Lin Ying’s Doris Club project brings her back to her creative roots

by Anushka Dakshit

Photo Credit: Jasmine Rutledge

Lin Ying’s way of creating is to be at the mercy of her muse. In her latest album, “There’s Still Time,” that muse was her mother and the experience of seeing her deal with trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic pain disorder, for four decades. Ying, who has been releasing music as Linying since 2016, released this album under a new moniker, Doris Club (named after her mother). What started as a passion project in May 2020 quickly became a way for the Singapore-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter to let herself create without any limitations, imitating the same senselessness and intuition she admires in her mother.

The album is split into Side A and Side B, referring to the two different sides of phonograph or cassette records.

Side A, released in September 2023, is filled with bouncy bass, driving beats, and crooning electric guitar over delicate vocals detailing Ying’s contemplations surrounding death, living with pain, and the existential pursuit of joy. The lyrical content and production are at odds, but it’s meant to help you digest otherwise agonizing sentiments.

Side B, released on March 22, is antithetical in sound to Side A, with folksy production, reverberating chords, and haunting vocals. In the second half of “There’s Still Time,” Ying compels herself and listeners to be more philosophical, teaching us to become amicable with death and pain.

The second single from Side B, “Lily, There’s Still Time,” is a contemplative ballad and a standout in Side B, with heart-wrenching introspection overlaid with lush strings and mellow piano. The lyrics serve as a letter Ying wrote years ago for her future self. Now, she’s at the point in her life where she can finally listen to the version of herself that wrote the single.

The album, “There’s Still Time,” was created in Singapore and Los Angeles and produced by Ying herself, with the help of producers Jordan Blackmon (Toro Y Moi, Leon Bridges), Josh Wei (Stray Kids, Rachel Platten), and co-writers Field Medic and Chris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie). Cohesively, the album is filled with country and folk influences, honoring Ying’s mother’s love of The Carpenters and Ying’s first musical influence Bon Iver.

Below, Rice and Spice talked to Ying about Doris Club, “There’s Still Time,” and her mother's influence on her artistry.

RS: Tell me more about the inception of the Doris Club moniker. I know that's a separate project from Linying. It's inspired by your mother's having trigeminal neuralgia, and you wrote this really beautiful Instagram tribute that said that Doris Club was a way for you to honor what makes you capable of making the songs she loves listening to. Tell me more about the relationship between the Doris Club project and watching your mother living through this sickness.

DC: I didn't think it fully synthesized clearly [that the album was about Ying’s mother’s experience living with trigeminal neuralgia]. It was just the way the songs started. I think maybe the first song I wrote was either “The Movie'' or “The Greatest Prize,” and this was deep into COVID when it was just a scary time. I just got extra existential during those years. It was impossible, I couldn't move on with my daily rhythm of life as a musician. When I was writing “The Greatest Prize” it had this distinctly country feel and I remember that year I didn't listen to any music that was released contemporarily. I listened exclusively to '60s and '70s stuff like the Carpenters.

Country music is such a big part of my mom's musical upbringing. It was bizarre to me, but that was kind of what I grew up on. I realized over COVID when I wrote this almost Kenny Rogers-sounding song, so much of my musical sensibilities and the kind of note choices that I enjoy and like, the style of songwriting that I like, there's a lot of storytelling.

I also started going to the studio with a good friend of mine, his name is Josh. I remember going in thinking like, well, I don't know what to expect. So let's just not try to go for a genre. Let's just make something that my mom would like. We were like, “Okay, we can use that as a guide.” So it wasn't carefully thought out.

That's the part of me that I have rejected for a long time. And I think in music you just can't do that too much. You need to maintain a balance but also kind of really prioritize the parts of you that aren't thinking too much about an outcome or putting a label on things. You have to just go with how you feel, right? That's sort of how this whole project came about me realizing, “Oh, I'm actually a lot more connected to my mom than I thought and the music that I make, everything that I make is kind of a part of her.” Then I just got really deep into it and started wondering, has her illness affected me and the state of my mind, my thoughts about life and death, and time?

Collage of Doris Club’s mother provided by Doris Club’s team

Photographed by Jovian Lim

RS: The songwriting is so beautiful. Side A is a bit more jazzy, pop, upbeat but the lyrics are talking about the concept of pain and uncertainty and surrender. I feel like the sound and lyrical content are at odds with each other, but it works. Was that juxtaposition intentional in some way?

DC: No, I don’t think so. Most of Side A, I made with Josh. He has such a short attention span, he was always like, “We’re gonna put in a driving beat.” That’s kind of how it happened, it wasn’t very intentional. But I also think that juxtaposition gives the lyrics more power. I'm really interested in how, you know, the nuances of how music makes me feel. The juxtaposition of sound and content is so prevalent in country music, and I think it brings out a really different kind of way for you to digest what's otherwise a painful feeling when it's masked, you know?

RS: That's what I love about it because it forces you to think about the things you don't want to think about. It kind of fools you into thinking about them. You write based on intuition, and you've said that when the music comes the words follow. So how did producing and building the album sonically help you put your emotions into words or help you realize what it is that you wanted to write about?

DC: I never go in thinking like, “I want to write a song about this today.” I've realized with experience that that's not something you can force and that you're really at the mercy of the muse. For me, it always needs to start from this kind of playful, free place where we get to switch things up really quickly. I don't do well when there's a rigid structure. What the song is going to be about and what the music or the sound is, these two processes sort of need to be in tandem with one another and inform each other as you go.

I pay attention to the kind of gibberish that I'm singing because sometimes it reveals really interesting things. I'll be thinking of images and metaphors that don't make sense to me. And only after the song is done, then I look back and I'm like, “Oh, that's what it was. I was using this picture to represent something that I was actually feeling.” It's kind of trippy because it's not intentional, right? You're letting the words lead. You're letting the senseless lead and then at the end of it, then you realize, “Oh, this is what my subconscious is telling me”, which is kind of scary.

​​RS: Did you go into the process of making this knowing it was going to be about your mother and what she was going through or what you were going through or did it just come up?

DC: It just came up. The song “Wake up (If I Was God),” which I think is the most direct, when we first started, it wasn't about it [Ying’s mother’s sickness] at all. I originally wrote the lyrics as, “Up all night, striking a deal/With whatever God who can feel the way I feel,” Later on as the song progressed, I started thinking, “Oh, this doesn't feel right.” When I changed the word “I” to “you,” then I realized, “Oh my god, this is about my mom.” It's kind of scary how mystical it can feel.

RS: Side B is a lot more folksy and slow and mellow. Why did you decide to split the album into those two sections and then release them one after another?

DC: There isn't really a clear answer to that. After I finished all the songs, I think I realized that there was a kind of natural divide. Right now just as Side B is about to come out, I'm in a season of my life where I'm feeling so much calmer and kind of mellow. It’s really aligning with my state of being right now. When you do senseless things without that much reasoning, at least for me, in my experience, things fall into place and work out in a way where it kind of makes sense towards the end. Maybe that's just a coping mechanism to make the best of things. Whatever it is, I'm kind of glad that that's how it happened.

RS: Your most popular single now is “The Movie” with almost 20,000 streams on Spotify. Why do you think that that's the song that most people have resonated with?

DC: It's funny, right? Because I've never streamed lower in my life [as Lin Ying], but I've also never felt more successful. You know, I feel it's kind of great. I think something about “The Movie”, it has a pretty catchy pop structure. It reminds me of the kind of torture of knowing there’s something you need to do but not being able to do it. It's a universal feeling, like you know what you're meant to do, you just can't bring yourself to do it.

RS: I also wanted to talk about “Lily, There’s Still Time”, which is the second single from the project. Talk to me about writing it. I feel like that's the song that to me had the most melancholic writing.

DC: Oh my God, that song still breaks me even after all these years. It's the title track for a reason. It's kind of crazy because it's written from the perspective of a new version of me that I hadn't yet been talking to. I knew I had to make a big change in my life. Or maybe I knew I was deeply unhappy and I needed to like to do a lot of things, but yeah, the main line that always gets me and at the same time encourages me is, “Don't get too used to crying/There's plenty of time left to find something exciting/ Just do the right thing.” That's something that I've had to keep telling myself over and over again. And now I feel like I'm finally that version that I was thinking and hoping I would be when I wrote that song. I just kind of feel like that's like a sweet little message from the future, you know?

RS: I know you played these songs for your mom. Does she have a favorite song from this project?

DC: She loves them all. “Seraphina”, “Lily, There's Still Time,” and “The Sea The Ocean.” I think those three are her favorite ones. I think that they're just retro-sounding. That's probably why.

Photographed by Ronan Park

RS: You talked about making this album for yourself. But when you think about someone listening to this album, is there anything that you want them to take from it or learn from it in particular?

DC: With everything that I put out, I think I just hope that it finds the right people. I remember how I felt when I heard a song that made me feel like my experience was understood in a really specific way. That to me was the greatest comfort that I had with music and I think that that is all it is for me, that's my sole purpose. It's to write from my own experience and try to be as authentic to that as possible and then just hope that it finds the right people. Yeah, I think that's all I can ask for and I would be very happy if I’ve achieved that even for one person.

RS: How did making the project help you grapple with the experience of living with your mother’s trigeminal neuralgia?

DC: For most of my life, I didn't even consider it that big of a deal. She was just such a trooper I don't think we grew up ever thinking, “Oh, we had a sick mom.” She was a math teacher for a long time, so we always had students coming into our house. Her old identity is this welcoming teacher, like a nurturing lovely person. That overshadowed the part of her that has trigeminal neuralgia. I don't think I had to deal with it growing up, at least not consciously.

I think that was the key takeaway from this whole experience, and I think making this album was a nice way to give attention to this whole other aspect of who she is that she wouldn't necessarily focus or fixate on or let other people around her fixate on because she couldn’t. It was incurable and not something that should be changed. She just had to make the best of it. Even now the conversation is rarely surrounding her pain. I think making this music is a good way for me and for her to kind of properly honor that and honor the sacrifice and the pain that she had to go through so that she could continue to live life.

RS: Any plans for Doris Club? Are you going to be releasing more albums under the Doris Club name in the future or is it just a one-and-done thing?

DC: Never say never because in between sides A and B, I put out a whole new EP. There isn't any structure that’s solidly in place. I have a feeling this won't be the end. I think this is just a nice way to wrap up the project and let it sit for a while and not have to worry about keeping anything up. We'll just see how it goes. I don't know. Being my mother's daughter is such an integral part to the person I am as an artist and the parts of myself that made me an artist that I know it's gonna come up soon at some point, but when that is I have no idea.