JUST before Christmas midnight last week, sad news befell the independent music community: folk singer-songwriter Meor Yusof Aziddin died at the age of 55 after battling Covid-19.

His daughter Kamelia, who had been diligently keeping friends and fans updated about his condition on his Facebook page, broke the news.

It took a long, very long while for me to process the news. I had lost a friend and mentor.

His was a singular voice in a world saturated with pretence. He was of the people and for the people, a true folk artist.

I discovered Meor (as he is known in the music community) when I first started gigging back in early 2002.

I saw a peculiar music CD being sold on the small but bountiful merchandise table featuring a side profile illustration in black of a longhaired troubadour.

Peculiar because most of the other cassettes and CDs on the table were underground bands and such – this was first for me in my still fledgling “career”.

I was arranging my new homemade cassette album for sale but Meor wasn’t on the bill nor was he around at the venue.

The album was his Pesta Jiwa II album – a DIY independent release – which I found out later was the album that followed his first ‘official’ album Pesta Jiwa, released on M. Nasir’s label Luncai Emas.

His career is the opposite of the cliched career path most assume: he had always intended to be a busker, so he progressed from signing to a label to becoming an independent musician and full-time busker.

Folk singer-songwriters are a rarity in Malaysia. I was excited at the prospect of meeting someone who already had a body of work out and also composed songs in Malay that weren’t in a derivative form.

For the next couple of years, I studiously listened to the albums I managed to find and his enigma grew – here was a singer-songwriter who had principles and sang straight from the heart, warts and all, with depth and insight uncommon in Malaysian music.

You have to remember this is Malaysia in the early 2000s. Solo performers with acoustic guitars singing their original songs were not a common thing.

The most you would see a solo performer in a similar set up would be bar musicians or buskers and they played mostly cover songs.

In 2004, I played keyboards for my friend and frequent collaborator Ron Khoo’s band Furniture at the Urbanscapes Music Festival.

I found out Meor was performing at one of the several indoor and outdoor stages.

Fresh off the release of his new album Itu Padang… Aku Di situ, he was gaining a reputation as a mercurial live performer and getting a lot of press coverage, although I had yet to see him perform live.

Itu Padang… Aku Di situ is an album that changed my life and sparked my desire to rediscover composing in Malay.

As I was wandering around the festival at dusk, I noticed in the distance a familiar longhaired solitary figure as I had seen in the newspapers – sitting next to a backstage entrance, smoking a cigarette in his then-standard look: white T-shirt, blue jeans, and slippers.

It was like a vision to me: I took a deep breath, quickly reached into my knapsack for one of my own DIY cassette albums and anxiously walked toward him.

“Hi Meor, I’m a big fan of yours!” I said.

He turned around, smiled, replied: “Thank you.”

I passed him my cassette as a token of appreciation, smiled back and told him I had to run as my band was up soon.

I had met one of my heroes and one of the unspoken rules of heroes is that you shouldn’t meet them.

However, I would get to know him better in the years that followed through the live music circuit and gigs I would co-organise and we would become friends.

The best lessons are informal. I learnt a lot about song-writing and folk music. Most important, Meor taught me about being principled and disciplined as an artist, as we hung out after soundchecks or over teh tarik when I dropped by to catch him busking at pre-gentrified Central Market in the mid to late 2000s, when busking was still illegal in Kuala Lumpur.

His life was far from easy and comfortable – he was the sole breadwinner to his wife Linda and then-young four children – yet he kept writing, performing and releasing albums on average one every 12-18 months.

I last caught up with him in person five years ago during Ramadan at KL Sentral (he had been the sole busker there for more than a decade) and broke fast together at a nearby mamak.

He was looking fit and healthy – he had just recovered from a brief hospitalisation. He was very productive by then – expanding from his blog, he wrote a weekly column on a now-defunct online news site, compiled his earlier writings into several series of books about music, songwriting, life, literature, politics, and philosophy.

He was also a historian and scholar of life at heart whose knowledge about music and history could compete with any academic in the woodworks.

Life had changed for me, I told him, when we last met. I had become a parent and responsibilities took a lot of my time away between work, gigging and family.

I never had the chance to catch up with him since – especially when the pandemic arrived at our doorsteps – aside from his online busking, which I tuned in to whenever I could and tipped.

If you wish to help his family, search Meor Pesta Jiwa on Facebook, his personal page now managed by his daughter.

Meor, I hope you find peace wherever you are now, brother. The community is a lesser place without you but your songs will always be played and sung. Amin. – December 31, 2021.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.