Yen-j (嚴爵) is that rare newcomer to the Mando-pop scene who possesses both good looks and talent in spades.
The singer/songwriter and producer’s debut album Thanks Your Greatness (謝謝你的美好) brilliantly combines jazzy flourishes and catchy pop for ebullient musical musings on romance and other meaningful pursuits. It peaked at No. 2 on G-Music’s Mandarin album chart after its release last month and has been lauded by veteran entertainers Dee Hsu (徐熙娣), better known as Little S (小S), and Wang Lee-hom (王力宏). Two tracks became theme songs for TV soap dramas My Queen (敗犬女王) and P.S. Man (偷心大聖PS男).
“I spent 20 months recording this album,” said Yen-j, whose concert tomorrow night at Riverside Cafe (河岸留言) has already sold out. “I went through a period in which I wrote one song per day and I must have accumulated a hundred songs.”
“My label trusts me enough to allow me to produce my own album the first time out. In order to come up with the best result, I re-recorded all the songs numerous times.”
Yen-j performs two sets at Riverside Cafe tomorrow night in an evening titled Yen-j “I Like … No, I Love Yen-j” Concert (嚴爵“我喜歡…不，我愛嚴爵”演唱會) as a warm-up for his first stadium gig, Yen-j 「Endless Beauty Version」 Concert (嚴爵“無限美好版”演唱會), at National Taiwan University’s Sports Center (台大綜合體育館) on July 18. At Riverside, Yen-j will spend one set performing unplugged versions of songs from his album and the next set paying tribute to his idols, who include Jay Chou (周杰倫), Wang Lee-hom, Khalil Fong (方大同) and Stevie Wonder.
A native of Kaohsiung, Yen-j moved to the US to attend school at the age of 10. He took up piano and trombone early on and started performing in San Francisco’s jazz bars with his high school teachers.
“I did not have the typical high school years because I was busy performing,” Yen-j said in an interview earlier this week. “I was lucky to have that opportunity to perform, though.”
After high school, he moved to Los Angeles to study music at the University of Southern California. Already a prolific songwriter with a demo in hand, he made the unusual decision to withdraw from USC after his first semester and move back to Taiwan.
“I figured I would only steer away from the opportunity of becoming a [career] singer if I stay for four years in college,” Yen-j, now 22, explained. “My father was understanding enough to support my decision.”
It took Yen-j only three months to land a record contract. In January this year, he released the EP Trapped in Taipei (困在台北) and embarked on a 44-gig live-house tour throughout the country to cultivate audiences and get used to performing live alone.
“I was a jazz instrumentalist in the beginning and learned to sing later on,” Yen-j said. “Performing live wasn’t that enjoyable in the beginning because I was just learning the ropes. Gradually,
I learned to enjoy it and interact with the audiences.”
Yen-j continues writing songs every day as a way to relieve stress, even during his current hectic promotional schedule.
“Either the beat, some lyrics or a segment of melody would appear, and I continue to finish the song,” he said.
“I have accumulated a whole bunch of songs for the subsequent albums,”
he laughed. “But the label says they won’t listen to the new songs until I finish the promotion and concert [for] the current album.”
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS