Jonathan Lee: After Writing Others' Innermost Thoughts in Plain Speech, Only in Hill Did He Finally Speak of Himself

30-Second Overview: Jonathan Lee was born in Beitou, Taipei, in 1958; his father ran a gas shop.¹ Afraid of going back to deliver gas, he spent his life writing songs: "Waking from a Dream" for Sarah Chen, "Realization" for Winnie Hsin, and "The Price of Love" for Sylvia Chang. In the plainest language of the street, he sang out the emotional lives and life obstacles of a generation of singers, many of them women.² Critics place him alongside Lo Ta-yu as one of Mandopop's two "godfathers": Lo observes the world; Lee peers into the human heart.³ Yet this man who best understood others' private thoughts did not directly speak in song about his own middle age and his father until Hill at age 55 and A Newly Written Old Song at age 60.⁴

The person who spent thirty years writing the best songs for others first wrote the ending of his own story.

In 2013, Jonathan Lee was 55 when he released "Hill." The line "only after crossing the hill did I find no one waiting" became the voice of an entire generation in middle age.⁵ A man who had used plain, street-level language to sing through the inner lives of Sarah Chen, Winnie Hsin, and Sandy Lam had taken a thirty-year detour before finally, on the other side of the hill, writing about himself. Looking back, that road began at a gas shop in Beitou.

The Man Afraid of Going Back to Deliver Gas

Jonathan Lee was born on July 19, 1958, in Beitou, Taipei, then still called Beitou Township and administered by the Yangmingshan Administrative Bureau.¹ His father, Lee Chung-nien, ran Changchun Gas, selling the cylinders of gas found in household kitchens. As a boy, Jonathan Lee had to carry steel cylinders up staircases, ring doorbells, and collect payment. He failed the entrance exam for arts school, went to Minghsin Junior College of Technology, and was not especially smooth as a student.

He later described this period very bluntly: "I didn't want to go back to delivering gas!"⁶ The sentence does not sound inspirational; it sounds more like escape. For him, songwriting was the path by which a gas shop owner's son tried to find a way not to carry steel cylinders upstairs anymore.

In 1975, while still in school, he formed the Wood Guitar choir with Chiang Hsueh-shih and Chang Ping-hui, singing in folk-music restaurants. In 1979, they won the college vocal ensemble category at the third Golden Melody Awards for folk songs.⁷ This was the closing phase of Taiwan's campus folk movement, and Lee happened to catch that train. In 1983, he produced Small Rain Comes at Just the Right Time for singer Cheng Yi, the first album of his life credited to him as producer, even before he joined Rock Records.⁸ The next year, in 1984, he formally joined Rock Records, and his first production project there was Sylvia Chang's Busy and Blind.⁹ In January 1986, he released his debut solo album, Elves in Life.¹⁰ The man afraid of going back to deliver gas never truly went back again.

📝 Curator's Note
Many people remember Jonathan Lee as the "godfather of Mandopop" and remember the great love songs he wrote. But the creative starting point he gave for himself was that he "didn't want to go back to delivering gas." That starting point matters. It explains why he spent his life writing words ordinary people could understand. Someone who has carried steel cylinders, rung doorbells, and collected money does not write songs in ornate literary diction. He writes in the language of the street, because that is where he originally stood.

Jonathan Lee, photographed in 2008. With a guitar and a stool, he turned singing into an extension of speech. Photo: Tat Lau. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Writing Someone Else's Letter to Chyi Yu

In 1989, Sarah Chen released Talk to You, Listen to You, which sold more than one million copies and became Taiwan's first Mandarin album to pass the million-sales mark.¹¹ The album was produced by Jonathan Lee, and its song "Waking from a Dream" was written and composed by him. Lines such as "Had you known heartbreak is always unavoidable, why were you so deeply devoted?" later became the background sound for countless heartbreaks.¹²

Yet few people know that when Lee wrote "Waking from a Dream," the addressee he imagined was not Sarah Chen. He said it was "imagining writing a letter to Chyi Yu, in a woman's voice, to another woman."¹³ A man using a woman's perspective to write, for a woman singer, a letter addressed to another woman: this became his signature move. He wrote "Realization" for Winnie Hsin, "The Price of Love" for Sylvia Chang, "Scars" and "Don't Mind Who I Am" for Sandy Lam, and "I Am a Little Bird" for Chao Chuan.¹⁴ The protagonists of these songs are almost all women, and what they sing about are the obstacles women cannot get past.

Winnie Hsin later recalled how strict Lee was during the recording of "Realization": "One day, Big Brother couldn't hold back anymore and told me, you have to keep singing until I am satisfied before the recording can end."¹⁵ He did not only write; he pushed singers to deliver a line exactly, because he knew that line had to enter someone else's heart rather than be sung for himself.

✦ "Don't rush to sing. Singing is an extension of speech... because lyrics are a dialogue."¹⁶

Lee saw songwriting as speech. He once said: "The first principle of Mandopop is lyrics."¹⁶ That is why his lyrics never go in circles. In "The Price of Love," the line "Perhaps we were never mature, not yet able to understand that we were about to grow old" is nearly plain speech, yet it lands precisely on everyone who has grown up. Scholars have compared him with Lin Xi: Lin Xi excels at creating atmosphere and layering imagery; Lee is "not especially good at creating atmosphere," but moving people through plain speech is in fact harder than creating imagery.¹⁷

Lo Ta-yu Observes the World; Jonathan Lee Peers Into the Heart

Taiwan's pop music scene has a saying about its "three great producers": Jonathan Lee, Lo Ta-yu, and Johnny Chen, known as Hsiao Chung.¹⁸ Among them, Lo Ta-yu and Jonathan Lee are often placed together because they were two completely different kinds of "godfather" in the same era.

One music review put the contrast with great precision: "Lo Ta-yu observes the world; Jonathan Lee peers into the human heart. Lo Ta-yu excels in imagery; Jonathan Lee loves plain description. Lo Ta-yu is a fighter; Jonathan Lee is an ordinary person."³ If one were to compare them with classical figures, Lo resembles Xin Qiji, with the nation and history in his chest; Lee resembles Bai Juyi, writing everyday language that common people could understand and remember. Lo wrote "Lugang, the Little Town" and "Orphan of Asia," turning the camera toward the era and society. Lee wrote "Waking from a Dream" and "Realization," turning the camera toward the heart of a person unable to sleep late at night.

📝 Curator's Note
The word "godfather" means different things when applied to these two men. Lo Ta-yu's status as godfather comes from his willingness to say what others dared not say; he wrote protest and history. Jonathan Lee's status comes from the other direction: he put into the simplest words the emotions everyone has but cannot voice. One pushes outward; the other digs inward. Taiwan's pop music gained its depth because both kinds of figure emerged on the same island.

Their life paths also make an interesting contrast. In 1990, Lo Ta-yu founded the label Music Factory in Hong Kong.¹⁹ Jonathan Lee did not have his own label; his stage was always Rock Records. He became vice president and production director, bringing batch after batch of singers to the center of Taiwan's music scene. These are two different ways of living as a "godfather": one sets up his own banner as a standard-bearer; the other, inside a major company, becomes the hands that choose songs, refine songs, and sign artists.

Lo Ta-yu, pictured at the 2021 Golden Melody Awards, is often named alongside Jonathan Lee as one of Mandopop's two godfathers: one observes the world, the other peers into the human heart. Photo: 化城再来人. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Songs He Actually Did Not Write

Precisely because Jonathan Lee was so good at writing other people's private thoughts, popular memory often credits him with a heap of songs by other people. To see his real signature clearly, these misunderstandings first have to be returned to their owners.

One of Sarah Chen's most famous songs, "Red Dust," was actually written and composed by Lo Ta-yu.²⁰ Sandy Lam's "Falling in Love with Someone Who Never Comes Home" was a UFO Records work, composed by Chen Chih-yuan, with lyrics by Ting Hsiao-wen and production by Chen Hsiu-nan, released in 1990, before Lee had even entered Sandy Lam's career.²¹ Winnie Hsin had an album called Scent; Lee was its producer and wrote "Realization" for it, but the title track "Scent" itself had lyrics by Yao Chien and music by Huang Kuo-lun, and was not his work.²²

Fish Leong was Lee's disciple, signed to Rock Records by him in 1997, but her biggest hits, "Happy Breakup" and "Pain That Breathes," had lyrics by writers including Yao Jo-lung, not Jonathan Lee.²³ Emil Chau's hit "Flower Heart" has music by Okinawan singer Shoukichi Kina and lyrics by Li Man-ting; it has nothing to do with Lee.²⁴ Chao Chuan's "I Am Ugly, But I Am Gentle" had lyrics by poet Hsia Yu, under the pen name Lee Ko-ti, and music by Kay Huang; Lee was credited only for album planning.²⁵ Emil Chau's "You Make Me Happy and Sad" was originally by the Japanese group CHAGE&ASKA, specifically Aska; Lee only wrote the Chinese lyrics. The melody was not his.²⁶

⚠️ The Most Common Misunderstanding: He Did Not Own Music Factory
Popular accounts often describe "Music Factory" as Jonathan Lee's label, but it was actually founded by Lo Ta-yu in Hong Kong in 1990.¹⁹ Lee's real position was production director at Rock Records. To confuse the two is to swap the life stories of the two godfathers.

Once the misunderstandings are returned, Lee's real catalogue becomes clearer: songs for which he wrote both music and lyrics include "Waking from a Dream," "Realization," "The Price of Love," "Scars," "Don't Mind Who I Am," "Question," "I Am a Little Bird," and "When Love Is a Thing of the Past."¹⁴ The production lineage he led includes Sylvia Chang's Busy and Blind, Sarah Chen's Talk to You, Listen to You, Winnie Hsin's Realization, Sandy Lam's Love, Sandy, and Karen Mok's You Can, a line of "urban women" albums.⁹¹¹ He wrote fewer songs than legend suggests, but every one stands. Fish Leong and Mayday, both discovered and signed by him at Rock Records in 1997, later defined an era, though Mayday's debut album was produced by Chen Chien-liang, not by Lee.²⁷

Only After Crossing the Hill Did He Write Himself

After thirty years of writing for other people, Jonathan Lee's own songs came comparatively late.

It is not that he had never written about himself. Early on, he wrote "The Man Who Races Himself" and "A-Zong's Three Things," the latter directly singing about his gas shop family background.²⁸ The line "You and I are ordinary people, born into this world" in "Ordinary People's Song," the theme song for the television drama The Sky and Sea, became the signature of his "ordinary person philosophy."²⁹ But to truly turn the camera toward his middle-aged self, one has to wait until "Hill."

In 2003, while he was in Shanghai during the SARS period, a melody surfaced in his mind. He let that melody ferment for a full ten years, not finishing the lyrics and turning it into a song until October 2013.⁵ When "Hill" appeared, almost everyone who had reached middle age saw themselves in it: the stuck feeling of having "so much still wanted to say but not yet said," the melancholy of having climbed through half a life only to find the far side of the hill empty. The next year, at the 25th Golden Melody Awards, "Hill" won Song of the Year, Best Lyricist, and Best Album Packaging.³⁰ It is worth noting that it did not sweep the awards: Best Composer went to Hsiao Ho-shuo, and Best Single Producer went to Jeffrey Kung.³⁰ But that did nothing to prevent it from becoming the middle-age theme song of an entire generation.

✦ "I entered the industry in my early twenties. In thirty years I wrote fewer than 300 songs... So, the work is the self."³¹

In 2014, he wrote and personally narrated "For Craftsmanship," an advertisement for New Balance. Lines such as "Many things in life cannot be rushed; you have to wait for them to ripen on their own" and "Focus on making something; at least then you have done right by the passing years. Leave the rest to time" were repeatedly quoted as statements of craft spirit.³¹ A young man once in a hurry because he "didn't want to go back to delivering gas" was, at 55, speaking of things that "cannot be rushed." Between the twenty-year-old afraid of going back to deliver gas and eager to find a way out, and the fifty-five-year-old urging others to slow down and wait for things to ripen on their own, lie the thirty years he spent writing for other people.

Official music video for "Hill" by B'in Music. The melody began fermenting in Shanghai in 2003, and Lee spent ten years before completing the lyrics. "Only after crossing the hill did I find no one waiting" became the middle-age theme song of an entire generation; the next year it won Song of the Year at the 25th Golden Melody Awards.

Writing to a Father Who Never Received the Letter

If Hill was Jonathan Lee's first direct writing about his own middle age, then 2018's A Newly Written Old Song was his first direct writing about his father.

Lee Chung-nien, the man who ran the gas shop, finally had a place in song. "A Newly Written Old Song" has been described as an "unsent letter of reconciliation": a son, after his father is already gone, putting into song the words he could not say back then.⁴ "Two men may very likely spend their entire lives doing no more than looking alike," the kind of unspeakable distance between father and son, was laid out by Lee in his usual plain speech. At the 30th Golden Melody Awards the following year, the song won him Best Lyricist; in the Song of the Year category, it lost to Jolin Tsai's "Womxnly."³²

📝 Curator's Note
The chronology of how Jonathan Lee wrote himself is fascinating. He entered the industry in his twenties and spent thirty years writing other people's private thoughts: women's heartbreak, women's awakenings, women's prices paid. When it came time to write himself, first came middle age at 55 (Hill), then his father at 60 (A Newly Written Old Song). The person who best understood others' private thoughts put his own at the very end of the line. It is as though after spending a lifetime peering into others' hearts, he finally worked up the courage to peer into his own.

This path of "others first, self later" had already been rehearsed in 2010. That year, he formed Superband with Lo Ta-yu, Emil Chau, and Chang Chen-yue and released Go South. The song "A Song for Myself" won him Best Lyricist, Best Composer, and Song of the Year at the 22nd Golden Melody Awards in one stroke; the Taipei Times called him that year's "biggest winner."³³ From "A Song for Myself" to Hill to A Newly Written Old Song, this man who wrote songs for the whole world spent the last dozen years of his life slowly writing songs back to himself.

Making a Living Off Women's Songs, and Bearing the Name of Scumbag Man

Jonathan Lee's songs are almost always speaking for women, but his real-life romantic choices later gave him, in the internet age, the name of "scumbag man."

In 1987, he married his first wife, Chu Wei-yin, and they had two daughters, Lee Chun-er and Lee An-er.³⁴ The two divorced in 1997. In the same year, he married his longtime collaborator Sandy Lam, the singer for whom he had written "Scars" and "Don't Mind Who I Am."³⁵ His marriage to Lam lasted until 2004, and they had a daughter, Lee Hei-yi.³⁶ Divorce and remarriage in the same year, when viewed together, gave him the label of "abandoning his family and children to pursue love."³⁷ A line later became popular online: "When young, one does not listen to Jonathan Lee; once one understands him, one is already an old scumbag man."

⚠️ Contested View: The Name of Scumbag Man and the Self-Mockery of 'Making a Living Off Women'
Jonathan Lee's romantic choices are public facts, and the "scumbag man" criticism genuinely exists in online discussion.³⁷ But two things are worth setting beside it. First, in 2024 he himself half-jokingly "admitted to making a living off women"; many of his representative works were indeed written for women singers.³⁸ Second, some have pointed out a gendered double standard here: many male singers have changed partners, so why has the anger concentrated especially on him? This article neither defends him nor sensationalizes him. It simply places the tension here: the man who wrote out the private thoughts of a generation of women, and the man called a scumbag by women listeners, are the same person.

Academia has noticed this tension. A master's thesis at National Chung Hsing University is titled Urban, Popular, Jonathan Lee: Gender Narrative and Love Discourse in Lee-Style Love Songs, specifically studying how he, as a man, wrote love for women, and what kinds of gender perspective he placed within that writing.³⁹ A gas shop owner's son ultimately became the "Lee-style love song" phenomenon analyzed in academic theses; this is probably something even he did not expect.

A Guitar Made by Hand

In 2002, Jonathan Lee did something rather different from producing and songwriting: he founded Lee Guitars and began making acoustic guitars by hand.⁴⁰ He said that in the history of Mandopop, there had been almost no luthiers of its own. The next year, he moved the workshop to Beijing's 798 Art District, and the center of his life gradually shifted to Beijing as well.⁴⁰

A Lee Guitars acoustic guitar. From hands that carried gas cylinders to hands that plane wood and make guitars. Photo: KaurJmeb. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

From hands that carried gas cylinders, to hands that played guitar, wrote songs, and polished singers, then to hands that plane wood and make guitars, these hands have taken on many kinds of work. But if one looks closely, they have been doing the same thing all along: slowly turning something an ordinary person wants to say but cannot quite articulate into a work that someone else can receive.

Beginning in 2019, he launched the Those Were the Days concert tour, with the first stop in Suzhou.⁴¹ The Taiwan shows included Kaohsiung Arena in January 2020 and Taipei Arena in December 2021, his fourth time "attacking the Egg," as major Taipei Arena concerts are colloquially described.⁴² On the Taipei stage, he said something very much like himself: "Little Lee just writes songs. I have never felt I was better than them. Being able to work with them is what made me."⁴³

After writing the best songs for others for thirty years, he still ultimately pushed the credit back to those who sang his songs. The line in "Hill," "only after crossing the hill did I find no one waiting," sings of melancholy. But standing on the Taipei Arena stage, he in fact understood clearly: on the other side of the hill stood Sarah Chen, Winnie Hsin, Sandy Lam, Sylvia Chang, Chao Chuan, Karen Mok, and an entire generation of voices whom he wrote into songs and who sang him into godfatherhood. The boy afraid of going back to deliver gas ultimately did not go back to delivering gas. He delivered cylinder after cylinder of private feeling into homes across the entire Chinese-speaking world.

Further Reading:

• Lo Ta-yu — Another godfather of Mandopop; his "observing the world" is the essential counterpart to Jonathan Lee's "peering into the human heart"
• Sylvia Chang — Lee's first production project after joining Rock Records, Busy and Blind, and the starting point of the "urban women" lineage
• A-Mei — A diva-level voice from the same golden age of Rock Records, and another path in Taiwanese women pop singers
• Taiwan Folk Music Movement — The train Lee caught in the 1970s, and the soil of the Wood Guitar choir and Golden Melody folk awards
• The Evolution of Taiwan Mandarin — Why "plain speech in song" moves people has to do with how Taiwan Mandarin became an everyday language

Image Sources

This article uses three CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/people/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Jonathan Lee 2008 portrait — Photo: Tat Lau, CC BY-SA 2.0.
• Lo Ta-yu at the 2021 Golden Melody Awards — Photo: 化城再来人, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Lee Guitars — Photo: KaurJmeb, CC BY 2.0.

References

• 李宗盛 - Wikipedia
• Jonathan Lee (musician) - Wikipedia
• 羅大佑 - Wikipedia