Indie singer/songwriter Blue Vela (陳曼青) honed her craft on the streets, yet is now poised to enchant mainstream audiences.
The chanteuse will perform a concert titled Long Time No See, Song and Dance at Riverside Music Cafe (河岸留言) on April 28. She will be joined by her labelmate Vickie (薇琪). Trained as a musician — she plays piano and percussion — Vela also writes her own songs.
“With this concert, I want to focus on ballads in an unplugged setting and convey poignant emotions,” she told the Taipei Times last week.
Photo Courtesy of Jelly Entertainment
The 24-year-old singer started performing in public aged 17 at the underground shopping mall at Taipei Main Station and also in Ximending. She independently recorded her first original album, Green Out of Blue (青出於藍), of which she sold 3,000 copies on the street, and competed in TV talent show One Million Star (超級星光大道) in 2009, coming in ninth place.
Vela, who could be described as a more lyrical version of Avril Lavigne, entranced the audience at her debut concert last month with a magnetic cover of pop icon Faye Wong’s (王菲) rock number Full Blossom (開到荼靡).
“When I perform jazz drumming, I aim to show that burning life force from my street experience,” she said about her feisty performance style.
The songstress collaborated with Malaysian songwriter Kok Lee Cheng Wei (李誠洧) to release a double single last month in Malaysia. The concept single comprises the ballads Song (有孝仔) and Daughter (女兒家).
This month, Vela is serving as the spokeswoman for a campaign by Fair Trade Taiwan (台灣公平貿易協會), for which she contributed a theme song and appears in a commercial.
“As a street performer, I want people’s respect in the forms of applause or money,” Vela said. “I think we should support fair trade by giving the farmers their fair due.”
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS