{"id":521624,"date":"2026-07-02T12:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T12:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/521624\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T12:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T12:36:08","slug":"richard-craker-on-producing-jolin-tsais-pleasure-and-ugly-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/521624\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Craker on Producing Jolin Tsai’s ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ugly Beauty’\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe secret to Jolin Tsai<\/a>\u2018s most celebrated albums, according to British producer Richard Craker<\/a>, has less to do with technique than with trust \u2013 and a willingness to sit with uncertainty until the music finds its shape.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe final conference of the 2026 Golden Melody Festival<\/a> in Taiwan, held ahead of the Golden Melody Awards<\/a>, and moderated by Kuang-ping Tso, president of Kouhei Production, brought Craker \u2013 founder of Karma Sounds Ltd. and the producer behind Jolin Tsai\u2019s \u201cUgly Beauty\u201d and \u201cPleasure\u201d \u2013 into conversation about his international career, his philosophy of creativity, and what it will take for Mandopop to find its footing on the world stage. Tsai would go on to win awards at the ceremony<\/a>, including Album of the Year for \u201cPleasure\u201d and Best Mandarin Female Singer on Saturday evening.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the conference, titled \u201cConnecting Global Sounds: Richard Craker\u2019s Creative Journey from International Markets to Mandopop,\u201d Craker recalled the early songwriting sessions with Jolin\u2019s team at Karma Studios in Thailand as feeling like \u201ca musical holiday\u201d \u2013 an open, experimental environment where genres were tried and discarded freely, and where \u201cUgly Beauty\u201d eventually took shape.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPleasure\u201d was more of a challenge. Craker described Tsai as a perfectionist with a sharp eye for detail, so the chorus took longer to complete \u2013 it later clicked in a Los Angeles session with songwriter Ross Golan. These types of experiences, he said, are simply what creativity looks like. What sustains him through that process, Craker added, is watching an artist move from merely singing a song to fully inhabiting it.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis advice to young songwriters was borrowed from Ed Sheeran: when you first turn on a tap, dirty water comes out before the clean water flows. Write badly, write often, and trust that the good ideas are on the other side of the imperfect ones. Moderator Tso connected this to Taiwanese singer-songwriter WeiBird\u2019s principle of \u201cfast, bad, wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for AI, Craker noted that technology cannot replicate human connection, emotion, or genuine artistic expression \u2013 and those, he argued, are what music is ultimately for.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the bigger question of how Mandopop can grow internationally, Craker said there is no specific formula. But watching the global rises of K-pop and Latin music, he sees a clear lesson \u2013 both broke through by embracing their own cultural identities rather than imitating Western sound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The secret to Jolin Tsai\u2018s most celebrated albums, according to British producer Richard Craker, has less to do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,236020,236748,85,46,236021,238724],"class_list":["post-521624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-golden-melody-awards","tag-golden-melody-festival","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jolin-tsai","tag-richard-craker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}