General Lee x Laremy Lee: Long Time Coming / Say It Like It Is

Mon, 24 Mar 2025
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Described as a meeting of the minds between North Mississippi hill country blues and Singapore poetry, Long Time Coming x Say It Is Like It Is is one of the earliest collaborations between General Lee and me.

The song by the Singapore-based rock ‘n’ roll band is an observation of the roots of modern poverty and systemic inequality in historical injustice, while my poem responds to these themes through a scathing satire of privilege, addressing anxieties about poverty on different points of the ideological spectrum at the same time.

I will be reprising this work together with DeltaV at our upcoming performance, Singaporeana Blues, this Friday, 28 March 2025 from 7-9.30pm at the Esplanade Outdoor Theatre.

See you then!

DeltaV x Laremy Lee: Singaporeana Blues

Thu, 20 Mar 2025
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I’ll be performing together with Victor, my good friend and long-time collaborator in the arts, next week at the Esplanade!

Date: Friday, 28 March 2025
Time: 7pm to 9.30pm
Venue: Esplanade Outdoor Theatre

Titled Singaporeana Blues, the performance combines music and stagecraft with the literary arts, exploring the universality of the human experience across time and space through themes that include love, longing and loss.

This performance will feature blues classics curated by Victor to a selection of published and unpublished works written over the course of my career. I’ll also debut a new poem written in 2025, entitled “Obituary”.

Victor will be performing as part of DeltaV, the platform through which he presents the blues and its sub-genres in exploratory instrumental line-ups.

This time, his fellow scholar of the blues, Brian Lim, will be playing the harmonica to channel the classic blues duo sound originating from the Mississippi Delta.

Some of the blues musicians DeltaV will cover include Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Please join us if you can! More details on the Esplanade website here.

Call It Singaporeana

Fri, 11 Nov 2022
2 min read
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General Lee and I return to perform our works again, this time as part of the Singapore Writers Festival.

Our performance – titled Call It Singaporeana – is a music and spoken-word collaboration focused on telling Singapore stories.

Each piece integrates an original song by General Lee with a poem or literary text written by me, in response to their music, where we bring together music, theatre and literary arts to imagine (or reimagine) Singaporeana – Singapore stories of our country’s history, myths and legends, and to tell (or retell) them through word and song.

General Lee will also be arranging their music in collaboration with The Good Company to incorporate acoustic instruments integral to American folk music such as the fiddle, the banjo and the mandolin.

The Good Company – comprising Kailin Yong, Kelly Olafson and Mark James Garratt – is a collective of musicians well-versed in the acoustic instruments that define the sound of Americana, or American folk music. This includes country, bluegrass and old-time music of the Appalachian Mountains.

A little teaser about what’s new and different from the previous show:

  • We’ll be debuting two new works: Murder in Toa Payoh x Confidence Man and No Place for the Blues x The Yellowgreenhouse.
  • While General Lee’s songs from their eponymous debut album released in 2016 form the bulk of the collaboration, “Murder in Toa Payoh” is one of their newer songs that hasn’t been released on an album yet.
  • “The Yellowgreenhouse” is a monologue written in response to “No Place for the Blues”. It’s a bit of a departure from poetry as I wanted to try something a bit different and I felt the form was better suited to the theme and subject matter of my response to their song.
  • Playwright and director Lucas Ho provides dramaturgy for this performance.
  • We’ll also have drummer Sami Kizilbash sitting in for the show.

It takes place this Sun, 13 Nov 2022 at the Festival Village (roughly between Victoria Theatre and Anderson Bridge).

There’ll be two sets – one from 5pm to 5.45pm and the other from 8pm to 8.45pm – so come for one or both, depending on your schedule (note: both sets have different works).

See you then!