hi taiwan my name is erica liu and i'm
chatting with joey on taiwan plus
hello i'm joey and welcome to episode 2
of icrt taiwan plus an interview series
powered by the only all english radio
station and streaming platform here in
taiwan
today once again i'll be interviewing a
friend a co-worker
and that last part is a little different
she is a professional singer songwriter
like me she is a dj at icrt and like me
she is an anchor at taiwan plus but that
last part i don't think i'll ever be
able to do
sing anyway today let's welcome erica
leo what's up erica hi joey so happy to
be here so as i just mentioned we not
only work at one but two offices
together but we never quite actually run
into each other exactly
you put it perfectly exactly even for
this interview we have to do this via
webcam because well your life is busy so
is mine we're both slashies and so let's
talk about you today let's talk about
your career as a singer-songwriter and
talk about your recent life as a slashie
in the 21st century
so we got to start from i think the
get-go at the beginning um when you were
first quote-unquote put on the map for a
lot of people here in taiwan was when
you attended a um
then very popular show series called
million star and i think it was series
seven season seven back in 2010 right
sometime around there yes exactly uh one
million stars one million stars
that's right yeah yeah and i i went uh i
tried it out um right when i graduated
from high school so i graduated in 2010
and then before going to college i was
like okay i have this last summer i've
been watching
a one million star for a couple years my
mom it's like our show to watch together
and uh so i was like okay before we go
to college before you know i have to do
that let me take a shot at it and i came
to taiwan and i joined season seven
and then i finished fifth which is not
bad i got some finales and i ended up
also getting signed in the process to my
my first agency
and yeah
yeah that was uh that was 11 years ago
when i was
18.
do math do the math you know about how
old i am now
i still look 18. you're good you're good
and growing up in l.a in california l.a
county or l.a los angeles county did you
guys i mean as like an immigrant family
did you guys watch a lot of taiwanese
shows abroad like did you watch uh kang
si laila and of course all the singing
competitions coming from taiwan so we
have like a couple of channels that are
like the city that i grew up in
it's like
sixty percent asian
you can get by speaking mandarin you
don't have to know how to speak english
in order to survive so my mom thousands
that
up till now like her english is still
kind of poor
so we had those chinese channels at home
um come to lila i actually saw i
discovered myself through youtube that's
like when youtube started that's right
in high school and that's how i kind of
started learning my chinese because i
could not learn chinese for my parents
or mandarin for my parents no okay so
wait wait back in 2010 or at least in
the early 2000s there were a lot of
singing competitions or talent
competitions on tvs but rarely a lot of
asian performers yeah so you thought
that okay maybe you would have more of a
shot coming to taiwan but of course
coming to taiwan comes with a different
kind of obstacles to you know hurdles to
conquer because you would have to sing
in mandarin yes that's right and my
mandarin like i mentioned before was no
good i was
competing in a mandarin speaking
competition like that was
really difficult for me and also it was
uh the judges constantly tell me like i
can't just rely on
knowing how to sing english songs just
amazing or always when i sing the
english song my score would be really
high and then my mandarin songs my score
would
you could see there's a difference
so um
language barrier was a difficulty for me
and also like most of the general
audience they're not going to see
different types of performers from all
around the world what they are watching
and listening to every day is music that
you could hear on the radio from
taiwanese true but i would say over the
last decade because of artists like you
that's over exaggeration over bravado
niss has become more mainstream and more
acceptable in the taiwanese music
industry
now do you think that the taiwanese
entertainment industry is a good place
for creatives like you
i do think that
when i first started at least in the way
that
my agency and my label
tried to
um
create this brand that is
me at that time was
that that way of making an artist was
starting to
um go extinct what exactly was that way
before the the concept before was if you
had that budget to dash at you to
push a new artist if you had the money
then you could break through
but nowadays the way we listen to music
we have facebook we have instagram we
have youtube we have street voice we
have
all these different things we have
podcasts and so the the audience
receiving the information
gets kind of spread out so it's not like
if i if i put my song at the end of that
oh shound you everyone's going to hear
it it's probably only 20 or 15 of what
it used to be so uh now 10 years later
11 years later i am an independent
artist and i feel like
there's actually a lot more
chance for an independent artist to be
heard
now right if you were assigned to
a
big label and you were independent it
was literally like this but now i feel
like the playing field is kind of almost
leveled out yeah i agree um like because
you
used to be competing as a
singer-songwriter or as a creative in
taiwan in the taiwanese market but now
every time you put out a youtube video
which you've been doing a lot just
covering or original work on youtube
you're competing with the whole world
and it's
you need to learn how to get yourself
hurt or seen have you figured it out
have you used some tricks or have you
learned something along the way i'll be
super honest with you i
have not
i'm still figuring it out um but i think
the beauty of it is that like you
mentioned i was doing covers on youtube
and i was doing that right when i became
an independent artist and i was still
figuring out what i was going to do with
my music career
um luckily i did this random video of a
genre of music that i've never tried
before which is like rapping like
legit rapping and i only did it because
my sister was just like hey i heard this
really cool song
not too long ago and i feel like it'd be
really cool to see you rap because no
one expects that from you so you want to
try it and then she sent me this song
and i listened to it
and it was called astronaut in the ocean
by uh mast wolf and i was like ooh i'd
like this and then i started learning it
immediately and then it was after i
recorded it it was only after i recorded
it my sister told me oh my gosh i sent
you the wrong song she actually wanted
to send me another song what
i know it's crazy right but
that cover i did of ash on the ocean
ended up
having right now currently over two
million views and it was the video that
made my youtube like views go up and my
subscribers go up and it was like the
gift from god that i never expected and
it's like everything is so i think so
based on sheer luck like i think that
has always been this way but even now
like you see songs that blow up on tick
tock maybe five years after its release
how could you have formulated or
calculated that yeah and i guess
everybody in the 21st century or past
the first quarter of the 21st century is
a slashie right you got to be a
ciecantini and you got to be a
singer-songwriter but also like
semi-producer yourself a videographer
youtuber and now dj and anchor yes
moving forward erica what is up next for
you you have a new single out called
turn off the light right yes
well actually this song i wrote uh two
years ago so back in 2019
at a songwriting camp that i went to
um
and then of course you know there was a
period of transition from being at an
agency and going independent and then
after going independent figuring out
exactly how do i put my music up on
streaming platforms because i literally
never had to handle that before for 10
years i was taken care of so i just baby
step from the very beginning how are we
going to put our music out there and
i'll let's along with um a new company
that i am at
called
perfection partner of perfection if you
okay if you
if you translate it directly it sounds
funny it sounds like perfect partner
sounds kind of dumb but
it's a little project a baby being born
and hopefully it survives
the plan is we're starting from a little
seed and hopefully it will sprout to be
a very strong tree where all of us can
live
and make music
and be
you know creatively free in this type of
an environment i think that's amazing i
didn't know that so it's like taiwan's
version of 88 rising in a sense right
you got it group of musicians get
together and release albums that's not
their own but you know
conglomerate of work from different
artists and i think that's that's the
way the world is going in uh be it in
music
um overall in the entertainment industry
even in politics you know people are
starting to get the sense that that the
age of idols the age of de facto leaders
is gone and it's all about people
putting their work together
the same umbrella same flag yeah all
right looking forward to more stuff from
eric leo and looking forward to more
news reporting
um music playing on icrt and taiwan plus
and thank you so much for joining us
here today on icrt thank you joey
it was a pleasure