Francesca Tay
By Tay Wan Lin
With a passion for singing about people who inspire them and telling their personal stories through their performances, Jayesslee’s music extends from pop to acoustic and even R&B. The pair, both 24-year-old, was born and raised in Sydney, Australia by their Korean parents.
The girls started off doing covers on YouTube in 2008, and to this date, they have acquired a startling amount of over 200, 000 subscribers and 32 million total upload views. Whoa, that’s more than Marie Digby.
Their cover of ‘Officially Missing You’, which garnered over 8 million views worldwide, propelled them to fame and since then, they have had steadily increasing popularity from all over the world.
The UrbanWire catches up with Janice and Sonia on their first ever visit to Singapore on Jul 9.
Q: What do you think of Singapore?
S: “It’s so clean! Any other country kind of looks all the same, but Singapore just looks different… It just feels like we’re in a magical land!”
Q: What is the first song both of you sang together?
S: “It’s called the Bubblegum song! We learnt that in kindergarten, and it’s fun because we can do it in rounds like Janice will start first and then I will catch up and it just sounds really cool.”
Q: Do you two get into arguments?
J: “Oh we always quarrel and fight. Although we’re smiling on the outside we could be fighting on the inside right now. (laughs) We can fight with our eyes, we’ve mastered that. We’re always around each other and we know each other inside out. We’re always trying to make a video and we’ve got our own opinions. Little things like choosing clothes can be so hard, because sometimes there’s this one dress that we both want to wear. Who’s gonna give in?”
Q: Name one quirky thing about each other
S: “Janice has this amazing love for Big Macs. I remember when we were 7 to 8 years old, she finished 2 Big Macs and I’m not kidding.“
J: “Sonia has this fear of holes or clusters of holes. For example, toads that lay eggs on their stomach? The cluster of eggs freaks her out and she’d scratch her skin until it bleeds. She’s not an ordinary one.”
Q: Are there any plans to produce your own album?
J: “Yes. The answer is yes and it will always be yes! Everyone asks us whether we’re getting our own album out and for about 3 years the answer has been ‘coming soon!’ We’re not lying, we’re actually working on it, trying to write more songs, do more covers, trying to create content to come up with a really good album. We don’t wanna have an album that’s we’ll cringe when we look back at it. For now, we’re putting up our songs on iTunes though!”
During their visit, the twins performed at City Harvest Church and TAB Singapore, the latter a performance space for upcoming and indie original and covers artistes, the venues were fully sold out for both nights, to many of their fans’ despair.
“We love it here but what’sup with the weather?” the girls exclaimed on stage which induced roaring laughter from the audience on their second night at TAB. As promised, they delivered a spectacular performance, with Sonia working her magic on the guitar and Janice singing in perfect harmony with her sister. They had the full attention of the audience as they revealed the riveting stories behind every song in between performances. At one point, the audience fell in dead silence out of respect as the girls talked about their late mother.
Apart from that, the adrenaline pumping crowd sang along sportingly to their covers of mainstream songs such as ‘Price Tag’, ‘Breakeven’ and Korean pop hit song – ‘Nobody’.
And it was hardly a surprise when the duo wrapped things up with their most popular hit, ‘Officially Missing You’. Indeed, everyone present would be feeling that same way towards the charming twins come the next morning.
Photo courtesy of Tay Wan Lin