With his elegant features and bright, clear eyes, Chen Yon­lon looks at first like a big, bashful boy, but when singing, he is focused and looks like someone who has been through a lot.

Born into an Aboriginal family with a background in music, the 37-year-old Chen has more than lived up to the family legacy. He has lent his voice to many songs familiar to music fans, such as award-winner Pur­dur’s trademark song “Ocean,” where Chen’s voice can be heard soaring in the background harmonies.

While Chen was born in Nan­wang like Pur­dur, unlike his fellow clansman he has spent much of his adult life in Tai­pei, leading to a voice that has elements of both city and countryside.

His first solo outing was on the 2004 compilation album Beautiful Hai­yan, where he interpreted the Ara ­Kimbo composition “Beautiful Mother Mt. Dawu” in a performance that attracted much attention. Listening to him sing, you can almost see the mountains and ocean as he remembers them.

By training with the U-Theater troupe a decade ago, Chen Yonlon (left) learned not to be tense on stage.

Used to life surrounded by his clan, when Chen moved to Tai­pei in 1995 to study history at Fu Jen Catholic University, he soon found his new life to be a much more solitary affair.

That is, until his junior year, when his good looks and singing voice earned him the chance to perform with U-Theater in their show The Sound of Ocean as a put-upon Aboriginal man. It was this performance that first got him onto the stage. Over the years that followed, he underwent training in drumming and physical performance, soon growing to love the stage as much as he loved singing.

At the same time, Aboriginal singers were seeing a revival in popularity, spearheaded by A-Mei and Purdur.

In 1999, Chen’s cousin Purdur released his album Ocean and his niece Samingad her album Sounds of the Sun, Wind, and Grasslands. The following year, these two made a surprising sweep of the Golden Melody Awards, and Taiwanese mainstream music finally began paying attention to Aboriginal performers.

From touring with other Aboriginal singers to standing in the ­spotlight himself, Chen Yonlon’s warm, evocative voice has always given ­listeners the sense of coming home.

Even while his relatives have been cleaning up at awards, Chen himself has been no slouch either. In the course of his many performances, he has had the fortune of meeting a patron of sorts, veteran producer and general manager of Wild Fire Music Elaine ­Hsiung. ­Hsiung has previously worked as a producer for such luminaries as Andy Lau, Stella ­Chang, and Sandy Lam, as well as being a major part of Ara ­Kimbo’s comeback. ­Hsiung first met Chen in 2000, and immediately wanted to help him release a solo album.

“I could see almost unlimited potential in him,” says ­Hsiung. In her two decades in the industry as a producer, the album she is most proud of having worked on is Ukulele’s Apologize; Chen, she says, had the potential to go beyond even that.

But first, she would have to wait.

“Even though the space on stage between being part of the chorus and being the lead vocalist is only a few steps, to me it seemed like a mile,” says Chen, who was still somewhat afraid of being right in the spotlight. As a result, he turned down Wild Fire Music’s offer.

And aside from simply being shy, there was another reason Chen was hesitant to put out an album.

If all he could sing was Aboriginal songs, he’d be forever pigeonholed, but if he didn’t sing them, he’d feel like he was doing wrong by his own heritage. Between this internal conflict and his low-key personality, Chen ended up making ­Hsiung wait a decade.

While he didn’t want to release an album, Chen never gave up on performing on stage. In 2004, he joined Wild Fire’s “We As One” concert, performing Ara ­Kimbo’s “Beautiful Mother Mt. Dawu.” Ara, standing backstage, found himself left breathless by the performance, and the song quickly became Chen’s trademark.

The concert was later turned into a recorded album, Beautiful Hai­yan, with Chen’s name appearing on an album cover for the first time. That year, the compilation took Best Aboriginal Album at the Golden Melody Awards, an act of recognition that began to break down Chen’s resistance to recording his own album.

At the 2012 Zou Jiang Hu Music Festival, Chen (center) performed with mainland singers Zhou Yunpeng (left) and Wan Xiaoli (right), giving the Taiwanese audience a taste of new folk music.

In 2006, the 30-year-old Chen looked back on his years of singing and realized he had no real mementos of it, and thus began reconsidering where he wanted his future to take him.

It was around this time that he met his other patron, ­Cheng Jie­ren. ­Cheng, a producer who has worked with Ara ­Kimbo, Pur­dur, and Sa­mingad, amongst others, is also the driving force behind Tai­tung’s Tie­hua Music Village performance venue.

“Jie­ren opened my eyes to the musical world, as well as helping me see my own strengths,” says Chen. Where once he believed he could only sing songs from his village, Chen began to realize that as long as he can sing well, he can represent his heritage just as well in Mandarin as in Puyuma.

His years of concern thus melted away, and he decided to set to recording an album.

If he was going to sing in Mandarin, though, he wanted to sing something classic, the kind of folk music he grew up listening to. And to Chen, classic meant one thing—Lee Tai-hsiang.

Lee agreed to get on board, but with one condition—that Chen would get back to basics and study vocal music from scratch. At Lee’s recommendation, Chen began training under National Taiwan Normal University music professor ­Hsueh Ying-tung, rediscovering his voice and learning proper breathing technique.

“Aboriginal songs are sung for distance, without adornment and with very direct vocal methods, as if you’re singing to be heard way up in the mountains,” says Chen. In analyzing his previous vocal methods, he found he could sing with the power of the mountains and the ocean, but not so much the winding intimacy of Mandarin love songs, sung to hypothetical partners.

As he went about reinterpreting the classic folk songs of the 1970s and 80s, Chen found it most difficult to inject something new and different for listeners. It was here that producer Chen Chu-hui’s new arrangements proved tremendously helpful. Leaving behind the complex harmonies and accompaniments of the past, Chen’s arrangements used few instruments to give the songs’ lyrics room to breathe and Chen’s voice room to soar.

His debut album Come Rain or Shine took over a year to record, with the song “Farewell” taking the longest. One particular line gave him trouble—“I’m drunk”—with him having to repeat it a good 100 times, the refined young man unable to quite harness the sense of bitterness required to nail it. In the end, he asked the producer to get him a couple of drinks to help him loosen up, and starting with a languorous, raspy sound his voice eventually fades out, as if he has run out of breath, giving an emotion-filled two words that finally allowed the producer to say, “That’s a take!”

In July this year, Chen Yonlon performed a set at an event in Taipei’s Huashan 1914 Creative Park. His remarkably catchy songs inspired the crowd to sing along.

Both Chen and the production team were tremendously confident in the final product, so when it didn’t get a nomination in the 2011 Golden Melody Awards, Chen was heartbroken.

“Did I not sing well enough?” he asked himself, beginning to doubt his own abilities.

When he finally received the award for Best Male Newcomer (Mandarin) at that year’s Chinese Music Awards in Guang­zhou, he began to cry as he accepted, and as soon as he got off stage, he called Lee Tai-­hsiang to tell Lee he’d been right after all.

Seeing how well listeners on the mainland responded to this “new folk music,” Chen’s determination and focus was even stronger for his second album.

In early 2012, Wild Fire Music invited standout mainland new folk musicians like Zhou Yun­peng and ­Zhang Wei­wei to Taiwan to perform as part of the Zou ­Jiang Hu Music Festival, helping further boost interest in the genre.

A few months later, Chen and veteran musician Lee Tzu-heng traveled to the mainland, performing in Beijing, Shanghai, Xia­men and elsewhere, and earning rave reviews from both sides of the strait. During this time, Chen performed his new album’s lead single, “Coastline,” several times.

“Coastline” tells a story of a life that when viewed up close appears like a rugged reef, but from a distance, a beautiful, curving coastline.

“If ‘Mt. Dawu’ was a song that reminded me of my mother, ‘Coastline’ is one that reminds me of my father,” says Chen, recalling how he would head back home when at his lowest and his father, a police officer, would throw a recruitment guide down in front of him. While this would make Chen somewhat sad, it also motivated him to push himself to do better.

His joy at finally achieving the recognition that came with the song’s Golden Melody Awards nominations this year, though, was quickly overwhelmed by the loss of his father. Having never before thought about why he sang, Chen once again recalled his lonely winter days in Taipei.

“The thing I sing for most,” he says, “is home.”

“I’m not a kid any more, and I can’t pretend to sing like anyone else; all I can do is be true to myself and sing in my own, simple style,” remarks Chen. He and his production team all believe that as long as his music can touch people, then he’ll earn their support.

With his home behind him and his dreams in front, Chen Yon­lon looks set to reach new peaks in his journey through the world of music.