Music was my alternate universe when I was a kid. My dad always drove me out of town for travel and he would play his favorite songs on the way. Listening to good music while watching great views made me feel like I was in another world.
I made up my mind when I was 12 years old that I’d work in any profession related to music. I started playing drums on cardboard boxes and pillows. I switched to playing guitar when my mom bought me one.
Losing my dad at the age of nine was the biggest hit I took. My family had always been picture perfect, as my dad, who was in the police, always took care of us. But when he died, there was only my mother left to look after us four kids on her own.
I planned to run away. My mom would leave us home alone for days at a time as she had to go work and take care of my sisters at our relatives’ home.
I couldn’t believe all this shit was happening to us. I called my mom and said that if she wanted me to stay with her, it was now or never. She rushed to come pick me up and go live with her and we’ve never been apart since.
You must always have a backup plan. I didn’t really know what I wanted to study. I just chose accounting as I thought it might be a good idea if my music career didn’t work out.
I was lucky that Pond [Thana Lawasut, a famous freelance producer] asked me to release an album with him as Hydra in 1992 before I went solo in 1994.
Working alone is great when you have to make a decision, because it’s all about what you want. But it’s so lonely at the same time. No one is there to share the good moments with you.
Details. That’s my style. I always pay attention to the little things in our life and put them in my songs. That’s why people say my music is different from others. I get bored hearing the same fucking words for love songs, why would others not get bored, too?
Writers and composers always have these weird sensitive feelings. Even a small piece of news overhead on TV can make you feel dark all day.
The music industry is so cruel to new faces. It’s really hard for artists to make money these days. My suggestion is they should have a plan B in life.
Make your identity as clear as you can. If you’re really determined to be an artist, you must create work that stands out from others; it must be unique, like a fingerprint.
I seriously underestimated my fans. I thought that after decades of being in this industry, my fans would disappear, that they might have families and kids and not be into going out to hear concerts anymore.
But then Facebook brought me close to my real fans. Talking to them made me so emotional. One day, I told them I wanted to hear their stories. Then, all of a sudden, they wrote me lots of stories. It took me four hours to read every single message.
Many stories were so touching. One guy wooed his wife by singing one of my songs to her. One lady told me that she and her younger brother once rode a bus in the rain for hours to watch my concert. Her brother has now passed away, so she wanted to come to watch my concert to remember that day with him.
I try to stay ordinary, as much as possible. People always tell me that I don’t look like a rock star at all. But I just love to play music and go home to eat noodles at the corner of my soi, in my flip-flops, that’s it.
I’m fucking happy being me today. My job is to tour, to do concerts where I can entertain people every other night.
I’m a homebody, though. I love to stay home when I have no work. There are times when my wife says that I should go out. But I actually love to spend my free time with my daughter. I never thought that I would find a person who I want to be with all the time like this.
Humans are imperfect. The important thing in life is you have to live with that imperfection with happiness.
