Singing her own songs
“It’s relaxing, therapeutic, it helps me de-stress….” It is words to this effect that Ilid hears most often from her fans as they describe how they feel when they hear her sing. But her life prior to hitting the big time was not so idyllic. In fact, before her first album Carefree Life was written, she was on a soul-searching journey, having left Taipei, where she had lived for many years, to return to Hualien.
Compared to many other songwriters, Ilid was not the kind of person who from a young age was completely absorbed by music and knew even then what she wanted to do in life. Back in 2008 when she put out the first song that she had written herself, she was only half-heartedly committed to a career in music.
Ilid got her start in music at age 22, when she heard that the Formosa Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe was holding auditions, and, without giving it much thought, signed up. After Ilid left the troupe, she sang in a folk music restaurant in Yilan for two years. From there she was invited by Chen Yon-lon and Suming Rupi to join Wild Fire Music. All seemed to be going well but for one thing: She was always singing other people’s songs.
Her close friend singer Panai Kusui, as well as her then-boyfriend (and now husband) Chen Guanyuu, encouraged her to write her own songs. “If you don’t have your own material, your own style, no one will remember you,” says Ilid. However, while it’s pretty easy to sing bubblegum pop-song covers, writing your own stuff is much more difficult. Finding it hard to make a niche for herself, Ilid wavered about her future, and even considered going into fashion design, which is what she studied in school.
One day she was chatting on the phone with her mother and said, half joking, half exasperated, “I might as well just go back home and farm.” Little did she suspect then that her jest would become reality. In 2008, she and Chen Guanyuu moved to Fenglin in Hualien County, aiming to reinvent themselves as “singer–farmers”—continuing to sing professionally but also tending their fields.
It was not a smooth transition. In those early days, Ilid’s heart and mind were still in the city, and she routinely spent half the night surfing the Internet, living in a virtual urban world. Ironically, she got hooked on the online game “Happy Farm.” She laughs: “I was unwilling to go out and cultivate actual vegetables, but online I would run into other people’s virtual fields to steal theirs.”
Since she stayed in bed every day until the sun was high in the sky, it’s no surprise that her mother called her a “phony farmer.” In contrast, Chen adapted very quickly, and it wasn’t long before he was living the early-to-bed, early-to-rise life of a genuine tiller of the soil. Nonetheless, after a year and a half of acclimatization in Fenglin, Ilid was ready to go all in on the rural lifestyle. In 2010 the couple decided to move to Nan’ao in Yilan County, where they continued their farming ways, and Ilid finally felt comfortable physically, psychologically, and spiritually.
Then things really started happening. First, the quiet and contented days in the fields provided Ilid with torrents of inspiration, and melodies just popped into her head one after another. These culminated in the album Carefree Life, which came out in December of 2011.
Next came the birth of her daughter, Terefo, who entered the world in October of 2012.
Yoko Ho, head of marketing at Chord & Major, a headphone company that Ilid has long been working with, says, “If you were to ask Ilid to prioritize the three roles of singer–songwriter, mother, and farmer, singer–songwriter would probably be last.” Ilid spent almost all of her time looking after her daughter, with only occasional free moments to jot down flashes of inspiration. While this meant that it took longer to come up with the material for a new album (A Beautiful Moment, 2015), she enjoyed the luxury of letting life gradually incubate her ideas into mature songs.
Ilid won three Golden Melody Awards with her first album, Carefree Life. Her husband Chen Guanyuu, the album’s producer, is the most indispensible person in her life. (courtesy of Ilid Kaolo)