Award-winning singer-songwriter Tanya Chua makes a foray into soundtrack work with an album of music composed for the TV drama Imperfect Us. Working with director and screenwriter Mag Hsu from the earliest stage of production, Chua created songs and incidental music that capture the intensity of romantic rivalry, the frustrations of unrealised ambitions and the desperate pursuit of fleeting moments of happiness. While she has given each of the show’s main characters a personalised song inspired by their storyline and emotions, the album remains a personal one. The artist draws on her own life experiences and long history of genre experimentation in tracks that range from the relaxed, jazzy feel of “Hey Hey You” and the band sound of “Rebecca” to the poignant piano ballad “Learn to Live Again”, which plays over the end credits. Below, Chua shares with Apple Music some of the stories behind her first experience of composing for the screen. How did you rise to the challenge of creating your first TV score? “Soundtracks and solo albums start from different places. A soundtrack arises from the various characters, while a solo album comes from me alone. The music has to strengthen visuals and characterisation according to narrative and dramatic needs. You first have to distance yourself and objectively observe each character’s personalities, but you also need to bring your own experience—to ask, what would I be feeling if it were me? “What was special about creating this soundtrack was the dynamic idea the director gave me—she wanted all the protagonists to have songs of their own. I thought it was a cool concept, since scores don’t usually have songs for characters. It also simplified the process and left me lots of space to stretch out. “I did my best to give all of the accompaniments their own voice. With that aim in mind, I could choose instrumentation precisely and decide how complex a song should be. Each instrument, whether drums, guitar or piano, is important and has a distinct part that tells its own story. Previously, when I’d add instruments, it was mostly a way to fatten the sound—the individual lines weren’t really pronounced. Here I wanted every track to be useful, which challenged me to streamline and focus my choices and know when I’ve done enough.” What stood out most about the experience? “My life and the script share all kinds of serendipitous parallels. For instance, the shared birthday of the female protagonists Ching-fen and Rebecca makes their sign Aquarius, Gemini rising—and that’s my sign too. Lots of the show’s stories overlap with my life. And it involves parallel universes, quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement, which I’m a big believer in as well. They’re not everyday topics of conversation but they’re key concepts in the script. The director and I started out as strangers who didn’t know each other’s working methods. But it didn’t take long for us to reach an understanding and elevate the work to a level both of us wanted. It was a genuinely priceless collaboration. All these compatibilities and coincidences put my mind at ease and gave me confidence in every passage of music I created.” How did you decide on the album’s eclectic range of styles? “I’ve been trying out new arrangements of songs in my own concerts the past few years, so composing a score turned out to be a pretty easy task for me. It was a lot of fun playing around with different arrangements, like swapping from a major to a minor key or vice versa. “Take the arrangement of ‘Finland’s Embrace’, for example. A drama just isn’t complete without majestic music to set off the atmosphere of the most intense emotions. We were adamant we wouldn’t use the strings that you tend to hear in that situation, but what was our alternative? All of a sudden, I felt like I’d reverted to my rebellious, tradition-breaking attitude, so I used an electric guitar to highlight the heaviness. I messaged the director as soon as it was done to say, ‘We did it!’ She first heard the song while waiting for a bus and it moved her to tears. “The director and I were in unspoken agreement about the musical atmosphere for each segment. If you listen carefully to the musical styles of the whole score, it’s all in my wheelhouse—these are elements I’ve accumulated since the start of my career. It was a grand opportunity to look back at all I’ve experienced on my musical journey and deftly put them to use.” Were there any special moments of serendipity during production? “The inspiration for the first track, ‘Bloom Again’, came when I was nearly finished with the piano part of ‘Learn to Live Again’ but it felt like the outro needed something more sumptuous. I added a few lines of piano trills—a little extra melody—that the director loved and suggested expanding into an instrumental track on the ‘bloom’ theme. In one episode of the show, Ching-fen is staring at a withered plant that suddenly bursts into bloom, so I wrote the piano for ‘Bloom Again’ to capture a spring atmosphere, with birds and butterflies in the air seeming to be waiting for something to happen the moment the flowers blossom. The track is a perfect album opener and leads the listener right into the story of Imperfect Us. “I feel this collaboration came at the perfect time for me. I’ve experienced what the characters experienced, so I could converse with them through music because I knew I was once like them. Director Hsu and I are both at the midpoint of our lives, a time when you feel like you’ve begun to deteriorate. You can totally flip that idea around and turn time and experience into knowledge. So this album can be summed up as the distillation of the wisdom we have as women at this stage in life.”