We were lucky to catch up with Vivien L. recently and have shared our conversation below.

Vivien, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

There are actually a couple of incidents that I don’t know which one was the “real” first time, because I had been thinking about pursuing a creative career for such a long time. But the song I wrote under a very random circumstance definitely made me look at songwriting differently for the very first time.

I was a freshman at Stony Brook University majoring in Classical Piano Performance at the time, and in a chill afternoon I was hanging out with a friend at their practice room. We were having snacks and chatting, and I was sitting by the grand piano just nonchalantly improvising around on and off during our conversation. None of us was paying much attention to what I played as we just enjoyed it as some background noise, until I played a riff that both of us liked immediately. My friend urged me to write it down before I forget, and in fact, I finished writing that song almost in the next hour. And the piano riff I played in the first place became one of the most important lines in the chorus.

The song itself wasn’t really anything too special at the time: it was just a simple love song that the 18-year-old me wrote for my then-boyfriend because we were in long distance and I hoped we could make it through. Playing back the song to myself over and over in the following days, I felt I was never more powerful and hopeful.

It wasn’t the first song I wrote, but it was the first one that I felt really connected to. I suddenly realized that, the combination of music and words expressed my feelings the best, stronger than anything I could verbally say. So in the following several months, I kept writing. I started to write about all sorts of emotions and memories that I found meaningful, and even about secrets that I haven’t told anyone. I felt like I was a little kid that got gifted a superpower by a wizard, so I kept using it to see if it’s true.

My songs then became my dairy, novel, and sometimes even my “mental health prescription”. I knew I started to dream about something bigger than writing music like a hobby. And that started my journey of researching and considering a career shift from classical piano to pop songwriting. In the junior year, I decided to pursue a master degree at Songwriting at NYU.

If you care, there’s an epilogue of the story about that “long-distance love anthem”:

The relationship didn’t make it to the end, unsurprisingly. In fact, we broke up pretty shortly after the song was created. As life kept moving on so quickly, I was caught up by all the new ideas and new tunes so I slowly forgot about it. The demo audio and the lyrics sheet lied in my old laptop quietly, never released or shown to anyone else. But I started revising and rewriting the song in 2019, which was four years post the first draft. It took me about two years to finally finish the project, and at the end I officially titled it as “Jiu Shi Nian Shao” (“When Love Was Young”). I re-structured the song from the perspective of a more experienced songwriter, but more importantly, I re-shaped the story from the perspective of a more mature grown-up.

In the summer of 2022, my manager in China called and asked me to check out a video clip on TikTok (known in Mainland China as Douyin) — it was my song sung on the Chinese music reality show “Wei Ge Er Zan” by Mandopop singer Chen Chu Sheng, who was an idol of mine when I was a child.

Vivien, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Vivien L., and I am NYC-based singer-songwriter, pianist, composer, and music producer. I was born and raised in Guangzhou, China, and I moved to the U.S. for college when I was 18 and ever since then I’ve been pursuing my artist career here. Besides being a solo artist, I am also the co-founder, the keyboardist, as well as the female vocal lead of the Alternative/Indie Rock Band Qu!et For The Neighbors.

I was actually a classical concert pianist, but now I am making all kinds of pop music. I started to study classical piano when I was 5 years old, and discovered a passion on pop music on my 3rd grade in elementary school. Being able to sing and accompany myself with piano had always been my dream since then. I wrote my very first pop ballad when I was 15, and that, I think, marked my entrance to a whole new world – composition.

I’m proud that I can carry my classical background on and start a creative journey. Nowadays I am a live show performer mostly touring around the NY and NJ areas, embracing all kinds of genres, including Rock, R&B, Funk, etc., and I am still exploring more.

But switching my focus to pop doesn’t mean giving up on the classical side. Nowadays, the way I’m trying not to leave the concert pianist self behind me is to provide classical piano lessons to the younger generation. Whenever I am teaching classical, the songwriter Vivien can take a rest aside. Instead of trying to be innovative and trying to convey my own feelings, in classical music we time travel back to the history and bring the old legends’ melody, technique, and thoughts alive. I enjoy keeping both kinds of music in my life, and that makes me feel whole.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect is that my music is the place to document my thoughts and stories. It is also most powerful tool I’ve used to express myself. Have you ever had a situation where you can’t describe your feeling verbally? Have you ever experienced that, no matter how hard you try to phrase, you just can’t seem to find the right word or the best way to tell what’s going on in your head? To me that happens a lot. I always have a lot of haywire pondering, and a lot of times they don’t come in full sentences. Some of them are sounds, some are colors or scenes, and some others are fragmented sentences in different languages I speak. They are all related but disconnected in the first place, and I’ll have to piece them together.

As a creative, it is naturally easy for me to do reflection on almost anything, like reflection of myself, reflection on movies, books, art, nature, social relations, etc. Even reflections about the atmosphere in a space. The more I sense them, the more I want to talk about them. And musical notes, lyrics and poems are my pen to write them down. Indeed, a creative’s brain is always running and it can get easy to overload sometimes, but that makes me feel I’m alive and I am full of soul. What’s even better is, I can get to spread my mind to others (my audience) too!

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I got often asked by non-musicians that how I could write or play a tune so effortlessly, or how I hear every detail like instrument/harmony/chord in a song immediately without paying too much attention to it. Some of them joke about me having magic, and they believe it is what’s called talent. Apparently this happens to a lot of other musicians and it’s nothing rare to see.

Well, while that does sound pretty much like some cool magic tricks, I surely have no super power. The truth is, the seemingly effortlessness actually comes from years of endeavor. We also call it – practice. Having some talent may be helpful, but practice is the only biggest factor to determine how much you can achieve.

The teacher who got me into piano improvisation and tonal theory said this to me in almost every lesson: “The more you listen to, the better you know. The more you try/practice, the better you get. Until it eventually becomes your muscle memory; until you sometimes even forget how’d you figure it out, but you just know so naturally.” Now as a music educator myself too, this is also what I keep reminding my students.

So to all the aspiring creatives and non-creatives who’s curious about it, the key to the “fun” is, practice, practice, and practice.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @vvnyolo
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@vivienl.1357
• Other: spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4eNfGtWhRBL5iwSN27UdB9?si=zJbdGtpgRWyDoT_2LtlGAQ