Mando-pop songstress Maggie Chiang (江美琪) wants to prove she can do more than tug at your heartstrings with her voice; she can write her own songs too.
Chiang, whose full-length albums include 2006’s Cry Baby (愛哭鬼), is releasing My Room (房間), her 10th album and first to comprise all self-penned material. The pop siren performed a sold-out concert at Legacy Taipei (傳音樂展演空間) on May 25 and will play a six-song set at Taipei gay club G-Star at midnight on June 8.
“I want my music to be warm and uplifting,” the graceful singer told the Taipei Times. “I want the audience members to relive their emotional memories through me.”
Photo courtesy of XY Music
Now aged 31 and dubbed a “therapeutic singer” (療傷系歌手) by the Chinese-language media because of her poignant delivery of heartfelt ballads, Chiang achieved stardom based on her entrancing renditions of hits such as How I Envy You (我多麼羨慕你), the theme song to the blockbuster TV period drama April Rhapsody (人間四月天), and He Must Really Love You (他一定很愛你).
Chiang did not muster up the courage to write her own songs until signing with her current label XY Music. She used her iPhone to record snippets of melodies that came to her, and then patched together the nine tracks on the album.
“I mostly hum tones when I am comfy and relaxed in my room,” she said. “There were a few times when riveting melodies hit me halfway through a shower, so I simply rushed out to get my phone and recorded them.”
Musically, My Room is Chiang’s most personal journey to date. Set against a heart-warming backdrop of swirling violin and piano, the title track pays tribute to the memory of her older brother, who passed away from cancer two years ago. Also on the album, Perfect Breakup (完美分手), the latest addition to her long string of contagious romantic odes, recounts her decision to bid a graceful adieu to a former beau.
“I told him that love had vanished, and I simply packed up and left that night,” she said.
Cheng Ching-hsiang (鄭青祥) turned a small triangle of concrete jammed between two old shops into a cool little bar called 9dimension. In front of the shop, a steampunk-like structure was welded by himself to serve as a booth where he prepares cocktails. “Yancheng used to be just old people,” he says, “but now young people are coming and creating the New Yancheng.” Around the corner, Yu Hsiu-jao (饒毓琇), opened Tiny Cafe. True to its name, it is the size of a cupboard and serves cold-brewed coffee. “Small shops are so special and have personality,” she says, “people come to Yancheng to find such treasures.” She
The low voter turnout for the referendum on Aug. 23 shows that many Taiwanese are apathetic about nuclear energy, but there are long-term energy stakes involved that the public needs to grasp Taiwan faces an energy trilemma: soaring AI-driven demand, pressure to cut carbon and reliance on fragile fuel imports. But the nuclear referendum on Aug. 23 showed how little this registered with voters, many of whom neither see the long game nor grasp the stakes. Volunteer referendum worker Vivian Chen (陳薇安) put it bluntly: “I’ve seen many people asking what they’re voting for when they arrive to vote. They cast their vote without even doing any research.” Imagine Taiwanese voters invited to a poker table. The bet looked simple — yes or no — yet most never showed. More than two-thirds of those
In the run-up to the referendum on re-opening Pingtung County’s Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant last month, the media inundated us with explainers. A favorite factoid of the international media, endlessly recycled, was that Taiwan has no energy reserves for a blockade, thus necessitating re-opening the nuclear plants. As presented by the Chinese-language CommonWealth Magazine, it runs: “According to the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration, 97.73 percent of Taiwan’s energy is imported, and estimates are that Taiwan has only 11 days of reserves available in the event of a blockade.” This factoid is not an outright lie — that
In July of 1995, a group of local DJs began posting an event flyer around Taipei. It was cheaply photocopied and nearly all in English, with a hand-drawn map on the back and, on the front, a big red hand print alongside one prominent line of text, “Finally… THE PARTY.” The map led to a remote floodplain in Taipei County (now New Taipei City) just across the Tamsui River from Taipei. The organizers got permission from no one. They just drove up in a blue Taiwanese pickup truck, set up a generator, two speakers, two turntables and a mixer. They
RSS