Alan Bishop quotes:

Everyone's a singer now, thanks to karaoke, for better and for much worse. But the live band is now becoming ancient history in Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma.

Almost all the bars in Southeast Asia are lady bars. The listener and participants who interact and frequent the clubs are exclusively male who become actively involved with the ladies, not the music. Coming to them to listen only to the music is not what people do.

Old is unwanted. You don't find Thais going to the thrift store. They want new clothes. They want the newest cell phone.

In terms of perceptions of the culture, most people don't think about music. They're not concerned with it. They don't take their musical legacy seriously.

There hasn't been a true breakdown or effort to break Thai music into genres. They're not into dicing and slicing everything up.

I don't speak anything very well. The longer that you travel, you find out that you really don't even need to speak the language to get around and get things done, to live in those places. If you're somewhat resourceful and perceptive, you're pretty much going to know what's going on because human nature is human nature: they understand it, you understand it, and it works.

The lyrics are not an important thing to me. In fact, it can be a distraction. If I knew the language enough to know it was a horrible love song with stupid lyrics - like most of the popular songs are today in the English language that I hear - then it would be much more of a turnoff then if it would allow me to interpret it from the expressive capabilities of the vocalizing or of the sound itself, which allows me to create my own meaning for it, which elevates it into a higher piece of work for me.

I've had to adjust to karaoke as a modern reality that obscures our hunt for what we're truly after.