Speaking Part 2 你喜愛的一首歌 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a song that you love.

You should say:

• what the song is
• when you first heard it
• what it is about
• and explain why you love it.

¹ A song I genuinely love is called Slow Train, by a small Taipei-based indie band whose first album came out in 2017. ² I first heard it played live at a tiny venue in the Gongguan district of Taipei, on a Friday evening in March 2018, during what turned out to be my final semester of university.

³ Musically, it's the opposite of dramatic. ⁴ It's just a quiet acoustic guitar, a single soft drum line, and the singer's voice — which has a slightly hoarse, conversational quality, almost as if she's telling you something across a small kitchen table rather than performing.

⁵ Lyrically, the song is about leaving a small hometown for the city, but written from the very specific perspective of someone who's already on the train and watching the platform slowly disappear. ⁶ There's a line, roughly translated, that goes "the things I thought I'd outgrow were the things I really wanted to keep" — and that single sentence basically explains why I've listened to this song probably four hundred times since.

⁷ The reason I love it isn't really the song in isolation. ⁸ It's that I happened to hear it during a six-month period when I was genuinely terrified about what would happen after graduation, and the song quietly gave me permission to feel ambivalent about it instead of pretending to be excited.

⁹ I still play it on long bus rides home to see my parents, and every time the opening guitar line starts, I'm twenty-two again — sitting on the floor of that small venue, wondering what came next. ¹⁰ Some songs are time machines, and that's mine.

A song I deeply love is "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac, originally released in 1975 — long before I was born. I first heard it through my mother's car stereo when I was about fourteen, and at the time I genuinely thought it was a new song.

A song I'll always love is a Taiwanese children's song called "Bubble" that my grandmother used to sing to me when I was very small. It's a simple lullaby, basically just three repeating lines, and I doubt anyone outside Taiwan has ever heard of it.

A song I have a complicated relationship with — but genuinely love — is a Mandarin ballad called "Goodbye, Stranger" by a singer-songwriter I won't name, mostly because the song carried me through a particularly painful breakup in my early twenties.