Linying has released two EPs over the past two years—one under the nominal moniker she’s been using for nearly a decade to explore the heights of dream-pop as a solo songwriter, the other under the name Doris Club, which took a significant turn toward folk-pop. Yet both releases were unified in their themes of heartbreak and nomadism and how these two concepts intertwined for her in recent years as she uprooted her life in Singapore after the dissolution of a relationship to start again in LA.
With those significant life experiences serving as a canvas on which she continues to create, her newly released sophomore album Swim, Swim takes a deeper dive into her emotions as she continues to process change, relying on aquatic imagery to symbolize her progress in overcoming indecisiveness. With a range of musical influences spreading far beyond both previously listed genres, the glossy sounds of Swim, Swim are the result of an equally broad range of inspiration outside of the music itself. “I’d say this album is my most introspective yet,” she shares, “and I think this period of deep reflection and self-inquiry, as we were wrapping up the recording on it, was essential to the way the subject matter ended up being expressed.”
To achieve this state of introspection, Linying shares that certain encounters with large bodies of water, remote islands, and even cold showers helped her reorient herself to the focused mindset we hear on the new record. With Swim, Swim out today via Nettwerk, stream along below and read about five of Linying’s most prominent non-musical influences on the record.
The ocean
I swam so much. I was never particularly athletic growing up, so when I rode a wave on a surfboard on my second try, two years ago now, I immediately doubled down and said, “A sport I can be good at?! I’m doing it.” This came at a time when my life was in complete upheaval: I was at the end of a long relationship, my family was on the brink of dissolution, and I had just moved to the United States from Singapore with no plan and no social security number—so I really needed the extent of surrender that was being asked of me internally to be mirrored in my external world, in a physical way. Sometimes the waves were mellow, sometimes they were violent; they either lifted me gently and helped me glide, soaring over the surface of the water, or else pummelled me mercilessly and made me come to terms with my own mortality. And it wasn’t personal, it was just nature.
Siargao
This ties closely with the ocean: Around the time I was about to move, I got a call from a producer asking me to help write songs for a movie star in the Philippines looking to pivot to music, who was hiding out on a teardrop-shaped remote island called Siargao. I ended up writing my book, If I Looked My Lack in the Eye, about it, because it was such a profoundly transformative experience. Coming from Singapore, a country of order and rules and structure, I’d never seen nature this untouched in my life. I’d also never been this unsurveilled and free to be whomever I wanted, because no one knew or cared that I was a “public figure” back home, so I didn’t feel pressured to behave. The people that the island pulled in were also drawn to transience and novelty. I took it a little far and lived out some very colourful stories, but at least I now have an album.
Carl Jung and the Philosophical Research Society
Someone told me recently that my shrewdness was a city person’s trait. I felt it immensely when I landed in my first neighbourhood in LA, a little East, where psychics and tarot readers somehow managed to maintain brick-and-mortar storefronts, a fact that bowled me over. I might have laughed when someone told me they were an “energy healer,” because I thought they were joking. Then, as an exercise in not letting my difficult thoughts overrun me, I began training myself to hone my attention, which led me to pick up Jung in a bookstore (before this, I’d almost exclusively read fiction, derisive of writers who spelled truths out in what I deemed clinical and unimaginative ways).
The bookstore was in a building called the Philosophical Research Society, which I lived across the corner from and would pass countless times on my runs in the neighbourhood, but never thought to go in until one day I noticed a plaque on a statue displaying a quote about man’s higher consciousness, which prompted me to enter. There, I began attending lectures alone on mysticism, folklore, and religion, because they reminded me of my history classes at university and I missed using my brain. I’d say this album is my most introspective yet, and I think this period of deep reflection and self-inquiry, as we were wrapping up the recording on it, was essential to the way the subject matter ended up being expressed.
Cold showers
“Swim, swim” comes from a sentence I’d said to someone in a bit of a romantically entangled context: “If you want to swim, swim.” I had little patience for anyone else’s indecisiveness, possibly because I despised it in myself. I remember an old version of me waffling back and forth between whether or not to pull the plug on a relationship that I deep down already knew wasn’t working. This was in the same season of my life when I’d spent 72 hours mulling over an online grocery order in the peak of the pandemic, adding and then removing and then re-adding frozen cod to my cart because of the myriad factors and variables I was taking into consideration: my schedule that week, whether fresh cod was a better bet if I was going to be able to eat it in time, what else I had in my fridge that needed finishing.
I really, really exhausted myself. That was when I told myself, “Enough, the pain of making the wrong decision can’t possibly be worse than the torment of this paralysis,” and in that vein, I started taking cold showers to train myself to get used to the feeling of a shocking, uncomfortable, but eventually gratifying plunge. I pulled the plug, I bought the one-way ticket; I became ruthless with myself, but this cold shower habit kickstarted the chain of processes that made me party to the places, people, encounters, and experiences that eventually shaped this album.
Brianna Lance’s dress for & Other Stories’ capsule collection
Right as we were conceptualizing the visuals for this album, I got a call from the Prime Minister’s office in Singapore saying that they wanted me to fly back to perform a song that I’d written for a National Day event a few years prior, because there was about to be a change in leadership and they wanted me to sing it at the swearing-in ceremony. In a mad scramble with brands and designers to source for outfits, my manager was given a sample piece from the atelier & Other Stories, who were unveiling a new collection with New York–based artist Brianna Lance. I was in the midst of shooting the music video for “Blondie,” so I took the dress with me on a whim, unsure if we were going to use it. Oddly enough it ended up defining all of the visuals on the album—none of our other options ever felt right, so we shot most of the cover art and videos in this dress that I now find impossible to divorce from my narrative of this album’s piecing. A few months later I looked up Brianna Lance out of curiosity and realized that this collection was inspired by her love for water.
