SEA Games 2015
Songwriter, Producer, Recording Engineer
Work on SEA Games 2015 began in January 2013, in collaboration with Sydney Tan, a long-time creative partner across national campaigns and large-scale live productions in Singapore.
The project had two distinct components: the companion album Songs of the Games, and the music for the opening and closing ceremonies. Within the first three months, we were in constant meetings with the management and marketing teams from SportSG, Singapore’s national sporting body responsible for hosting the games. The tagline theme for the games was Celebrate the Extraordinary.
The central question I kept returning to was how to make the idea of sporting excellence extend beyond sport, to make it personally relevant to everyone watching, not just the athletes.
That question became the conceptual spine of Ordinary. I wanted the song to follow a single life across three generations, built around the idea that pursuing excellence was never meant to be easy, and that the effort we make, however quiet, becomes the path for those who follow. I chose Benjamin Kheng and The Sam Willows to perform it. The production went through multiple versions over six months before I locked the final arrangement.
Ordinary became one of three official theme songs for the Games. Its music video was shot in the style of a reenacted documentary, telling the real story of Fandi Ahmad, Singapore’s most celebrated footballer. At the opening ceremony torch lighting, the song played as Fandi Ahmad entered the stadium and passed the torch to his son Irfan, also an international footballer, before together they lit the cauldron.
The second theme song, Unbreakable, performed by Tabitha Nauser, occupied different emotional territory, an internal conversation between physical defeat and mental resilience. I wrote it as a war cry for the mind rather than the body. It received the heaviest airplay of the three theme songs across terrestrial television, online platforms, and in-stadium throughout the Games.
The ceremony work presented a different creative challenge. The prevailing tradition in Singapore’s national productions leans toward spectacle, mass choreography, elaborate staging, hundreds of performers. Sydney and I wanted to work against that where it served the material.
We tested this approach first at Singapore’s National Day Parade 2014. There was resistance initially, but the concept was approved and it worked. The intimate moments, a single performer, a single spotlight, created a sense of connection that the larger set pieces alone could not. It demonstrated that unity and national pride don’t always require scale to land. Sometimes they require the opposite.
Following the success of NDP 2014, we moved into the ceremonies with the committee’s full backing. I built the opening ceremony around the idea of individuals converging into collective excellence. The closing ceremony celebrated a shared sense of achievement.
Throughout the project, my recording and engineering responsibilities spanned vocal sessions, choir recordings, string sections, and arrangements across multiple genres, all produced to broadcast standard. The Games generated over 44 million YouTube views across Southeast Asia, surpassing the combined digital reach of the 2014 Asian Games and Commonwealth Games.
The project ran from January 2013 to the closing ceremony in June 2015.