Howan: 'Old Head'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

Howan is a San Jose-based indie rock band whose songs are all in Mandarin. The band members were all born in China and later came to the United States to study and work. The music reflects their lives and feelings in both China and the U.S. They met while jamming in practice spaces around the South Bay.

“It has a feeling of both nostalgia, but also with the hope and happiness of living here,” says Wenhui, who plays the keys and sings. “In our first album [Howan], a lot of songs are about the sea, and our lead vocalist’s hometown is also a city by the sea in Xiamen, China. In the sound, you can feel a geographical connection between the [west] coast of the United States and the south coast of China.”

Howan’s influences are funk and math rock while their melodies sound closer to Chinese indie music. Wenhui says that it’s been difficult to meet friends who are willing to make Mandarin music in the U.S., where most people don’t really speak the language.

“I feel [when] writing in Mandarin, I can describe things more accurately, and it’s my mother language,” says Fei, the band’s lead vocalist and guitar player. “We do find after our show that there’s always people coming to me saying that they are enjoying our music, while they don’t speak Chinese at all.”

Regarding “Old Head,” Wenhui says it’s the most representative song of how they make a fusion of Western and Chinese music. While the lyrics and the melody have a very Chinese style, the guitar riffs are from funk music. The song is about an Asian grandfather who moved to the U.S. at an early age.

“He spent a kind of special life here, and he had his own secrets. But at the end of his elderly life, he can still have fun and play mahjong in the mahjong house in Chinatown,” Wenhui says. “He’s living in a completely different cultural environment, but he can still enjoy his life.”

Wenhui says life on the West Coast moves at a slower pace than in China, which gives the band more time and energy to focus on music.

“Like most of the indie music in China now, [especially] the most popular ones, they are extremely emotional and intensively expressing a lot of things, or at least trying to express a lot of things,” she says. “But I feel like here, music is more like just music, where you feel the rhythm, you feel the melody, and you feel happy.”

The band’s members also include Fei on the guitar and lead vocals, Jing Guo on the drums, and Rann on the bass guitar. Howan will be performing at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco on June 30th at 8:00 p.m., so you can go hear them live.