In her East Asheville studio, Lisa Huang cranks out hits for the Japanese pop charts.

by Linda Ray   .   photos by Rene Treece

Never heard of J-Pop? Most Americans haven’t. It’s the music-industry nickname for Japanese pop music, and in the past two decades, as Japanese music has become more Westernized, album titles there have shifted from Japanese words to things like First Love and Atomic Heart, with many hit songs sung entirely in English. Still, you might presume that Japanese pop tunes would be penned by Japanese artists. Or at least by someone who speaks fluent Japanese. But in the case of East Asheville artist Lisa Huang—who’s written #1 singles for Japanese acts including Crystal Kay, whom she calls “the Japanese Beyonce”—you’d be wrong on both counts.

Huang, who moved to Asheville in 2007, was born in Taipei, Taiwan. Her mother is Japanese and her father is Chinese, but Huang says she barely speaks Japanese and hasn’t visited Japan since she was 12. Timmy Huang, her father, is a notable jazz musician and moved his family to L.A. in 1985, where Lisa stayed for nearly 20 years. “I was surrounded by jazz my whole life,” says the 36-year-old Huang, who started playing piano at age six.

Even though music is in her genes, it’s impressive to see just how versatile she is with different musical styles and genres. She’s working on an album of original songs, tentatively titled Fade, that will combine alt-rock with a little flamenco and bossa nova. At some point in 2010, she’d like to release a trip-hop album. In addition to singing and songwriting, she often plays all the instruments required for her original tunes—guitars, organ, keyboards—which makes her something of a one-woman band. She might start by picking out a simple melody on guitar. Then, with the assistance of relatively inexpensive recording software like Logic Pro and Pro Tools, Huang lays down keyboard tracks, adds guitar and percussion, then sings lead as well as harmonies on as many as 16 background vocal tracks. Microphones and cords are plugged into her computer and feed each overlay into the final mix.

Hanging on the wall of her small studio, a converted bedroom, are a platinum and a gold record, trophies from her gigs in the 1990s as an audio engineer at Electra Records, where she helped produce albums for everyone from the R&B group Silk to rapper Tupac Shakur.

At the moment, she’s in both a money-making and a creative groove with Japanese pop. Huang sends her demos to her Los Angeles agent, and he pitches them to the stars. When he hears of a singer looking to record something new, he lets Huang know and she pitches her best tunes. In some cases, because record companies want to hear high-quality versions of a song before they buy it, she can spend weeks fully producing 45 songs before she sells a single track. “It’s like real estate,” she says. “You show a bunch of houses before you make the money.”

Her big break came in 2006 when the Japanese boy band Kat-Tun recorded one of Huang’s tunes, “Signal,” which hit number one on the Japanese Orion charts (Japan’s Billboard equivalent). And Crystal Kay is still riding high with Huang’s song “Dream World,” which made number one in 2007. The song was included in a greatest hits album in August 2009 and hit the number two spot again. The video now gets lots of play on Japanese TV.

The artists she writes songs for tend to take the track she records and mimic her lyrics and melody. Occasionally, some things do get lost in translation. Kat-Tun, the all-Japanese boy band, had trouble following some of her English lyrics, so they changed them to simpler English phrases. And she has had some artistic differences in the past with performers who wanted to change her lyrics. But for the most part, she likes hearing her work in another cultural venue. “It’s cool to hear it in Japanese—it’s another world’s touch,” she says. Sure, more credit goes to the on-stage performer than the songwriters behind the scenes, but that’s true no matter what country you’re in. “People say they love Elton John, but he co-writes most of his songs with his partner. The artist is the front man,” she says.

Like many self-employed creative types, Huang has to be disciplined about her schedule. She works five days a week, organizing music files one day or working on a riff the next. She practices keyboards and guitar every day and tweaks the tunes she’s got in progress.

She didn’t always have the luxury of being able to follow her passion. After graduating high school in 1991, Huang attended an L.A. recording workshop in Studio City and landed an engineering internship. Then she went to work for Rondor Music in L.A. as a sound engineer and stayed for seven years. “It really was perfect timing for me to learn about the transition from analog to digital,” Huang says.

Her dream was to be a stage star, rather than the less-glamorous engineer. But after 20 years in L.A., she hadn’t landed a big record contract and decided to move to Asheville to switch things up. She speculates that, even in such a seemingly progressive era for artists, her ethnic background makes record companies nervous. “Race is still a big part of the record deal,” she says. “They can’t see me as a singer and songwriter because I’m not white, black or Latino.”

Still, she’s written a string of hit songs for Japanese recording artists, which is nothing to sneeze at. She’s also started dabbling in the local music scene. That includes laying down commercial audio tracks for businesses like Mobilia, a high-end furniture shop in downtown Asheville, and the Asheville consignment store Clothes Encounters, both of which needed catchy tunes for their websites. She’s been experimenting with a few local groups and played keyboard with several bands at last fall’s Moog Foundation anniversary party, which may lead to more public appearances. “I know my muse is here,” Huang says of the Asheville area. “There’s never a day when I sit down to write and nothing comes.”