Gentle Bones, Benjamin Kheng team up for feel-good tunes

Home-grown singers Gentle Bones and Benjamin Kheng were not exactly sober when they decided to release a song together.

Kheng recalls: "We've been talking about it for a while - and one day at a wedding, and I think we were drunk, we were like, 'Are we going to do this or not?'"

They were at a mutual friend's wedding in late 2019 when they finally firmed up the collaboration.

Then the pandemic happened and the duo had to wait until after the circuit breaker period before they could book a music studio for a songwriting session.

It resulted in the breezy pop tune, Better With You, which is the title track of a two-song EP that Gentle Bones, whose real name is Joel Tan, released recently.

The other song, Put My Hands Up, is a hip-hop-influenced track.

Working together was "symbiotic", the pair tell The Straits Times in a Zoom interview.

They say the lyrics - about checking in on a loved one - were timely, given the uncertainty caused by the global pandemic.

Kheng, 30, says: "It's a year when we really did need to check in on people, not just ourselves, and we needed to just lift people up. The song is quite unabashedly that. Lyrically, it plainly says it's trying to coax someone almost off the ledge.

"I think many people had it tough last year and everyone's dealing with it in his own way, so it was nice to kind of write a song that was just straight up a feel-good song."

The musicians have long been fans of each other's work.

In 2014, they released their first collaboration, a spoken-word track titled Father, Father.

Kheng, who describes Tan as "one of - if not the - best pop writers we have in Singapore", says releasing a song together is a dream come true.

Tan, 26, is equally effusive when speaking of Kheng's work, saying he has been a fan of the latter's band, The Sam Willows, for years.

The quartet, one of the most popular local bands in recent times, are on hiatus as the members focus on solo careers.

Tan, the third most listened-to Singaporean artist among Spotify's local listeners last year, says: "I think the Willows have set a huge precedent for what the music industry can be in the future and even now.

"What they've left behind is something that has really inspired me and I've been learning a lot from Ben."

Better With You is the latest in a series of collaborations that Tan released last year.

In February last year, he put out Be Cool with singer Gareth Fernandez, followed by Two Sides, a duet with Charlie Lim, in April.

In June, he released Shouldn't Have To Run with Joie Tan and, in August, his first Mandarin song, a duet with Tay Kewei titled Don't You Know Yet?

He says: "I've been a huge fan of Mandarin music my whole life. I'm not the strongest in the language, so it took me a while to find that sweet spot where I felt like I could release a Mandarin song."

Kheng, too, has intentions to sing in Mandarin some day - but admits he has to brush up on the language first. "I'm afraid I'm not going to get the nuances of the language, so I'll put out something only when I know (my Mandarin) is strong enough and I'm not going to make a fool of myself."