Olivia Ong diversifies her sound in her new album Waiting with up-tempo, rock-influenced tracks. -- ST PHOTO: DESMOND FOO
Her career took flight following the success of her single Ru Yan (Like Swallow), which was the theme song for the popular Channel 8 drama The Little Nyonya.
Yet, home-grown singer Olivia Ong, 27, recalls that the sudden attention that she received four years ago was "overwhelming".
"I didn't know what I wanted back then, how I should present or behave myself.
"Maybe I came from a sheltered family where everything was given to me, so I had to learn how to take the initiative to pursue my dreams," the Taiwan-based artist muses in an interview here to promote her first full-length Mandarin album.
Waiting. -- PHOTO: NUCLEAR BLAST RECORDS
Titled Waiting, it was released in May on the heels of two earlier English-language albums, Olivia (2010) and Romance (2011), under Taiwanese label HIM International Music.
Ong started singing in English, the language she is most comfortable in, as a bossa nova singer. After completing her O levels in Singapore at Damai Secondary School, she left for Japan and spent four years there pursuing a musical career under Japanese recording company S2S, releasing her debut album A Girl Meets Bossa Nova in 2005.
She then returned to Singapore in 2008 and later that year, signed on with Taiwanese company HIM.
Calling herself a late bloomer, Ong, who has been based in Taiwan for close to three years, seems surer of herself now.
"I did some soul-searching over the last two years. In Taipei, I had a group of friends who were very confident and knew that music is what they wanted to do, and how to go about doing it. I wanted to be just like them. Just free," she says in her husky alto.
Waiting has garnered positive response, with the title track among the top six songs of radio station UFM 100.3's music charts for the past two weeks, and its music video on HIM's official YouTube channel drawing more than 700,000 views so far.
The album reflects her determination to diversify her musical style, with up-tempo, rock-influenced tracks such as What Went Wrong and bonus English song Wonderland, which she had a hand in composing, included in the mix.
"I didn't want to be singing bossa nova or quiet songs all the time. I want to have fun on stage. So I told my producers about this and experimented with rock and Latin jazz.
"My fanbase has grown, which is pretty encouraging," she says with a smile.
How does she stand out as a female Mandopop singer in Taiwan, and deal with the inevitable comparisons to other Singaporean singers such as Stefanie Sun and Tanya Chua who have also ventured there?
"As a guiding philosophy, I tell myself that I want to be my own person. Right now, I want to focus on producing more original work and improving myself," says the middle child of a retiree father and housewife mother. Her older sister, 33, is a teacher and younger brother, 26, is a recent architecture graduate from the National University of Singapore.
Being used to conversing mostly in English while she was in Singapore, the biggest challenge that she faced in recording the songs for Waiting was grasping the pronunciation of the Mandarin lyrics.
"I might sing a line correctly and get all the emotions right, but if I mispronounce just one word I have to re-record it again, which can be rather troublesome."
She had the same worries while recording Ru Yan, which was her first ever Mandarin song. It is a pensive ballad about memory and yearning.
"I wasn't surprised that the song did well because I knew that it was a good song, but I wasn't sure how I fared because the lyrics were pretty hard and I did not get the emotions of the song at that point."
Rather than follow the typical Singaporean paper chase and get a degree, she has no plans to further her studies at this point, preferring to focus on her career instead.
"I'm just glad that I'm not in school anymore. I know that a lot of people are nostalgic about school but I'm just excited to be doing what I am doing now."
This article was first run in The Straits Times newspaper on July 15, 2013. For similar stories, go to sph.straitstimes.com/premium/singapore. You will not be able to access the Premium section of The Straits Times website unless you are already a subscriber.