Jonathan Koe

Jonathan Koe (they/he) is a queer mystic who was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. Jonathan expresses their multi-faceted creativity through music, astrology, tarot, energy healing, and statistics. Jonathan has been releasing music under the moniker Nate Qi, the English phoneticization of their childhood pet name, since 2019 and has written songs since they were 11 years old. Jonathan graduated from Manhattan School of Music with a Master of Music (2013) and from Columbia University with a Master of Arts in Economics (2016). Jonathan currently lives in Brooklyn.

Songs are magical beings with their own eyes, hearts, and wings. The spirit of a song exists on a universal collective plane. You – the individual, the ego – may be able to craft a smart rhyme or a catchy tune. But you can’t write the essence of a song into existence.

Like dandelion wisp blown by the wind, it is the silvery seedling of a song that decides to land on you. Every day, hundreds whisper in your ears: “I want to be born. You’re going to be my mother.” Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’ll be too busy to even notice. But the one percent of the time you took to accept this invitation, the world will stand still.

When a song is ready to be born through you, they take over your whole existence. Suddenly, there’s no space for you to answer your Instagram DMs or to worry about that unfinished homework. In my experience, the best songs often come fully-formed. The lyrics and melodies tumble out at the same time.

This makes a lot of sense. In the world of great songs, lyrics and melodies are inseparable entities – just like John and Yoko, or Burt and Bacharach, or Billie and Finneas. There is no such thing as good or bad lyrics. When the whole song works, everything just fits. When it doesn’t – well, you have a choice. Either you toss and move on, or you get to work and find a way to materialize that initial spark.

Some songs cast a powerful spell on everyone. Songs like Imagine or All I Want for Christmas is You. It’s hard to say how they got their power. No doubt, there is musical science as to why certain songs just ‘work.’ However, let’s not forget the power of John Lennon’s death or the fact that every department store in America has been playing All I Want ad nauseum every single holiday season since the song came out. There is no denying the power of great musicianship and penmanship, but one cannot overestimate the impact of a national tragedy and good ol’ brainwashing.

The more important and interesting question, to me at least, is: “How do you write a song that works for you, the songwriter?” In other words: how do you write a song that takes you back to the very heart of the emotion you felt when you were writing that song every single time you play it? How do you write a song that brings back the smell of the room, the exact pattern of your lover’s plaid, the exact glow of the fluorescent lights?

Songwriting saved my life. There is nothing more life-affirming than the act of distilling a glimmer of your life force into a three-minute sonic spell. When you finish a song that expresses exactly how you felt, you remember that your life is real and that you are real.

I wrote First Love on a NYC subway train ride home from Columbia, in the fall of 2014. After years of training to be a concert pianist, I decided to bury the dream and follow the advice I’ve heard since I was 14: to get a marketable degree and a day job. Although I couldn’t remember the exact trigger (some test I flunked? Plain old existential hollowness? Does it matter?), I perfectly remember how I felt. Alone and worthless.

The combination of my state of mind, the drizzly weather, and the packed subway car created the perfect soil for my songwriting harvest. The verse and the chorus tumbled out of me effortlessly.

   Days like these I thought you
   The hissing of the rain, the people on the train
   Slowly turn the hands of time
   Measure distance of our hearts
   Will I see your face again? 
   I thought we had it all
   But you turned your back on us
   You were my first love
   How did you find the heart to falter?

Writing First Love was a powerful experience for me. I remember crying the whole ride home. I wasn’t writing about a lover’s betrayal. To me, it was about how I left my mom in the motherland to pursue my muse. And now, my muse has left me. It all felt like a cycle of regret, betrayal, and heartbreak.

The first thing I did as soon as I got out of the train was to find a quiet enough spot to record a Voice Memo on my phone. Yes, tears and all. Here’s the evidence. You can hear the subway in the background and me stumbling on what would end up becoming the bridge of the song.

I finished the song, produced and recorded it, then tucked it away somewhere in the middle of my debut album, Elementary Love. It was always a personal favorite, but I never really thought anybody would notice. When I reached out to my filmmaker friend Bảo Ngô, Bảo picked First Love to build the visuals for.

When we met to discuss the concepts, Bảo kept coming back to the idea of using a disembodied mannequin hand in the shoot. We were both fans of surrealist art and Wong Kar Wai’s films, so we took our scene ideas from his movie stills where there were intimate moments between couples. These couples were slow dancing, holding hands, eating dinner. Instead of casting another person, we used the mannequin hand to amplify the sense of loneliness, while giving the visual treatment some room for interpretation.

In both songs and visuals, negative space plays an important role. In this case, the song could be a love letter to a former lover, but it could also be directed to one’s country. The visual could be dreamy and poetic, or funny and slightly creepy, or plain absurd.

As for us, our intention was to visually represent the deep human longing for true care. Our first love is our land – Mother Earth, the country we were born into, the community that gave us life. We all want to feel seen, safe, and taken care of by our people. And yet, acceptance isn’t always available to us. So we create crutches and we hold on to what gives us a false sense of security.

Here’s the video:

The disembodied mannequin hand was a symbol for isolation and severed belonging. While a real hand represents nurture, care, and labor, the fake hand emits a strangeness and stiffness that can never replace the care of the true mother.

The final scene in the video represents a ritual we must all go through: releasing ourselves from the womb, the comfort zone so we can dance freely into the night.

Objectively, I don’t think First Love was a perfect song. Far from it. But writing it was a deeply healing experience. And releasing the video has been an exercise in surrendering my own egoic control of how my art will be received in the world.

One of my dear friends, Zaneta Sykes, who also happened to be a powerful musician themselves, once shared a priceless nugget of wisdom, “Hold the space for your vision to come into shape and form. The skills will come.” So I will extend that to you. One advice I wished someone had given me earlier is to have the guts to develop the skills you feel you need to write the songs you want to write. Maybe you need to take singing lessons – go and find a teacher. Maybe you need to take poetry or music production classes – don’t be afraid to find an online class to help you out. The time investment that you make to develop your skills and to incrementally overcome your impostor syndrome is always well worth it.

No matter where you are in your songwriting journey, I think the key is to write for yourself and to listen to your intuition. Critiquing yourself and obsessing about some external standard of perfection doesn’t require a lot of courage. What does require courage is to allow yourself to pour your heart, soul, blood, and tears into a three-minute, ephemeral, intangible art form that someone could easily pass off as background music. And then to do it again. And again. And again. For as long as you can breathe.

May you find always joy, healing, and love in songwriting.