The year is 2015 and I’m back in Singapore. Throughout my last nine years studying in the sprawling urban hellscape known as Los Angeles, I’ve honed my skills at slappin’ the bass, joined three different bands, performed on the Sunset Strip, and released my first solo album. With that chapter of life done and dusted, I’m eager to explore the music scene in my hometown. After poking around a bit, I discover a regular blues jam at my local community center. It’s the pilot episode of the second season of My Musical Life, with an entirely new cast.

The year is now 2024 and I’ve just performed at Beerfest Asia with a group of musicians I’ve met over the last nine years. With two seasons of My Musical Life completed, its impossible to not reflect on the vast differences between Los Angeles’s and Singapore’s music scene and what those differences say about the two cultures. After all, many musicians in this day and age come from diverse backgrounds, both personal and professional; a vertical slice of the society they live in.

The most immediate contrast between LA and Singaporean musicians is what the term “Jamming” means to these people. In LA, when we got together to jam, we improvized together. We either started with a series of chords or a song we all knew and went from there, or we simply picked a key, had one of us start things off, and made things up as we went along. Typically, by the time we got to the end of a 15-minute jam, we’d traversed at least three different key and tempo changes. In some cases, there’d material in there to write a song with. This is how my college friends taught me to play music shortly after I purchased my first bass guitar, and jamming like this was the way you got to know another musician and proved your worth.

Back home, jamming means playing well-known tunes like Pride and Joy, Creep, Crossroads, I Shot the Sherriff, and so on. In many cases, trying to get too clever with the song in the spirit of improvization will get you concerned stares. Jamming, then, is not so much an act of creation as it is an act of regurgitation. My attempts at leading my fellow musicians with an improvized jam were initially met with confusion; what is this guy doing? What song is this? Four minutes into the jam, the drummer stopped playing and straight up told me he didn’t know what we were doing. It was quite a culture shock for me but in retrospect shouldn’t have been that surprising, given how Singaporeans are generally raised to color within the lines and follow instructions to the letter.

Fast forward nine years later, and the small but dedicated circle of musicians I know here have a better idea of what it means to do an improvized jam, but it’s apparent that even among the most technically skilled players, there’s an inability to come up with interesting riffs and rhythms on the fly. Everything sounds like mush as people play around the same scale, and my attempts at evolving the jam in a different direction by playing a different riff, as my friends and I always did back in LA, fall on deaf ears because no one is listening to each other.

In LA, nearly all the musicians I played with, regardless of their skill and background, wanted to write songs and put an album together. Jamming was one way of generating ideas. There was a genuine hunger among my musical peers to make a name for themselves by flexing their creativity, and that hunger inspired me to do the same for myself with, to date, three original albums and a fourth on the way. Meanwhile, after nine years of jamming in Singapore, I’ve met only a handful of musicians with more than a passing interest in creating their own music.

It all points to what I see as a difference in what musicians in these two cities want to get out of their favorite pastime. For the LA musicians I’ve played with, music was a means to imprint their creative identity and very possibly take it further as a professional endeavor. It wasn’t hard to feel that temptation; LA, after all, has a reputation as the Mecca for actors and musicians, where the right amount of creativity, dedication and luck could propel you into stardom. The reality was not quite true, but more on that later.

Singapore musicians, on the other hand, have a very clear idea of what their passion is and isn’t. It’s a fun activity and the best way to spend time after work, but it will never be more than that. Because of that, there isn’t much of a mental predisposition to create or innovate; playing music is more about the joy of jamming familiar tunes on stage to a captive audience and less about carving out an identity.

The irony about this contrast is that Singaporean musicians are much more mentally equipped to be serious artists than the average LA musician. I could write a book on the endless torrent of horrors I had to deal with during my time there, from the seasonally suicidal drummer with a baby mama from hell who would randomly not turn up at practice and not answer his phone, to the drug-addled guitarist who couldn’t resist jerking himself off in the presence of women, to the vocalist whose volatile family and financial situation interfered with his ability to write new music, to the keyboardist who was too high to learn any of the songs, to the band leader who was perpetually blasted out of his mind and would insist to the point of shouting that a song he wrote in 9/4 was actually in 4/4. When the stars aligned and everyone showed up sober and prepared, the musical chemistry was absolutely on point, more so than most of my experiences in Singapore. It’s just that there were so many obstacles that stood in the way that were the result of individuals who couldn’t get their personal lives in order. When chatting with other musicians at gigs I played, I learned that many of them had foregone more financially stable careers in hopes of making it big in LA, electing to instead work menial jobs that would give them more time to play music. Unfortunately, I often saw this life choice become a catch-22, where the high cost of living in LA, coupled with a lack of gainful employment, interfered with one’s ability to commit to music in a city where competition is fierce and new bands often have to pay USD1,000 to play at venues like The Roxy and Whisky A-Go-Go, who do zero marketing for your band.

Likely as a result of our culture of discipline, education and orderliness, the Singaporean musicians I know are typically working professionals who in some cases have also done their national service. They show up to practice, they leave their personal issues at home, and they learn the songs ahead of time. What they lack in imagination, they make up for as reliable musicians who know their craft and approach it with the same professionalism as their day jobs. They have a disciplined attitude and the financial and personal stability that any serious musician needs to go far, but in many cases, it doesn’t go much further than playing Sweet Child O’ Mine at a bar. As highlighted in a recent Facebook post by local jazz pianist Jeremy Monteiro, the life of a full-time musician who mixes gigging with teaching rarely gets you more than SGD2000-SGD5,000 a month. This isn’t much worse than what an LA musician makes a month, but in a culture where people are judged by their salary, it might as well be.

Compounding this frustrating juxtaposition is the fact that the logistics of playing music in Singapore are infinitely better than in LA. The main advantage is how clustered together our population of 6 million is, on a 31-mile long island where you can travel from the furthest end to the other in less than an hour using public transportation. Compare that to LA, where you could spend up to USD7,000 a year on your car (gas, maintenance, insurance, registration) along with the fact that it’s not uncommon to join a band with people who live two to three hours apart when you factor in the city’s legendary traffic jams and lack of public transportation.

Many smaller venues also don’t provide backline equipment, unlike Singapore, where even the Irish pub next to my home is fully furnished with amps, a drum set, keyboard, monitors and PA system. There’s also the fact that audiences in LA have become jaded to the myriad of bands vying for their adoration. After all, in a city that is home to the likes of Michael Jackson, Dave Grohl, David Crosby, Kanye West and Trent Reznor, the general public is far less inclined to care about your Led Zeppelin tribute band. Conversely, post-COVID Singapore is proving to be fertile soil for local music, with venues like Timbre+ seeing an uptick in sales and other FnB outlets upgrading to accommodate live music. It might not be the best place to be a full-time musician now, but there’s an argument to be made that the ingredients for some kind of musical renaissance are slowly coming together.

At a bandmate’s house party in downtown LA back in 2013, I was speaking to a man who was enthusing about how he felt like his musical career was finally taking off now that he managed to get Darryl Jones, the Rolling Stones’ touring bassist, to play on his record. After congratulating him, I asked him how long he had been playing music. “35 years” he said. He wasn’t the first guy I spoke to who took this long to make that kind of meaningful progress, and it might have been the final nudge I needed to come home and start a new career.

LA has far too many visionaries of varying ability who hang their hopes on musical success. It’s a great place to find inspiration, but is ultimately oversaturated with aspirants destined for disappointment in a city of broken dreams. Singapore has no shortage of reliable and skilled musicians in Singapore who nevertheless have little desire to create and will not take their talents beyond playing classic tunes on stage. Is there a third option besides choosing between being a starving musician who gets paid $100 a gig, or the drudgery of playing “It’s My Life” and “I Want to Break Free” over and over? Perhaps. The path that shows promise straddles the line between the other two, essentially drawing on the most valuable takeaways of my time in LA and leveraging the best qualities of Singapore’s music scene. It turns out that many of the musicians I know here are perfectly capable and more than willing to play music, both originals and covers, that are outside what is normally heard in the SG live music scene. Unlike the LA scene, which is prone to clashing egos, the Singaporean musicians I know are quite happy to have a singular visionary take command and leverage their abilities to produce something special. It’s a dynamic that’s taken me a while to realize and am only recently taking advantage of. With these learnings in mind, let’s see how season 3 of My Musical Life goes.