food or clothing, none of the horrors or toxins of the outside. But our genes still long for sunlight and freedom, so life remains very oppressive. The story begins with disaster (intro “Disaster”), speaks of forgotten history (“Nobody Cares About the Things You Care About”), finds salvation through a love song (“Without You I’m Nothing”), and ends with the unknown adventure of escaping the grid city (“Time to Say Goodbye, Friends”). Oh, the songs in those parentheses are just my own guesses, by the way — they might be right, they might not.
Nobody Cares About the Things You Care About
Next up I want to introduce ” Nobody Cares About the Things You Care About. ” That first line, ” nobody cares about the things you care about, ” sounds at first like it’s taunting someone — nobody’s going to care about someone as tiny as you. But the second line, ” just like me, just like you, ” plainly and frankly conveys that lonely, weathered feeling of “we’re all the same kind of people.” ” They say let this world be destroyed, they say it’s fine, they say it’s fine. They say let both joy and pain be forgotten, they say it’s fine, none of them care. ” Listening to this song always gives me a sense of helplessness, as if the world would go on just the same without you — and if one day you suddenly vanished from this world, maybe no one would even notice.
Sometimes I think that way too, and in some sense it really is true. But even if you’re tiny and unimportant, we didn’t come into this world just to be seen by other people, did we!? What matters most is still letting yourself truly enjoy this world — that’s the important thing.
Grid City
Next up is “Grid City.” Grid City is the backdrop of the album cover, but it might also be a miniature of the life we live now. We all live inside the grid city, and every one of us within the grid spends a whole lifetime striving without rest — just so we have a chance to buy ourselves a single door. After listening to so many songs, I’ve realized that sometimes the reason we love a song is because we’re afraid of becoming the very person the song is describing. Maybe part of the reason I love ” the band ” so much is that I’m afraid of becoming someone who loses himself, too.
” And then what, who will understand, will it all just be gone in the end, all gone. We can no longer remember the color of the sky, only a nature that craves freedom still pressing down on us, we can no longer recall what we were chasing, time marches on without mercy as we live in this lonely city “
Who Am I
The second-to-last song is also one I love a lot (okay, I say I love every single one). This song fits my state of mind perfectly when I’m alone in the dead of night. At night I often find myself accidentally overthinking everything, replaying all the things that happened during the day — whether I ran into a certain person, whether I said the wrong thing, whether I accidentally lost my temper at someone. Every little worry and disturbance comes surfacing in the depths of night. ” I know, I know, I can feel it all too, but my foolish brain still hasn’t given up on thinking. So just leave this night to me, to torment myself; once the tears have all run dry, I’ll be fine on my own. ” At night, we always overthink, yet by morning we’ve forgotten it all completely.
The Breakup
After the final song, Hsiu-tse set down his guitar and handed it to a fan in the front row. That’s a musician’s symbol of completing the most perfect performance — by throwing away or destroying an instrument, you make that performance an unrepeatable eternity. On July 15, 2016, Hsiu-tse one-sidedly announced on his personal Facebook page that Oh I See What You Mean was disbanding, leaving everyone stunned. No one knew what had actually happened. At the time even the drummer, Da-bao, was so stunned that he accused Hsiu-tse of being irresponsible, of never treating them as a band but only as Teacher Chen’s session players.
But the truth was, no matter how angry or how heartbroken Da-bao was, ” the band ” had lost its captain and would never again have the chance to be what it once was. In the end, only these songs remained in our hearts, and beyond that there really was nothing left. I think they had probably been gradually struggling to hold on ever since the third album. A full year before the breakup, Hsiu-tse had already brought up wanting to take a temporary hiatus — maybe to stop writing songs and stop performing for a while — but at the time everyone else pushed back, saying they at least needed to keep doing commercial gigs.
I think maybe it was because he didn’t want ” the band ” to keep boxing him in — maybe he was tired, maybe he didn’t want to keep drowning in those sad lyrics anymore. Maybe it was losing the love of his life, or maybe he simply didn’t want to keep going, so he chose to end it this way. But I think maybe Hsiu-tse himself hadn’t even figured out why he was about to make this decision!?
So what did Hsiu-tse do afterward? Actually, back in 2015, before the breakup, Hsiu-tse and Zhao Miu formed Fragile Girls. After ” the band ” broke up in 2016, Chen Hsiu-tse changed his name to Chen Huang, married Zhao Miu, and the two kept actively working in the music scene as Fragile Girls. In 2018, the two of them ended their nearly two-year marriage, but Fragile Girls kept going. Then in April 2020, the Fragile Girls page posted a disbandment statement — but that statement was deleted within a few hours. At the time, the band’s manager posted a statement on Weibo saying the post had only been made by Zhao Miu while in a poor mental state, and that they weren’t really disbanding. But… a few days later, the Fragile Girls page posted again, expressing support for Taiwan’s independence and statehood; after that, the China-born manager announced the termination of the partnership with Fragile Girls. Hilarious — it has this vibe of “the soft breakup didn’t work, so let’s go head-to-head the hard way” instead.
(The above paragraph is cited from item 3 in the references.)
After all that, Chen Hsiu-tse went back to his hometown to work as a delivery rider, kept on creating, and a few years ago even put out a solo album, ” I’m Home. “
Time to Say Goodbye, Friends
” I know I’ll face many lonely nights, I know the unease and fear in my heart. Though I can’t stop the tears from falling, though there’s still some confusion. But once you’ve said farewell, you can’t look back again. ” The final song, from the now-disbanded band ” Oh I See What You Mean ” — ” Time to Say Goodbye, Friends. “
Special thanks to the article ” Today Your Uber Eats Order Will Be Delivered by Hsiu-tse — An Interview with Musician/Delivery Rider Chen Hsiu-tse, About the Band, About Fragile ” written by ” BIOS monthly. ” Without this article, I would never have had the chance to learn so much about what was really going on in Hsiu-tse’s heart back then.
Thanks for reading. I’m Mydondon, and if you enjoyed my post, feel free to hit like and save it! Below there are also a few articles I’m sure you’ll love, so go take a look there too~ Well then… see you in the next one~
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Ramen reviews: https://mydondon.net/category/food/ramen/
You can check out Part 1 over here:
Mydondon’s new recommended-playlist family bucket (all-drumsticks meal) on YouTube:
Mydondon’s new recommended-playlist family bucket (all-drumsticks meal) on Spotify: