by Maylin Lei
Credits to ilyaimy.com for providing the cover picture
My EP, When Pigs Fly, is the first body of music I’ve ever released. I purchased my first guitar little over a year and a half ago and only began writing songs after a year of learning to play guitar. However, when I found out how enjoyable it was to write songs, I knew that I was onto something.
I began with a classical training from age eight on violins made by my grandfather, from a half size to three quarter, then to his “number 2” with a finessed fiddleback grain in high glaze. His Luthier’s hands I remember as large and gnarly as they would trace the creases of my palm to elucidate future prospects. After ten years of scales and arpeggios working my way through graded texts filled with compositions by the gifted and deceased, a final concert in the embers of 1990 marked the occasion of my last musical performance on stage, aside from dreams.
Barely 12 months passed before my own strange sounds were committed to cassette tape for the first time, born of a natural necessity to do, and it was this background of prescribed exam pieces that gave me something to react against.