IN: Wang Leehom (born May 17, 1976), sometimes credited as Leehom Wang, is a Taiwanese-American singer-songwriter, record producer, actor and film director. Formally trained at the Eastman School of Music, Williams College and Berklee College of Music, his musical style is known for fusing Chinese elements (such as Beijing opera, traditional styles of ethnic minorities, Chinese classical orchestra) with hip-hop and R&B. Wang debuted in 1995 and since then has released over 25 albums, with sales of over 50 million copies. He is also a four-time winner and 19-time nominee of Taiwan's Golden Melody Awards, the "Grammys" of Chinese music.

Born in Rochester, New York, Wang is the second of three sons of immigrants from Taiwan of waishengren heritage. His father, a pediatrician, and his mother, moved to the United States to further their college studies in the early 1960s. Influenced by his older brother, Leo Wang, who had been taking violin lessons since he was seven, Wang began to develop a curious interest towards the violin and its musical counterparts when he was three. He begged his mother to put him in violin lessons with his brother but his mother was against it, reasoning that he was too young. When Wang turned six, his mother enrolled him in violin classes, performing along with his brother. As he became a teenager, he began taking piano lessons, also teaching himself the guitar. He also worked several jobs to earn money to buy a second hand drum kit.  He attended Jefferson Road Elementary School, Pittsford Middle School, and Pittsford Sutherland High School in Pittsford, New York. He graduated from Pittsford Sutherland. Passionate for a career in music, he chose to attend Williams College double majoring in music and Asian studies. He joined an all-male a cappella group, The Springstreeters, and the group recorded several demo tracks.  In the summer of 1995, while Wang was visiting his grandparents in Taiwan, he was offered a professional recording contract by Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) after he participated in a talent competition hosted by the label. Not wanting to lose the opportunity, he immediately began preparing for his debut, and released his debut album Love Rival, Beethoven (Qing Di Bei Duo Fen ) that December. The record received little limelight, forcing him to leave the label. He signed with Decca Records the following year, a label then famous for producing "powerful singers" (Shi Li Pai Ge Shou ) in Taiwan. Wanting to also have control in the idol market, the label initially planned to market Wang as the mainstream "romantic idol", like with their previous artist Mavis Fan. However, after discovering Wang's talent in music-making, Decca began promoting him as Taiwan's "quality idol" (You Zhi Ou Xiang ) instead. Wang released his second album If You Heard My Song in 1996, which included some of his own compositions. He co-wrote the album's eponymous title song, which earned positive responses from the audience. The album drew moderately successful sales, and he became a rising star in the idol market, also finding similar successes with his third and fourth albums. During this time, Wang was asked to leave his college studies to pursue a full-time singing career, but he insisted on finishing school first.

How did he learn to sing?

OUT: He joined an all-male a cappella group,


IN: Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, who was usually too busy with his practice to discipline his children, and Myra Rude, an artistic mother who determined that any "squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves". Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music. When she was nine years old, a neighborhood predator sexually abused Louise. This event had a major influence on Brooks' life and career, causing her to say in later years that she was incapable of real love, and that this man "must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure....

Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others.  She was noticed in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the Howard Hawks directed silent "buddy film", A Girl in Every Port in 1928.  In an early sound film drama, Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks played an abused country girl who kills her foster father in a moment of desperation. A hobo, Richard Arlen, happens on the murder scene and convinces Brooks to disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding the rails" with him. In a hobo encampment, or "jungle," they meet another hobo, Wallace Beery. Brooks's disguise is soon uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal, sex-hungry men. Much of this film was shot on location, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies.  By this time in her life, she was mixing with the rich and famous, and was a regular guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, at San Simeon, being close friends with Davies' niece, Pepi Lederer. Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend; many women styled their hair in imitation of her and fellow film star Colleen Moore. Soon after the film Beggars Of Life was made, Brooks, who loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise, and left for Europe to make films for G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian Expressionist director.  Paramount attempted to use the coming of sound films to pressure the actress, but she called the studio's bluff. It was not until 30 years later that this rebellious move would come to be seen as arguably the most savvy of her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit. Unfortunately, while her initial snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether, her refusal after returning from Germany to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. Actress Margaret Livingston was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film, as the studio claimed that Brooks' voice was unsuitable for sound pictures.

Did this relate to her real life in anyway?

OUT: