Dru Chen Is Turning The Mirror On Himself

The singer-songwriter has been recording thoughtful, soulful music for over a decade. Now, at an artistic peak, Chen is looking back at a brilliant catalog with the first major, in-depth interview of his career.

Slower Life era, 2023.

For more than a decade, Dru Chen has carved out a place for himself in music as a soulful and energetic singer-songwriter. 

An accomplished, award-winning musician and educator, Chen traveled seamlessly from the sweaty, soul-funk of his debut album Mirror Work to the contemporary R&B of his latest album Slower Life. Yet despite his years of experience, the forthcoming album Mirror Work 2 arrives at a time when Chen is enjoying his first real burst of success.

Slower LIfe produced Chen’s first singles that have crossed a million streams, and it’s his most accessible music to date. “Summertime”, the album’s most popular track with over 2 million streams, is a classic blend of pop and R&B, while “Why Can’t I Help Me?” is a blues-jazz track that details how hard it is to get out of a funk. 

But it’s Chen’s explorations of love that have connected all eras of his music. 

“I feel 'attachment' quite intensely by nature, and that seems to play a role in my interpretation of the feeling of love. But I don't equate the "feeling of love" to "love" itself, which is much more of a doing-word,” Chen told me recently in an interview from Singapore. “My mentor Dick Lee once told me that the feeling of bittersweetness is the most appealing emotion in songwriting.” 

Since the beginning, Chen has largely released music independently, barring major label distribution for select projects. “It does take a lot of will-power and self-sustenance,” he agreed when I commented on the challenges of being an independent artist. 

But Chen is quick to assert that he’s had help from several different stakeholders, including his management team The Black East and Warner Music for Mirror Work, Yung Lee Records and LINCH which A&R’d and distributed the tracks from Slower Life. He’s parted ways with management since the release of Slower Life, but his outlook on collaboration has remained the same. “I believe it's important to find the right artistic soul mates to collaborate with, where your vision aligns with theirs and there is mutual gain from the arrangement,” he said. “To be challenged artistically is vital, in the creation of relevant work.”

For Chen, these collaborations help “get the projects off the ground and running.  Having others hold you accountable to standards and a timeline is important because it keeps the machine moving and the gears churning,” he added. “Without collaborators, the biggest challenge would be a lack of momentum and urgency, especially if you have other means of making money.” These partnerships are what motivates Chen to keep going and to, in turn, give back as an educator. 

Chen is a second-generation immigrant child of Chinese-Malaysian descent, and hails from Melbourne, Australia. 

“My memories of my childhood hometown are mostly peaceful with plenty of greenery and nature,” he said. “My parents were strict yet very attentive and they instilled a strong love of music in me. My mum noticed my musical inclinations at a young age and sat with me while I practiced to help develop my musicality.”

When he was four, Chen’s mother took him to a keyboard class that set in motion a lifelong devotion to music. “I took to it like a duck to water - it was just effortlessly joyful, and I finished the whole book in one sitting. I was sold from day one.”

In the ‘90s, Chen’s father was promoted to a new job based in Singapore. “So my parents decided to uproot and make a new home in Singapore,” he remembered. “The change was exciting but scary. We came from the outskirts of Melbourne in an undeveloped and very green suburb called Eltham. The switch to one of the busiest cities in the world was hectic but we got used to it after a while, and welcomed the exposure to a culture that was much closer to ours geographically.”

n 2013, Chen released the rollicking, free-wheeling EP Intentions. It’s an album that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve; the live music sounds alive, joyful, and raucous. “I set about making five tracks which spanned all of my musical influences up to that point, from the Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder funk of ‘You Bring Out The Best In Me’  to the Prince-esque rock-soul in ‘Turnaround’ and the alternative folk-rock of ‘Trainwrecks’ which was very much a nod to my earliest vocal hero Jeff Buckley,” he told me. 

Chen brought in several talented collaborators who gave the album its bulletproof production. He remembered, “I worked with bassist Josh Bridges who is a wonderfully talented Australian musician, and Graeme Pogson, an absolute knockdown drummer of The Bamboos and GL fame on a few of the tracks (bass and drums on ‘You Bring Out The Best In Me’, ‘Lovelight’, the drum loop on "Turnaround"), and the beautiful Marley Pearce who played drums on ‘Trainwrecks.’” 

“We tracked the songs in SAE Institute in Melbourne in 2013, with an outtake song ‘You Got It Babe’ which was later released as a standalone single featuring Kimbra's then rhythm-section Stevie Cat Jnr on drums, Anthony Liddell on bass, and Charlie Lim on rhythm guitar and production,” he said. “It was a very inspiring and energetic time for me, working hard and going through the learning curve of the music industry and my own creative practice.”

Over time, with the help of friends and musical partners, Chen learned how to hone his voice and develop his own signature sound. “Joel Tan, more famously known as Gentle Bones, taught me to look at my own artistry in a different light,” he explained. “He was a huge factor in encouraging me to experiment with my sound.” 

The Mirror Work era (2019, above) brought Chen a wealth of collaborators and laid the foundation for the soul-baring music he is releasing today.

When Chen released his first full-length album Mirror Work, the soul and funk was still heavily present, but Chen had laid the groundwork for his thoughtful, exploratory lyrics. He sang about how life is only as good as the people you share it with on tracks like “When I Look In Your Eyes” and paid respect to his mother, past lovers, and friends. 

“Good Thing”, a song Chen told me is his favorite song that he’s written, is perhaps Chen at his most arresting. His soulful, honey-soaked vocals soar as he sings about how love can bring out the best in a man. “What a man needs,” Chen sings in the opening line, “is someone who understands him.” 

What I’m most struck by on Mirror Work is the sparsely intimate track “Feelin’ Blue”. “What can I say, you thought it’d be a better day,” Chen sings in the opening verse. “You got yourself out of bed to put your favourite record on/ But even that don’t get through to you anymore.” The track slinks and unravels at a lazy speed, contemplative and melancholy, like the sound of a late summer rainstorm. 

Years later, Chen would circle back to carve deeper into the blues of depression in greater detail. But on Mirror Work, “Feelin’ Blue” is a singular, stunning work of catharsis.

Like most gifted soul singers, Chen’s best work comes in turbulent times. “Why Can’t I Help Me”, a standout track on Slower Life, came to Chen at a time when he was “looking for a sunny day feeling especially when life has been serving up a monstrous and persistent monsoon.”

Slower Life doesn’t shy away from the rocky waters of growing older. If standout track “When I Look Into Your Eyes” from Mirror Work was about Chen’s relationships with the most important people in his life, Slow LIfe was, at pivotal moments, about the relationship with himself. 

“I always wanted to look in the eyes of my 3-year-old self and connect with his mind and soul and wish him all the best in this journey,” Chen told me. For the EP’s single cover, Chen juxtaposed an image of him at 3-years-old with himself today. “With Slow Life, every photo was scanned from a 35mm film roll. The songs serve as snapshots of time and memories, literally trying to slow down life.”

Slower Life, which serves as an extension of the mini-album Slow Life, came in the months following Chen’s launch concert for the record at Esplanade Concert Hall in Singapore in November 2021. “I took a few weeks break from the music, then went back to work with what was unfinished on my hard-drive,” he told me. “The first song to catch on was "Show Me" followed by ‘Why Can't I Help Me?’.”

Chen had already scored a hit with “I’ll Be Honest”, a collaboration with Shye, so he decided to keep pushing. “Once we had these three in the bag, it made sense to round out the bases with a few more,” he explained. “So we followed it up with a song commissioned by Foundation for the Arts and Social Enterprise called ‘Utopia Reimagined: If You Knew’ with Charlie Lim, ‘Connect The Dots’ written by Gentle Bones, Jesse Blu and myself, and finally ‘Mess In Me’ (both the full studio arrangement, and acoustic version) which also feature Gentle Bones and Rangga Jones.”

Eventually Chen realized he had a new full album on his hands. “It made sense to make it a more complete body of work with the additional seven tracks,” he added.

Today, Chen is working on a follow up to Mirror Work. His recent release, the jazz and neo-soul single “These Chords Will Do” (featuring the legendary Chok Kerong) serves as the second single for the album’s sequel, MIrror Work 2. The single was the first track Chen put down for the new album and digs deeper into Chen’s experiences. 

“It was therapeutic writing this song because it describes my inner world,” he explained on Genius. “It’s a metaphor for my ever-shifting emotional temperament. I’ve caught myself maintaining a sense of calm on the outside but like an iceberg, so much more happens under the surface.”

In the original Mirror Work, Chen wrote about a lover examining her life as she looks in the mirror. But as his new music has proven, there’s no better muse as an artist than your own experiences. As he’s turned the mirror on himself to examine his own world, Chen has become an unstoppably compelling musician. Mirror Work 2, Chen told me, “will be a culmination of everything I've learnt so far, from the folk and rhythm and blues influences through to pop. I'm very excited to share this with the world.” 

Chen is approaching the new album, too, with a belief that he can be of service to others. “I learned that I enjoy helping others a lot, especially when it comes to finding themselves and their journey as creative voices,” he said. “This manifests in my production and songwriting for others, as well as my life as an educator.”

Yet he looks forward to where things will take him with the new music, and how he will grow as an artist. “When the situation calls for me to be in the spotlight, I relish the pressure and responsibility and always take it as if it's the last time I'll be doing this, “he added. “Even though I know I'm a lifelong musician and that I will be jamming until I'm not able to speak.”