Sound Source: Deep Dive: Helen Feng
May 22, 2022
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Bienen sophomore and music creator Helen Feng takes listeners on her path of love and forgiveness through her unreleased single, “Wash Away.”
[“Wash Away” plays]
LYRICS: I’ve wished you hell / For the thousandth time
HELEN FENG: I wrote this poem one day, and I just like really connected with it and it made me cry.
LYRICS: But on this day
JENNA WANG: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Jenna Wang. You’re listening to Deep Dive: a series from Sound Source where we hear the stories behind music on and around campus. Today, we’re talking to Bienen sophomore and music creator Helen Feng.
LYRICS: Will you forgive me
JENNA WANG: The song you’re hearing is “Wash Away,” an unreleased song in her in-progress EP. In this episode of Deep Dive, Helen walks us through her songwriting process for “Wash Away” and how she arrived at the final product.
LYRICS: Whose fault is it / at the end of the day
HELEN FENG: There was a bullying experience I had in fifth grade. Although I was very hurt by the experience, I learned that the person who did that to me, she actually was going through a tough time in her life.
LYRICS: A game of / Cause and consequence / We dance around it
HELEN FENG: Can we arrive at a moment of like, mutual understanding, and at least like, recognizing that there’s something kind of bigger than us?
LYRICS: Can we wash away
HELEN FENG: It really reinforces my passion in psychology and wanting to like, think about human behavior and what drives us and how to develop more awareness and understanding in the way our mind works. A lot of the traumatic response still haunts me. It just came out of nowhere and I was like, ‘Whoa, love and forgiveness can maybe be on the same plane as the path of healing.’
JENNA WANG: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Jenna Wang. Thanks for listening to another episode of Sound Source. You can find Helen’s pop covers on YouTube and Instagram. This episode was reported and produced by me. The audio editor of The Daily is Lucia Barnum, the digital managing editors are Katrina Pham and Will Clark and the editor in chief is Jacob Fulton. Make sure to subscribe to The Daily Northwestern’s podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or SoundCloud to hear more episodes like this.
LYRICS: With all the love in me
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @jennajwang
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