At Asian CineVision, we first discovered Goh Nakamura when he was in town for DAYLIGHT SAVINGS at the Anthology Film Archives with Dave Boyle. In the film, he plays a heartbroken man looking for reconciliation, but then finds love along the way. After we watched the film, we were interested in Goh as a person and musician (he plays the same character in the film and its prequel SURROGATE VALENTINE, btw). So we dug deeper into his music, his career, and his ambitions. With folk mixed with acoustic, his songs are full of anguish and hope–nothing less of romantic. If you dig his music, be sure to share it with your Valentine–coming up in 9 days!
CineVue: You have been showcasing your music since the beginning of Youtube in 2006–how has this social media platform inform/change the way you make music?
Goh Nakamura: I don’t think it changed the way I make music, but it brought me to a wider audience than I could have ever reached on my own as a solo singer/songwriter recording songs in his bedroom. There were some serendipitous events that got me to be a featured video on the “front page” of youtube, attracting over a million views in a few weeks…but things have changed so much since then. Now I post something, and it’s like a two hundred views if I’m lucky. Then again, I’m not covering Bieber songs or whatever the hit single is at the moment.
CV: Unrequited love is one of the main themes in your songs, can you describe your motivation and process when creating music?
GN: My motivation is to capture a mood, hopefully to strike a chord in the listener. My process varies pretty wildly. Sometimes a song will practically write itself, and I need to get it out in one sitting…but those moments are rare. Most of the time, it’s like an arduous archaeological dig, and takes months, sometimes years to make sense of a melody or chord cycle stuck in my head.
CV: There are two feature films written about you: SURROGATE VALENTINE & DAYLIGHT SAVINGS, and you play the lead role in both films. How did you link up with director Dave Boyle and the crew, and what inspired these films to be made?
GN: I met Dave at the San Francisco Asian International Film Festival in 2009 at a screening of White on Rice. We hit it off. He asked me to write a song to promote his film, and we made a video in black and white in San Francisco when he was in town. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this was sort of an audition for a script idea he had about a traveling film maker chasing “the one that got away.” He wanted to change the lead character to a musician though, and I guess I was in the right place at the right time. The inspiration was to make something like a Francois Trouffaut film blended with the vibe of “A Hard Day’s Night” and the Bob Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back.” It was sort of an experiment to see what we could get from shooting it in about 2 weeks on a microbudget.
CV: You are an actor, musician, and teacher: what is your favorite part about all three, and what do you learn from wearing these different hats?
GN: Acting and recording/playing music are similar in that you are “at play.” Creating a mood or interpreting a feeling/idea. Teaching makes me re-analyze and keep my own philosophies and techniques in check. All these hats feed each other. I’m forever a student in all three.
CV: If you can be anywhere in this world to write, create, and produce music, where would it be and why?
GN: Still trying to figure this out. Anywhere that I can be: isolated (if I need isolation), artisically inspired and pushed, with good food nearby.
CV: Who have you collaborated with in the past, and who would be your dream collaboration?
GN: I don’t collaborate much. I think I’m a horrible “co-writer”… or I haven’t found the right person yet. I’ve worked on a bunch of scores for Ridley Scott films with composer Marc Streitenfeld, and that’s always a lot of fun. I’d love to collaborate with an animator or a director to do an orchestral film score
CV: Where do you see yourself five years from now?
GN: Writing more songs, screenplays, film scores. Either that, or destitute and wondering how I could have answered this question better.
Goh Nakamura is a San Francisco Bay Area based musician who writes ditties about parking tickets, impossible crushes and faraway dreamlands. With one foot in the traditional troubadour world and another in the digital age, he performs at venues small, large, and virtual, to an enthusiastic and ever growing audience. A fortuitous 2007 feature on YouTube’s front page brought his music videos over a million views and earned him a huge new fanbase from all over the world. You can connect with him on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and for additional ways to connect with him, check out his website.