AN Honest Love Song is not only the latest record of Harlem Yu, the singer-songwriter from Taiwan, but also his first solo Mandarin album from his own production company, Harlem's Music Delivery Room. Yu established his own music production company about a year ago because he felt that working under a record company limited his creativity. Prior to his new album, the production house had already produced an English album and another album for his band, Top Gang, which he formed about three years ago. ''Our band does not have any particular style because we don't want to be confined to any one type of music. We have five guys in the band and we all have our own favourites, like myself, I like R&B and rock,'' Yu said. ''I think we can put together something good and have some fun, but I'm not going to sing with the guys all the time; the band is not a long-term project.'' However, so far, Top Gang is still the soul of Yu's music. The band arranged the music for his new album. Yu said there was a big difference between his old albums and the new one, in which nine out of 11 numbers are love songs. ''My previous albums had only three or four love songs. When I finished composing nine of the songs for this album, they all turned out to be love songs,'' he said. ''I didn't know if this was good or bad, but I left them as they were, since they came naturally.'' Yu said as a composer, he always tries to do something new or different. But this time, he gave up the new for the old. ''Since I didn't like the latest things like rap and house music, I thought I could do something old like blues and rock.'' The theme song for the Taiwan Movie Year, ''Drinking Them'', which is a rock number, and an A Cappella (vocal only) for the title song are also included in Yu's new album. The all-round singer will stage his debut solo concert in Hong Kong at the end of this month at the Academy for Performing Arts.
