Bad Boy (1997)

Bad Boy is the second studio album by Taiwanese singer A-Mei. It was released on June 7, 1997, by Forward Music. Predominantly an R&B, pop and soul record, Bad Boy centers on the theme of love and relationships. The album was produced by her mentor Chang Yu-sheng with the aid of Benjamin Lin, Ma Yu-fen and Yu Guangyan. It was ultimately the last album of hers that Chang was actively involved with due to his untimely death caused by a car crash five months later. On August 17, 2018, 21 years after its initial release date, a vinyl reissue of Bad Boy was released by Forward Music.

Commercially, the album found immense success at home and abroad, topping Taiwan's IFPI sales chart for nine weeks and went on to sell over 1.38 million copies in Taiwan alone. Since its release, Bad Boy has remained the highest-selling album of all time in Taiwan. The album also managed to shift more than six million copies throughout Asia in just six months, setting a major record for the highest sales for a Taiwanese singer.

In order to promote Bad Boy, five songs off it were released as singles; the title track, "Can't Cry," "Whenever I Think About You," "Dancing Alone" and "Listen to the Sea." All five singles attained commercial success throughout Asia and are now regarded as modern day classics in the Mandopop genre. To this very day they are still sung at karaoke boxes and are often performed by contestants on major televised singing competitions. A-Mei performed songs from the album on her concert tour A-Mei Live in Concert 1998 the following year.

Background and production

Seven months prior, A-Mei released her debut studio album, Sisters. The record became an immediate success, selling over 1.21 million copies in Taiwan, becoming the fourth best-selling album of all time in the country, and shipping an additional 4 million copies throughout Asia. The album's meteoric success broke a glass ceiling for Taiwanese aborigines in show business. This meteoric rise to fame lead Billboard Magazine to declare her Asia's most popular singer on May 17, 1997.

Afterwards, Chang Yu-sheng produced the album Bad Boy for A-Mei. In terms of production, Chang chose to continue the "happy songs + love songs" model from the preceding album Sisters. At the time of the album's production, Forward Music was just starting out, and producer Chang's request to A-Mei was to incorporate the singing style of the Beinan countryside into the songs, and sing them "a bit rockier, a bit more violent"; he hoped to inspire A-Mei's unique qualities, believing that such qualities were not possessed or were too shy to be displayed by urban women, the largest audience for pop music. In addition, Chang also added some fashionable elements to the album.