When Andrew Sue Wing was around two years old, he was given a red ukulele. About two years or so later, he received a guitar. It was sunburst-patterned with a light center and darker vignette edges.
These early instruments were what ultimately ignited Sue Wing’s interest in music, leading him to write his own songs. Later, his repertoire expanded to guitar, drums, bass, banjo, vocals, and a little bit of keyboard.
Sue Wing is a Belmont musician who blends contemporary folk, rock, R&B, and jazz.
“I play what I call Black rock music,” Sue Wing said, which he defined as a mixture of African American musical traditions with contemporary forms of pop, folk music, and other sounds rooted in musical lineage.
Growing up with a Trinidadian father, Sue Wing said it was “interesting to be born in a place where you are not fully of the culture.” In this experience, he observed, there is a push-and-pull between home and the outside world. There was the benefit of having a broader cultural perspective, yet Sue Wing expressed that there was the feeling of ensuring “everybody feels like I’m acceptable, not a threat, and not a fish out of the water.”
The biggest way it reflects in his music, Sue Wing said, was through genre-mixing. His own sound is difficult to categorize. When he created his song “Muscle Shoals” — named after a sound that resonated so deeply with Sue Wing that he was wearing their merch on a T-shirt during the interview — he was absorbing more folk and country. When he wrote his song “Chic on the Radio,” he was listening to disco, R&B, and Chaka Khan.
“He’s striving to create his own voice,” said Sue Wing’s mother, Carolyn Wood. “He’s inspired by lots of different people, but I think that’s how most people create. They take building blocks and integrate them into something new.”
Sue Wing’s 2024 album “Seventeen” is a smooth, contemplative album. He began writing music at 13, then began recording at 14. He is now 17.
“Seventeen” is an accumulation of Sue Wing’s experiences. “Falling Leaves” is a track about uncertainty and understanding. There’s “Chic on the Radio,” which is an upbeat, letting-go-in-the-car-ride song. The title track “Seventeen” alludes to police brutality and systemic racism, and as the lyrics read, “insanity/I could be dead by seventeen.”
“I’ll never forget the first time I heard that song,” Wood said. “At the end, you have the twist where ‘the kid looks like me.’ It clarified for me how it does affect him…[and subsequently], we’re all connected and it affects everyone.”
The album was Sue Wing’s way of “testing the waters.”
Besides song-making, Sue Wing is interested in film scoring. At Concord Academy, a teacher reached out to Sue Wing to score a feature film for class. Despite having little knowledge of the technical aspects, Sue Wing agreed. Eventually, he assembled a group of seven musicians in a makeshift studio. The students recorded the parts, and Sue Wing handled the mixing, mastering, and production.
The first time he saw the student film was at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square.
“It’s funny, because I’m at a crossroads right now in my development. I have ideas to go in all sorts of directions,” Sue Wing said. “I think what will determine that is what opportunities I get. I want to go into film scoring, not necessarily as my main thing, but I would like to do more of that if I can.”
As a recent high school graduate, Sue Wing will study music industry at UCLA. You can catch his performance on Saturday, June 28, at 6:30 p.m. at Hanami Sushi Bar & Grill in Cushing Square.
