Spaceman (Qing-Feng Wu album)

The background narrative of the album is "the illusionary world in the mind's eye of a spaceman". Qing-Feng noted "The image of the hero of the album I have in my mind is a man lying in sickbed, seemingly unconscious, as no one can tell whether a paralyzed man like him really has another world inside of his head and whether or not he himself knows that he isn't awake at all."[4] The themes of the songs present several contrastive pairs referring to "communication and responses", "consciousness and memories", "self and others", "dreams and awakeness", "sanity and insanity" and "illusion and reality". The 12 songs resemble 12 chapters that are well coherent, but each of them also stands for an independent piece, while remaining an exquisite narrative as a whole.

Qing-Feng Wu had examined the concept of paradox and ambiguity greatly in his lyrics, which inspired the designer to translate the conception into the album packaging to imply that the audience have to juxtapose the design back and forth to figure out the true and the false.[5] Malaysian photographer Lin Zhong and stylist Yii Ooi, through the theatrical arrangement of the images, collaborated to bring out two sides of the singer - sometimes crazy and bizarre and sometimes childlike.

The music arrangement of the works collected in Spaceman contains elements of electronic, psychedelic, theatrical, world music, folk, rock, post-rock, avant-garde, classical, R&B, Hip Pop and so on.

“The Carnival in Babel” (巴別塔慶典, Bā Bié Tǎ Qìng Diǎn) discusses the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel that explains the origins of the multiplicity of languages which led to all sorts of disputes while satirizing the miscommunication among people in a humorous manner.[6] The title track “Spaceman” (太空人, Tài Kōng Rén) depicts the sentiments that may be "unremarkable to the casual eye, but unforgettable in some people's mind", as the song was inspired by an ambiguous relationship the singer once had in the past. The music is arranged with simple guitar chords to bring up the ordinary texture of life.[3] Qing-Feng Wu said that the lyrics of this very song are his favorite among all the lyrics he has written so far.

“Influenza” (傷風, Shāng Fēng) talks about the phenomenon "when people hurting each other has become common practice". The term “傷風”, generally known as "cold", can be interpreted as "Po Shang Feng” (破傷風, Tetanus) as well as the abbreviation of the idiom “傷風敗俗” (shāng fēng bài sú, morally corrupt).[7] From a first-person narrative, with the style of magic realism, “The Forgotten Town” (失憶鎮, Shī Yì Zhèn) depicts the state of consciousness of amnesia (失憶症 Shī Yì Zhèng, pronounced almost the same as the song title “失憶鎮” in Chinese), insanity and nonsensical babbling. The audio mixing presents the multi-track mixed vocal that drifts back and forth, far and close, creating a sense of temporal and spatial isolation and an impression of displacement.[8] “Story~lines” (線的記憶, Xiàn De Jì Yì) adopts the relevant concept and terminology of "lines" in Geometry to portray the emotional condition of human beings, from existing in isolation to gradually bonding with others.[9]

“Outsider”, about 10 minutes and a half long, is the final chapter of "Autobiography of A Madman". Producer Showy Hsu (徐千秀) added a 4-minute long, post-rock instrumental piece when he was arranging the music. Qing-Feng Wu was therefore inspired to write a monologue to go with it, and also had it serve as the annotation of the entire album.[10]“The Echo Collector” (回音收集員,Huí Yīn Shōu Jí Yuán) is only instrumentalized with drums, Marimba and the layered vocal. The vocal shifts between left and right channel to imitate the echo effect auditorily.[11] The word choice of the lyrics comes from the other 11 songs; structurally, if “Dream Translator”(譯夢機, Yì Mèng Jī) is the "Prologue" of the album, “The Echo Collector” would be the "Table of Contents". “The Echo Collector” depicts that "the present moment" of every individual is interwoven and accumulated by countless echoes in the past, as "echoes" refer to the words, allusions and messages that come from families, schools and societies. Qing-Feng Wu once noted that the song also speaks for his opinion about work creation; in other others, no creation is a purely original invention of one's self.[12]