Interview with My Life As Ali Thomas.
Interviewed by: Sophie Guimaraes
From Thailand, My Life As Ali Thomas has been gaining a following since their project Paper. We interviewed ‘Pie’ Kanyapak Wuttara, ‘Rack’ Wipata Lertpanya and Taw’ Wannaphong Jangbumrung, AKA the group members. Read it below.
Pandemic
How has the pandemic affected your creative process? What has inspired you over the course of these many months indoors, and how have you found that inspiration?
The Covid 19 pandemic was/is one of the worst events that ever happened in our time. Our condolences go out to everyone who has lost their loved ones due to this unfortunate event. Many businesses went under as collateral damage. It’s a hard time for everyone. The only good thing that came out of this horrible time, in fact one of the best things ever happened too in some ways, is that the pandemic gave Earth recovery. The ocean, the animals, forests, and
rivers; the pandemic gave them time away from humans. Seeing how nature is without humans, how they regrow, is definitely food for thought; an inspiration. In the middle of this bad luck for the human race we were able to use this period to finish our studio album.
What were your favorite tracks of 2020? What did you listen to to help weather the most brutal periods of the pandemic (if the experience in Thailand was anything like what we had here)?
Jazz was pretty good for 2020. Chaos goes well with another chaos, and jazz is a good example of a musical chaos, makes the weight a little lighter and a little more playful.
Thailand
What’s the Bangkok bar scene like?
We’re not really in that scene anymore lol, but we assume it’s still good? haha. Bangkok has quite a lot of nice speakeasy/hidden bars around, culinary cocktails have become quite a thing here.
Favorite live venues to in Thailand, either to play or to go to a concert? What would a typical night out look like?
For live houses in Bangkok we quite like the Saxophone bar. It always was the bar to go to for live music, still is. A typical night out would be dinner somewhere and then end the night at the Saxophone bar. Another live house that we like is the North Gate jazz bar, this one is in Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is a province up north of Thailand, we tour there quite often (more so than other provinces in Thailand), and we drop by sometimes when we get the chance to.
Who are some of your favorite Thai artists? If someone were to say they wanted to get into the Thai music scene, who should they look to first?
T-bone, Srirajah Rockers, Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band.
Artistry
If you could step into the shoes of any artist—dead or alive—for a day, who would it be?
Michael Jackson.
I’m also really interested in your band’s general aesthetics. It feels fresh and new and like something that would really resonate with American listeners. What would you want new fans to know about you?
We’re from Thailand, and we write in English, and if you’re curious of what that sounds like then yeah try our music. Our upbringing remains, heartbreaks and dreams, come see what we’ve painted. We follow in the footsteps of the many artists we admire, come see how that’s reflected in our hearts in our songs.
Singing inspo? Guitar inspo? Drums inspo?
Jeff Buckley, Elvis Presley, The Edge, Noel Gallagher, Buddy rich, Dave Brubeck, Jack Dejohnett.
What’s your songwriting process? Do you have any tenants you go by, or any artistic rules you’ve set for yourselves, such as “I will never x” or “I must always y”?
We always try to get it right, whatever that’s in our head/we hear, our “goal” is to try our best to translate that idea and carry it all the way throughout the recording process until the very end of mixing and mastering. It’s a difficult rule to keep because sometimes the little things get lost along the process. In this album (Peppermint Town), we wanted to capture a lot of things, a starry night, the ocean, lover’s conversation, to repaint in music the things we fell in love with.
New Album
I’ve read that Peppermint Town is anchored in a lot of imagery. What are the strongest images you have associated with your songs? Like, if I handed you a bunch of paints and asked you to paint your favorite song on Peppermint Town, what would it look like?
It would be the colour of the ocean, the depth of the ocean, from bright emerald green sapphire blue to pitch black.
What kinds of stories are you telling in Peppermint Town?
Peppermint Town is a dreamer’s tales. It’s fiction, definitely somewhere along the fantasy/galactic genres.
You’ve already played SXSW and have made some major strides as a band. What are you hoping the impact of Peppermint Town will be? What do you want the response to be from listeners? What new heights do you think it’ll take you to, or where do you want it to take you to?
We hope to inspire people to paint their dreams out loud. That maybe when you hear our album that it would spark something, and then that spark perhaps maybe becomes a beginning of something new, maybe an adventure. Thinking back to it most of the emotions we used to write these songs with we got from living and just being ourselves at our most natural state, falling in love, falling out of love, dying, resurrecting. In a way, I think coming back to basics is what Peppermint Town is about, coming back to being a dreamer, get lost in nature, feeling the ocean, just amplifying those images and making the dreams vivid. New heights? Not sure lol ,we hope our music would take us to an adventure too, and maybe find our place our people, wherever that may be, the people who share the same passion as us. For Paper, I’ve read that you didn’t commit to a specific genre, and it was your first album as a band.
For Paper, I’ve read that you didn’t commit to a specific genre, and it was your first album as a band. What is your direction for this new album? How has your approach changed? Do you have a specific direction this time? + When is the album dropping?
Same direction. For a few singles we did after Paper we tried setting a style first before writing and it didn’t flow as great. I think it’s harder to set a genre before writing the songs, it’s always easier to work with what we have and see how much we can stretch from there. But I guess that’s more the making of it, but in terms of the stories that direction definitely changed since the first album. For Peppermint Town how we worked was more towards creating the pictures rather than dealing only with the lead melody and repeating hooks. The aim was to paint I guess that the sounds would create the images and tell the stories with those images, with, at the same time, keeping that musical form so that they don’t wander off too far and lose focus. The album
is out soon, we think July.