Behind the Song: Loved and Lost
My song started with a random prompt I found online:
“Take your favourite food and make a song about it, without using the actual name of the food.”
I was working on this prompt right after I’d made myself a smoked salmon and avocado on toast, and the smoked salmon had especially hit the spot for me that day, so I decided to enter the world of a little salmon fish.
With a little research (thank you, Wikipedia), I learned that salmon are “anadromous”: they hatch in fresh water, migrate to the ocean, then return to fresh water to reproduce. I related to this journey (coincidentally, I’m currently following the same pattern: born in Hong Kong, migrated to New York, now back to Hong Kong to have a baby) and decided to tell the story of my fish protagonist’s final moments after it had been caught making this pilgrimage, as its existential crises unfolds.
What started off as a kind of silly exercise soon took on deeper meaning for me. Through the mind of my little fish friend, I released a little of the pain of my two most painful losses yet: that of my father and my unborn child.
In my experience, grief is not something that you ever fully exit, rather it’s something that hits you first like a tidal wave, then returns over and over — first pulling you under each time, then more gently washing over you when it comes.
This song is like that gentle washing over me as I’ve reached the stage where I can think of losing my loves as a gentle wash — while projecting a whole lot of feelings onto my little fish.
The lyric video:
