Yesterday, in the third performance of "Riding the Wind and Waves", Liu Lian bid farewell to the stage. But as the only sister who was "paid to appear on the show" this time, stories about her are still spreading on social media -
She graduated from the School of Archeology and Museology of Peking University, and later went to a well-known 4A advertising company , working all the way to creative director; at the same time, during his undergraduate studies, he formed the jazz group Mr. Miss with his senior Du Kai. In 2016, he released his first album "Mr. Miss" and won the Best Singing Group Award at the 28th Golden Melody Awards the following year.
Compared with the sisters who have long been famous in the show, Liu Lian may be the one closest to an ordinary girl, but regarding herself now, this ordinary girl can confidently make judgments: "I have grown into the person I was when I was a child. An envious look."
As for how she did all this? The following is Liu Lian's self-report -
text | Wang Yuan
editor | Jinshi
1
When the program team called to contact me in February, what they were most interested in was my dual-career status, as mentioned in the program Yes, I am the only one who watches "Riding the Wind and Waves" while working, right? They would be hard-pressed to find another one so wild. The company
also knew that I was in a special situation, and arranged some relatively flexible work for me. I was responsible for proposals and copywriting scripts for some important projects, and then wrote manuscripts and checked the materials of the output content, mainly these. While I was recording the show, I temporarily handed over the work to a colleague. I heard that he was extremely busy during this period, and I felt guilty for him.
Regarding the show, I think everyone knows that this is a reality show. I have never participated in this kind of life under surveillance 24 hours a day. At first I was worried that I wouldn’t know how to express myself in this kind of situation, but after I arrived, I saw that everyone was talking very normally and communicating very naturally. This feeling made me feel like I usually meet my colleagues at work. The feeling is not much different.
This is the first time I have appeared on such a big reality show. Another thing I am worried about is how other people think of me. This can easily make people worry about gains and losses.
For example, when Yi Gong was selecting songs, others said that I was a "divine fortune teller". I knew that I was not. I just happened to be captured at that moment, so when I encountered a scene like this in interpreting the rules in the future, I would be more careful. under pressure. Can I calculate so accurately every time? What if I miscalculate next time? In fact, there are many times in my life when I am stupid.
In life, you can immediately eliminate other people's misunderstandings, but when you become a public figure, you can only let others interpret it. All I can do is prepare my mind to accept these interpretations.
Liu Lian's "Riding the Wind and Waves" first stage picture source video screenshot
Zhao Meng and I slept on the same bed in the dormitory. In the first week, we tossed and turned every night and couldn't sleep. I was worried that I wouldn't do well because I was not familiar with this environment yet. When I was the captain, I took on such an important role as captain, and I was particularly afraid that I would make mistakes.
was in the group at the time, and I met Zhu Jiejing, Tang Shiyi, and Qi Xi. Two of them were dancers and one was in the film industry. None of them had been in the entertainment industry for a long time. So at the beginning, the four of us were having a group planning meeting, discussing how to design the stage every day. I thought, isn't this the most comfortable state for me? I do this every day in the company.
But on the third day of the discussion, the staff told me, let’s talk about something else. I said what's wrong, isn't this good? He said we can't just have meetings, we should also show other aspects of these sisters' personalities outside of work. At that time, I suddenly understood and felt a little guilty because I was the captain. I thought I should design some relaxation sessions to let everyone show the cute side of life.
But I didn’t think about what to do, so I could only sit next to them and say, let’s chat (laughing).It was very tough. I would catch them one by one and chat with them every day. I would forcefully chat with them, and they would be confused. In the end, nothing came out of these awkward conversations. In the two or three days before
's performance, after the four of us became familiar with each other, we all naturally found a relaxed state. But I still lost in the end. After knowing the result, I felt very uncomfortable. I felt sorry for them because I had a good card in my hand and could not play it out.
I also know that my popularity is very bad in the competition. I originally expected that I might leave as soon as I win. So I found that when my second husband was still around, I didn’t care about winning or losing as much as I did at the beginning. At that time, I thought, I can leave, but I have to leave a good work and be worthy of myself.
The second husband got "Dream Man". Fiona Sit and I had the same idea that this song would not work if we just stood on the stage and sang it. We couldn't subvert such a classic original song, so we hope to integrate more is expressed in this song. The feeling of the
stage is very intuitive. We were shaking, and the camera looked like I was laughing, but at that time you just couldn't help but feel that it was all so beautiful - you were standing on such a stage, so released. Such a great show and such a great person.
In this show, the most touching moments are when I look into each other's eyes while singing. Including Yi Gong, when we couldn't find the feeling, we would stare into each other's eyes and sing this song.
Even if you know that this is a show stage, you can feel what these people have accumulated in their hearts over the years and what they want to express. In their eyes, you can feel the transmission of vitality.
Participating in this program, if it has changed anything for me, it has made me more sure that I can make good works and have more confidence in my creative ability.
On the second stage, Liu Lian and Fiona Sit jointly performed "Dream Man" Source: Weibo @成风波波
2
In the show, I seemed to have picked up the script of a happy unlucky guy. I never won once, not even a round, not a handful. None, and eventually I got used to losing. The last time I felt such a shock in my life was probably when I finished second last in the science experimental class in my freshman year of high school.
My grades have been very good since I was a child. I am used to being number one. I even think that I should have good grades as a matter of course. It is difficult to accept that I am not as good as others. But when I entered the science experimental class in the first year of high school, I was surrounded by people who had graduated from elementary school competitions, and my progress was twice as fast as in other classes. Every time after an exam, the chemistry teacher would ask the last few to stand up. Do you know how humiliated I was? The last one keeps changing, and the second last one is always me (laughs). But after I entered the liberal arts class in my sophomore year of high school, I basically didn’t attend math classes anymore, and I was able to score many points higher than others without any effort.
So, from junior high school to high school, except for the first year of high school, I was always number one - although my grades were very good, I was actually not that happy in life.
Chengdu is my hometown, but neither of my parents are natives of Chengdu. They were transferred there later. So I always feel like I'm in an away game, waiting for others to accept me. My family speaks Mandarin , but I can only speak Mandarin, and my classmates make fun of me. So when I was in my second year of high school, I started to study Sichuan dialect hard, just to be able to keep up with everyone.
At that time, I had a bit of a please-pleaser personality and didn’t dare to have any objections. When I go out and meet someone selling something, I will buy it immediately even if I don’t want to buy it. If I have a fight with a friend, I will choose to apologize first because I want to maintain the relationship. In order not to make others feel unhappy, even if I am hurt, I am not willing to show it.
life is also very monotonous, and I can't see any other possibilities. One of the most depressing scenes in my life is the road to school in middle and high school. My home is very close to the school. It only takes 20 minutes by bike. I go to school at two o'clock every day. It was a small lane on the main road, with a residential compound next to it, and other restaurants, stationery stores, and hardware stores.At that time, the hormones of adolescence are raging, but there is nothing else around to put it. Walking this same road every day makes me feel like I can't live anymore.
So every day when I was riding my bike, I started humming. When I was in junior high school, I still listened to love songs and was limited to my own little emotional world. But when I was in high school, a friend who I grew up with introduced me to " Linkin Park ". From then on, I started listening to rock music . Radiohead, Evanescence, Ringo Shiina and others discovered that they could boldly present unprecedented things in their works, criticize the current ills, and at the same time write very poetic content. Even when people reach an age when they feel they should settle down, they still remain curious and questioning about the world.
I suddenly opened the door to the world of music. The more I listened, the deeper I listened, and the more I listened, the more biased I became.
What shocked me the most was Dolly Amos. After she was raped by a male music fan, she wrote "Me and A Gun". All her emotions were transformed into such a song, using music to To fight back the harm society has done to her. Her strength really conveyed to me the power of music. Some people say that people have two birthdays. The first is the birthday when you are born, and the second is the day when you decide the direction of your life and decide to go in this direction. I think my second birthday was the moment when I fell in love with music and wanted to be like them.
At that time, I thought that I must go to Beijing for college, because there are many live houses and music festivals in Beijing. This idea kept me going.
Liu Lian in rehearsal Photo provided by the interviewee
3
My first choice was Peking University New Media, and I wanted to study advertising. Because I saw an whiskey advertisement on TV before. Most of the advertisements I had seen before were the kind of brainwashing, but that advertisement showed two people fishing in the Arctic, and then the music slowly started playing, and suddenly I saw This scene, my God, makes me feel that advertising can be so beautiful and artistic.
But because I was in the class of 2008, the Wenchuan earthquake occurred one month before the college entrance examination, which made our mathematics very simple that year. I relied on mathematics to distinguish myself from others. As a result, the person who finally admitted me was my third choice, Peking University. School of Archeology and Museology.
As soon as I entered university, I asked my seniors how to change departments. I wanted to transfer to Xinchuan, and later I took some of their professional courses. But by the second year I decided to stay. The archeology major studies ancient architecture, human skeleton, and sketching. I began to think that this major is a bit interesting. It allows me to come into contact with things that are difficult for others to come into contact with - rarity is a very important thing.
Our major also has some practical classes that will really take you to places of interest. When I went there before, I just read the introduction, took some photos and left. But after studying archeology, you will have a completely different feeling when you walk into these places again, look at its brackets, its eaves, and judge its age.
In fact, a lot of what I learned at that time was forgotten after the exam, but at least the school taught me to think about things from multiple perspectives, which changed my thinking mode and allowed me to see myself from a third-party perspective. experience. Later, writing songs and advertising will also require you to write about the same thing from a different perspective. You will find that if you change the perspective, you may have more interesting and novel stories or perspectives.
Of course, studying does not delay music. I signed up for the Top Ten Singers Competition in my freshman year, and in the semi-finals I sang "Seven Years" by Norah Jones. I was still very shy at the time and felt very unsure about finishing the song and did not make it to the finals. After the competition, I received a private message from Du Kai on Renren. He was studying for a postgraduate degree at the time and served as a judge for the competition as a teacher. He praised me in a private message and said he thought I was very talented and invited me to play with him at the Guitar Association. I thought, wow, it turns out I am pretty good and have something.
Du Kaicai told me later that he took the initiative to contact me because he wanted to work as a singer and singer in a bar at that time. People said that you are an ugly guy, so you should find a better-looking girl to partner with you.Later, we sang together in a bar in Wudaokou.
Later we went to perform in several bars near Nanluogu Lane. Everyone carried small stools and sat next to each other. The atmosphere feels very warm now that I think about it. I remember one of our performances. By the end of the performance, all the customers had left, and only the boss was left sitting down to listen to us singing. The boss can play the saxophone, and as we listened, he took out his saxophone and played with us. Even if there is no audience, you will still feel very happy when you see him sitting down and taking out his musical instrument to play with you. At the time of
, when we first started collaborating, Du Kai and I were just working partners, and our music preferences were very different. I like minor music, British music; he likes American music, black music, rap and so on. At that time, we paid 200 yuan for a three-hour concert and had to sing more than 50 songs. We just experimented with various styles, folk , pop, British, RB, etc. The performance was good and bad sometimes, and sometimes everyone would just play dice and drink below. But many times, when singing jazz and Broadway style, the audience responds very well and will turn their heads and listen carefully. We just felt like, this is something that's right for us.
Mr. Miss, the jazz group of Liu Lian and Du Kai. Picture provided by the interviewee
4
When I graduated from college, I had two choices. At that time, I had already guaranteed graduate school and could continue my graduate studies at Xinchuan College on the Shenzhen campus of Peking University; I got an internship offer from Ogilvy & Mather Beijing. What I thought at the time was that if I chose to study in Shenzhen, the group might not be able to continue. So I decided to stay in Beijing, work in an advertising company, and continue singing with Du Kai.
Because I thought our prospects were pretty good at the time. In our sophomore year, our group Mr. Miss won the championship in the Peking University Top Ten Singers Competition. Gradually, we got some opportunities to perform and compete. One opportunity led to another. We also appeared on China’s Got Talent. Unexpectedly, after I decided to stay in Beijing, I entered a gloomy period musically. My songwriting also hit a bottleneck, my opportunities for performances also decreased, and I basically fell into a stagnant situation.
For most of Mr. Miss's songs, Du Kai first wrote the music, and then I wrote the lyrics. He studied jazz and Broadway music very deeply, and he was very sensitive to what was suitable or not suitable for inclusion. This kind of music requires a very free and easy and optimistic personality, but I am a relatively pessimistic person. When I wrote the lyrics of Mr. Miss, I had to work hard to adjust myself to that kind of mentality and create the character in the song. "I".
Sometimes, I feel like Du Kai’s Party B. I have to submit my lyrics to him for review. If the review fails, I have to rewrite it. At the beginning, when he could only accept the optimistic and free and easy style, this was actually not his requirement, but the requirement of jazz music itself. But at the beginning, I really couldn't accept it. It was difficult to write from the bottom of my heart like " "Singin' in the Rain" is a song with a very direct expression. We have been arguing for many years. I always have a desire to do and rock .
So at that time, we wrote very slowly. The first album "Mr. Miss" took 7 years to prepare and was released in 2016. After the album
was released, it received three nominations for the Golden Melody Award. The day before we went to receive the award, we performed in Jiangxi. There was a heavy rain and the plane was grounded. We had to charter a car and drive overnight from Jiangxi to Shenzhen, then from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, and then to Taipei. We didn't even make it to the red carpet. It took ten minutes to put on makeup and go straight to the ceremony venue, and finally won the award for Best Vocal Group.
Mr. Miss at the 28th Golden Melody Awards Ceremony After
won the award, I thought we should be able to enter the mainstream, at least enter the first echelon of the music industry, but it didn't happen. After we came back, the audience still didn’t know us very well. When we go to music festivals, like other bands’ rock songs, people don’t even need to hear clearly what they are singing to get excited and shake their heads happily, but that’s not the case with us. You have to listen to my lyrics clearly and you have to get into the act. It's a bit like a musical stand-up show.The same goes for
, including the program. The program will bring some popularity, but it may pass quickly.
Therefore, even when I just won the Golden Melody Award, I did not want to quit my job and become a musician full-time. Because doing advertising allows me to maintain my sensitivity to society and new things - advertising is feeding my music back. Even when I am doing very self-expression, I have the ability to balance it and make it acceptable to users. something, and at the same time, it’s something I want to express.
was actually quite hit when he first entered the advertising industry. I applied for a job at a company and said that I really wanted to be creative. The person laughed and asked me, do you know what creativity is? I found that I really didn't know. At that time, I didn’t have any works, and I didn’t know how to prove that I could do it.
I have been writing PR drafts for about a year or two, and every time I ask some particularly beautiful lyricists to praise something, I get very upset every time. At that time, the most common thing to do was to call various media teachers, "We have an event here, can the teacher come to participate?" and then go to the event to take care of various trivial matters. I also once thought about whether I should change careers and go to a gallery to curate, or go to a music company to work in music-related industries.
But then we started to get involved in new businesses and started to do creative content. Later, the way of advertising distribution also changed. We started to do social platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, and we could do something that we really wanted to express. I remember when we held an brainstorming meeting, my leader said that this industry actually belongs to young people. You are the ones who are most at the forefront of the times and know best what everyone loves, so your opinions are the most important. Therefore, even when we come up with some particularly wild ideas, he will not immediately kill or deny you. He will follow your ideas and think about how to develop the idea.
I am a person who the more others encourage me, the better I can do. Especially when you are unsure about yourself at the beginning, these encouragements are particularly important. Later, I worked as a Weibo operator for a car brand, and I saw that little by little, people began to like reading these Weibo posts and began to interact with us, just like raising a child of their own.
When you become more and more comfortable at work and have enough understanding and certainty of your own abilities, you won't need others to recognize you. Even if others are not optimistic about the plan and think it is risky, I already have enough confidence to make it happen.
Liu Lian (third from the right) posted photos of her work at the commercial shooting site on social platforms.
5
Maybe it is because of the shadow of my junior high school years that I am particularly afraid of repeating my life. Therefore, when choosing a job, my standard is: Don’t do a job that is repeated every day. This may have also led to me doing advertising and music at the same time.
I just want to have a life where every day can be different - from this perspective, I have basically grown into a person that my childhood self would have envied. The reason why
grows like this is partly due to the influence of Chengdu on me.
In the month between the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake and my college entrance examination, we were at home for the holidays. In order to stay away from high-rise buildings, we even slept in tents in open spaces in parks. At that time, I was reviewing and watching the earthquake news on TV. I was very confused and felt that my future was uncertain.
But the people of Chengdu are very good at enjoying themselves. Everyone sleeps in the park and plays mahjong in the open space. I think this is a very important mentality that Chengdu taught me - from then on, even if I was extremely busy and worked overtime until the early hours of the morning, I could still laugh. I knew that nothing in life was impossible.
Another thing that gives me energy is music.
My growth process over the years has been deeply influenced by Du Kai. He is a person with an academic personality. He taught me many different ways of thinking that are different from ordinary people and supplemented my vision. Although I wanted to break up the gang countless times when the quarrels got serious. But when you calm down and think about it carefully, it's rare to have such a person by your side. I think I entered Peking University just to get to know him.
We went to record the show together, and he could keenly feel the difference in the audience's reaction between the show and the offline performance. During offline performances, even if they are not listening attentively at all, they are truly reacting to the situation at your venue. But in the show, there is a mismatch between the audience's feedback and your actual performance level.
finished recording the show at two or three in the morning, and I was already exhausted. He still wanted to catch me to discuss the essence of the reality show, and I got angry with him many times. But in life, it's rare for you to meet someone who lives purely for one thing.
Du Kai also made me feel like I could come down from my impetuous state. He is now almost forty years old. He has no house or car, and is under great pressure in life. His girlfriend and family members are urging him every day, but he is still able to calm down and study this matter. Every time he sees him When I do, I can easily calm myself down.
Now, it has been almost 7 years since the release of "Mr. Miss". Our current idea is to let those who like us because of variety shows also like our music. We hope that this kind of music will become music that everyone listens to on a daily basis and form a circle of jazz music culture, rather than just being a newcomer. .
Now, I can gradually consider the literary nature of lyrics and other aspects. Du Kai has gradually become able to accept some dark and satirical lyrics. I have a gun-toting side in my personality, so writing this kind of song is relatively smooth, and I feel like I can do it again.
Indeed, music makes me more confident and makes me less afraid of growing old.
I used to be very afraid of getting older. I always felt that when I reached 30, my end would be approaching and my creativity would diminish. I would feel nervous when I saw words such as "the talent has been exhausted". But at this stage, I found that I could take control of my life. I might not have been able to make some of the music I envied before, but now I can. As long as I think of it, I can write it. Although I have not reached the moment of complete freedom and still worry about some worldly issues, I feel that my life is much better than when I was 20 years old.
I remember one year at the end of the year, we held a Christmas concert. The audience was not that big, about two to three hundred people. In fact, some songs, after you have sung them one or two hundred times, you no longer have any interest in them. But when we sang "Leave Tomorrow's Troubles to Tomorrow" that day, the whole audience sang along with us, and I suddenly felt a new feeling.
These songs were just born in a tiny corner of the world. Sometimes Du Kai and I would walk along the empty road outside their house at two or three o'clock in the middle of the night, writing lyrics while walking, as if your music was originally It is just self-expression, and the works created belong only to these two people. But the moment it goes out, it turns into pills, giving others some nutrients. After they receive this energy, they can feed this energy back to you, and everyone spirals upward together.
At that moment, it was like countless people had joined that street, but it was not noisy and would not break the original sense of tranquility. Every individual finds and sees his or her own life in your songs, forming a kind of resonance . That's my happiest moment.
Liu Lian in life. Photo provided by the interviewee
