Hong Kong band Wellsaid wanted to take a road trip with distant friends – they turned that desire into an album
Hong Kong Free Press
Hong Kong band Wellsaid used to share a playlist named “imaginary road trip” with friends in the city and abroad, expressing regret at being unable to hit the road together during Covid.
But even as borders reopened and the band could tour again, “there are people that we can’t see, for various reasons,” frontman Sum Lok-kei, known as Lok, said. “Willingly or unwillingly, people are separated, and only under these imaginary, hypothetical conditions can they actually do something together.”
Without going into details, the four members of Wellsaid told HKFP their feelings about friends who had left the city or passed away. The unfulfilled road trip has been turned into a song with the same name as the playlist, which opens Wellsaid’s third full-length album, Regretopia.
Despite the “quite heavy” nature of the topic, Lok said the song was “a lot more upbeat” – thanks to the collective song-writing process with bassist Dixon Chan, drummer Darryl Blacker, and guitarist Jackson Ng all involved.
Wellsaid was formed in 2017 with Lok and Dixon as original members. After cycling through several departures, Darryl and Jackson joined in 2019, fixing Wellsaid as a four-piece outfit.
They play music that may not speak directly to the city’s mainstream listeners – with lyrics written in English and a sound tinged with emo and punk sensitivity. In an interview with Still/Loud in 2019, Dixon said: “You go to one of our gigs – well, you’re looking at the whole scene already.”
But that has changed with time. Speaking to HKFP in their band room in September, Dixon said the band certainly feels less lonely now. “Somehow we managed to gather a small circle around us,” he said.
And with a bigger following, the band has changed, too. Imaginary Road Trip is its first-ever song to feature lyrics in Cantonese – an idea that was put to Lok by his longtime friend, Taiwanese singer-songwriter Hom Shen-hao.
“He was like: ‘Now that you’re trying to write songs for the people around you, rather than just for yourself, why don’t you sing in a different language so that the people around you could understand better?’” Lok, who is also the band’s chief lyricist, recalled.
The new album is Wellsaid’s most ambitious project to date. Compared with their 2022 album Lurking, which was recorded sporadically in Hong Kong during the pandemic, the band completed the nine-track Regretopia in roughly a year and a half. They even flew to Taiwan twice to record the album – thanks to another long-time friend of Lok’s who engineered the tracks.
“What I wanted to do with this album is to stretch what it means to be Wellsaid’s music,” Lok said.
‘A timestamp’
Regretopia is divided by an interlude – a gritty guitar rings out against ambience created by sound artist Brian Chu. The track closes with a male voice saying he has just landed, and telling whoever listening not to worry about him.
That voice belongs to Hong Kong musician Jabin Law, who has moved to the UK. Lok said he invited Jabin to “recreate” the voice message he sent to his family after arriving and that bolstered the album’s theme.
Immediately after the interlude is a track titled Like Water in Water, a much slower song compared with others on the album. The band said the track, along with the faster, upbeat Imaginary Road Trip, served as the record’s “goalposts” and were the first two songs written for the album.
“I think that really sets the main tone of the album,” Lok said. “Sonically and content-wise, this is where we’re heading… it’s kind of lucky that we just landed two songs that are pretty significant to us.”
Lok said that whereas he used to write songs about how he felt, this time he wanted the lyrics to be about the people around him. “During Covid and the protests [in 2019], there are moments where I feel like we are connected to a collective consciousness,” he said. “A shared pain,” Dixon added.
Across nine tracks, Wellsaid touches on private feelings about departure and death, and also the collective experience of living in an online environment, where attention-seeking behaviour and problematic speech are the norm.
In short, the album was about “living in 2024,” Lok said, jokingly. That also encapsulates how the band approaches making music.
“Just like when we’re doing Lurking, it was basically a timestamp of where we were around that time of writing and recording the music,” Dixon said. “It’s just a natural way of how we make music.”
This time around, the band’s members also have more understanding of each other when it comes to making music, they said. “We grew a lot in the couple of years leading up to this album,” said drummer Darryl. “We wrote the songs more organically… we formed the ideas together.”
‘Among good people’
Their collective efforts can be heard in the songs. In several tracks there are multiple voices other than those of lead singer Lok and backing vocalist Darryl.
Those voices belong to the many friends involved in the project, such as Hong Kong indie singer 611, as well as Hom, who just happened to visit the band as they were recording in Taipei.
“I feel like a lot of the things that we do are enabled by our friends anyway, so it makes sense to have them involved,” Lok said.
Even the album name arose from a chat Lok had with friend and musician Leung Wing-lai after a gig. “I was telling him how I feel about performing the songs… he’s like, ‘you have a disease of regret. You have a regret disease. You’re always thinking about the thing you’ve just done!’” Lok said.
“I think I was going to Japan, and on the bus to the airport, I was like, ‘regretopia,’ that’d be a good name.”
Lok continued: “We feel like we’re always living in a state where you’re… kind of regretful, not of what you’ve done, but of what collectively this world has become. Because it could have been nice. That’s what makes you regret, [because] it could have been different.”
The recording in Taipei was enhanced by the album’s producer Wilmer Chan, who the band said “just knows when to push our buttons.”
“[Wilmer] is the exterior ear, but with the knowledge to understand where we’re coming from,” Darryl said. “I keep saying this – if Wilmer says it’s good, then it’s fucking awesome. If he says it’s okay, then it’s still pretty good,” Lok added.
During two sessions in the Taipei studio – recorded with a six-month gap in between – local friends and musicians dropped by. One of them brought Wellsaid some extra gear – and bubble tea. Another came with their newborn baby.
As Jackson was recording his guitar solo, there was “a whole cheer team outside,” Dixon recalled.
The move to record in Taiwan was costly, creating a sense of urgency that pushed them to make the songs on time and get the recordings right within each session.
“It was stressful, but also very wholesome,” Lok said. “It just feels like you’re among good people.”
‘Growing as friends’
In the 2019 interview, Wellsaid had just regrouped with Darryl and Jackson joining. Their peers in the local indie scene were going into hiatus or disbanding for good.
At that time the band said: “We’re going to outlive them all.”
“That is still the plan,” Lok said, noting the ambitious goal was made when departure and demise felt inevitable in Hong Kong’s independent music scene. But in recent years, young bands have been emerging and making “exciting music,” he said.
Meanwhile, Wellsaid has grown like a “family business,” Lok said, with each member having a role. For example, Dixon handles the band’s visuals while Lok looks after the money, or, as he put it, “many Excel spreadsheets.”
For newer members Darryl and Jackson, the band is important for the friendships as much as the music.
Jackson said joining the band was an opportunity to rekindle his love for music, after his previous post-rock band dissolved. “Playing music was a passion then, now it is a necessity,” he said.
It was the same for Darryl, who moved to Hong Kong in 2017, thinking at the time that he would take a break from music and focus on his career as a chef. “I could have ended up in… a fucking gweilo band,” he said, using the Cantonese slang term for white people in the city. “I would have been doing that just to get my fulfilment of playing some music.”
Instead, he joined Wellsaid and became best friends with the members, adding that they share the same music taste – as well as love for hotpot.
“We didn’t just grow as musicians. We’ve grown a lot together as friends, as men, and as adults… we’ve seen a lot of changes together,” the drummer said.
“I’m in a band with my friends. We go on tour, we write records together, and we hang out. That’s like the coolest thing for me.”
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