Magdalen Hsu-Li will lecture on diversity and perform songs from her CD Fire at Rider University April 8.
By: Matt Smith
Magdalen Hsu-Li has visited more colleges than an indecisive 17-year-old lured by "Come to our school" slide shows and free T-shirts.
The Seattle-based singer-songwriter performs and lectures at women’s colleges in western Massachusetts, big Southern state schools and every institution of higher learning in between.
"I think I’m in touch with the demographics of young people ages 18-25," jokes the 31-year-old Ms. Hsu-Li. "I really have a bird’s-eye view because I visit almost every college in this country. I know what the demographics of the different areas look and feel like, and what students are going through, what’s going on in terms of the psyche of your average student."
College audiences run the gamut from "reticent and quiet" to "enthusiastic beyond all reason," says Ms. Hsu-Li, speaking from her "landing pad" in Seattle at the end of a week that took her to campuses in Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, New York and Massachusetts. She’ll offer a lecture/performance, "Kaleidoscope Rhythm & Diversity," at Rider University in Lawrenceville April 8 as part of the school’s celebration of Women’s History and Asian Heritage months.
Although the college circuit nowadays is her bread and butter, Ms. Hsu-Li began her career on the lean coffeehouse circuit, sleeping on basement floors with "dogs licking my face in the morning and cats running all over me in the night." The shift from folk rooms to the land of dorm rooms was accidental.
"Students would come to these shows and they’d ask, ‘Hey, can you come play my school?’" Ms. Hsu-Li says. "It was the same way with the lectures. I never once said, ‘I’m gonna sit down and write a lecture.’ Students would ask me, ‘Hey, can you speak on this topic?’ I’d go, ‘Well, that is actually something I have a lot to say about, or that isn’t something I have a lot to say about, so I can’t do it."
Her initiation into the performing arts was equally organic and serendipitous. Although she took a few piano lessons growing up in Martinsville, Va., the visual arts were Ms. Hsu-Li’s first love. She earned a bachelor’s degree in painting from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in 1992. After graduation, she moved to Seattle and found herself immersed in the city’s booming music scene, eventually studying jazz and classical at the Cornish College of the Arts.
"I didn’t know I was going to be a musician when I moved to Seattle," Ms. Hsu-Li says. "I was always surrounded by musicians, and I ended up becoming one. To me, it’s so much more of an immediate, powerful art form than painting. That’s not to say that I’m not still interested in painting but, obviously, the music has taken over my entire life."
Ms. Hsu-Li plans someday to create a multi-media show, with slides of her paintings to illustrate the songs. However, her painting background is already an integral component of the way she presents a song.
"All the years I spent developing as a painter have really helped me in composition as a musician," she says. "The great editor that was instilled in me helps me to really look at my work and cut it apart and dissect it."
On her latest CD, Fire, released on Ms. Hsu-Li’s own Chickpop Records, she offers 12 direct, brutally honest songs that filter her political convictions, probe personal depths and mine interpersonal relationships.
"Laramie" is a tribute to hate-crime victim Matthew Shepard. The hidden track, "Chink," is a punk-piano riff on racism. The opener, "Redefinition," documents the challenges of being a one-woman industry, including casting her lot with publicists, radio promoters and marketing firms: "Well maybe you dream of being rich as you’re chasing after that big, bright star/ But do you really have the insight and clarity? Do you really know who you are?/ It’s a sea of sharks and charlatans as you navigate round the bends/ And sometimes you don’t even end up with any money, power or friends."
While her in-your-face lyrics, crystalline voice and piano skills draw inevitable comparisons to Tori Amos, Ms. Hsu-Li sounds more like Jonatha Brooke with Bruce Hornsby tickling the ivories. She is a big Peter Gabriel fan and loves jam bands. Her concerts draw a diverse crowd: feminists, folk fans and hippies.
As a Southern-born, bisexual Chinese-American, Ms. Hsu-Li has a unique perspective on contemporary society that she’ll share in "Kaleidoscope," her lecture at Rider. She and percussionist Dale Fanning will use rhythm, clapping and drumming to get the audience to facilitate a discussion on diversity, paying particular attention to the way female sexuality is portrayed in the media (i.e., the bare midriff of Britney Spears).
"I don’t know if I can market myself that way. It’s not for me," Ms. Hsu-Li says. "I’ve got nothing against sexuality in general, I just don’t like it where it’s overused to the point where it’s the only way a woman can be portrayed."
However, Ms. Hsu-Li says, as an artist, you’re sometimes damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
"If you choose to not portray yourself like a Britney, if you do choose to do it someday, are you going to get in trouble for that with your audience?" she asks. "People want you to stay a certain way. If you don’t wear lipstick, they don’t ever want you to wear lipstick. It’s so limiting."
The constraints placed on an artist by the media, and by her fans, go against Ms. Hsu-Li’s reasons for becoming an artist in the first place.
"You’re not really being an artist if you’re not pushing your boundaries and the boundaries of those around you," she says. "But, on the other hand, you can leave people in the dust by losing connection with the zeitgeist around you.
"I consider myself a through-and-through artist, meaning what I’m learning about in my life is what I’m going to be putting into my art. What other people I’m meeting are experiencing gets filtered down through my psyche into art with the music that I make."
Magdalen Hsu-Li offers a lecture/performance at the Student Center Theater, Rider University, 2083 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrenceville, April 8. Lecture 7 p.m.; concert 9 p.m. Tickets cost $5; free to Rider students, staff and faculty. For information, call (609) 895-5727. On the Web: www.rider.edu. Magdalen Hsu-Li on the Web: www.magdalenhsuli.com