For more than two decades, prolific singer/songwriter/producer Bobby Chen (陳昇) has released one solo album per year, and since 1993 he’s performed an annual year-end concert.
A writer with six books under his belt, Chen is known for his socially conscious pop odes and unique brand of ballads, such as Leaving Sadness for Myself (把悲傷留給自己), Hating Love Songs (恨情歌) and Opium Rose (鴉片玫瑰), which convey a melodramatic and melancholic sense of romance. He’s also a member of New Treasure Island Band (新寶島康樂隊), which specializes in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), Hakka and Aboriginal songs. To date, the group has released eight albums.
Tonight Chen performs songs from his newest solo album, Bobby Chen PS Yes, I Am in Taipei (陳昇PS是的，我在台北), in addition to past hits, at a concert at Riverside Live House.
On the album, which goes on release today, Chen pays homage to the capital through folk-pop portraits of its residents.
“Two-thirds of the people who live in Taipei come from other places,” said Chen in an interview last week. “Ideally, I would call the people in Edward Yang’s (楊德昌) movies the real Taipei people. I myself have to call the city home because I have lived here for so long.”
Born and bred in Changhwa County, Chen moved to Taipei after graduating from vocational college. He worked odd jobs before entering the music industry as a lowly assistant, and gradually moved up the ladder, penning and producing numbers for stars such as Takeshi Kaneshiro (金城武) and Rene Liu (劉若英).
Unlike many of his Mando-pop peers, Chen is well-known for his hard-drinking antics.
Asked how he came up with his trademark style, Chen replied, “All romances are similar. A man loves a woman. A woman loves a man. In most cases, they can’t get who they love.”
Happily married for the past 26 years, does Chen draw on wedded bliss for inspiration? “I don’t,” he said. “I simply borrow ideas from other people. Or I use memories of an old romance. I’m not the sort of person who needs a romance in order to produce a new work of art.”
And to what does he attribute his longevity? “The secret is not to think about it,” he said. “I simply continue to do what I like. I am already planning my next project while finishing my current one. In the current record industry climate, you are already winning if you just continue doing what you do.”
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
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