Wednesday, June 29, 2005 Sweet, hot Coco By Tessa C. Mauricio SHE is every bit as charming as she is curvaceous. Every bit as sweet as she is sexy. Every bit as Asian as she is American. She is Coco Lee, and she had Manila falling in love with her warm personality and sizzling hot music over the weekend, breezing into the metro for a one-night only show to promote her latest album, Exposed. The Coco Lee appeal begins with an openly happy smile that lights up her pretty China eyes and everyone else around her. Then, she says her hellos in that affable American way and makes strangers forget she is actually an international pop star. Much like a little girl, she gushes at the sight of multicolored flowers and beautifully wrapped packages, gifts presented to her by BMG Records Pilipinas at a press conference in Holiday Inn Galleria. But once she performs, Coco Lee turns into every little girl’s dream: A goddess on stage whose moves and music gets the whole world grooving along to her beat. That’s Coco Lee in a nutshell: A mix of extremes that works. A mix of extremes that’s real. Asia’s idol Coco Lee holds the distinction of being Asia’s first successful crossover artist to the United States, Europe and Australia. She did what the likes of Martin Nievera and Gary Valenciano have long wanted to achieve. Nievera has done well in the Las Vegas live circuit but has yet to cut a record for the international market. “Oh, but it wasn’t easy to do,” she assures the local press. “And being the first to do anything, you open yourself to a lot of criticism and a whole lot of mistakes too.” While she picked up the Western flair for R&B from growing up in San Francisco (her family migrated to the United States soon after she was born), it was still in Hong Kong where Lee kicked off her singing career. In 1993 she returned to her motherland to join the prestigious New Talent Singing Contest where she landed the second place prize. It was this win that convinced her to stay in Asia to pursue a professional career as a singer. Signed to Sony, she released Yesterday’s Passion (her Chinese debut), which launched her to the top of the pop charts. “In 1999 I decided on doing the crossover because I could see so many talented singers out here in Asia, and I thought to myself, how come I don’t see anyone in the international scene? “That’s when I told Sony I’d like a crack at it, and I’m grateful to them for having given me the opportunity to take my music further.” And so with the release of the all-original Just No Other Way album that year, Lee fulfilled a lifelong dream, expanding her fan base far and wide. From then on, life—and career—just got better and better. Coco, exposed Voted year in and year out as one of the “world’s sexiest women” (FHM, Esquire, Maxim magazines), Coco Lee still blushes whenever she sees the music video of “So Good,” one of the cuts of her second all-English album, Exposed under Sony/BMG. It is after all explosive, with the artist in a nude-colored bikini in a highly sexual, highly suggestive choreography. The Asian in her tells her never to show the video to her father. “We did ‘So Good’ as a way of showing the world that I’m all grown up from six years ago when my first English album came out,” she explains. “I wanted the album to talk about love in a sassy way, which is what almost all the songs are like—there aren’t any sad songs here, just stuff that’s uplifting.” She is proud of the fact that the entire album has her heart and soul, as she puts it, “from the very first song to the very first instrument.” Apparently, she wasn’t able to participate much in the writing and production side of Just No Other Way, which featured the hit single “Before I Fall In Love,” and she wanted to change things for her second outing. “I just want to look back so many years from now, listen to my albums, and be able to say, ‘This is me. This is good music,’ and not be embarrassed of my work.” And with all 14 cuts in the album, the artist has no regrets “exposing” Coco Lee. 轉自： http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2005/jun/29/yehey/life/20050629lif2.html -- ▎◣˙◢◣˙◢▉ 情報員標號:218-34-56-16.cm.dynamic.apol.co ▉├┼┤ ▉ ◤ ▎◥ ◤▉ 隸屬★單位:中央情報局 (bbs.e-cia.net) ▉╰┼情局▉ ◣