The five women who make up the R&B/hip-hop group Blush are busy working on their debut album while launching their first national tour. They’ve opened for acts including Justin Bieber, Black Eyed Peas, and The Wanted…not bad for a group formed via an international talent search that took part in China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. The competition to earn a spot in Blush was fierce, with Victoria Chan from China, Natsuko Danjo from Japan, Angeli Flores from the Philippines, Ji Hae Lee from South Korea, and Alisha Budhrani from India ultimately chosen as members of the group.
In support of their national tour, I had the opportunity to speak with Victoria Chan about being a part of Blush, the tour, and her musical influences:
I think it is so fascinating the way the band came together. With most bands, the members are lifelong friends or they knew each other in school and had mutual interests. You didn’t even know you were going to like these other women.
“I know. You’re just kind of put into a group, and luckily through the process we actually lived together for almost six weeks, six to seven weeks. You kind of got to know each other before you even knew you were part of the band. The struggles that you went through, just the experiences bring you closer. And it’s still constantly a learning process. You’re still learning things about each other that you didn’t know.
We’ve been together for three years and you’re always learning things about each other, what makes someone tick or what they really like and little things about them, about their past that you might not have known about. We’re always learning about each other’s cultures as well. We love food, and we share a lot of what we love through our food. We’re always constantly learning, but there’s never a dull moment.
We can be sitting in an airport and airports are really boring, and you’re waiting for agents to board, and we’re always talking about things that happened before. Then there’ll be something that comes up, and we’ll learn something about one of the girls. Yeah, it’s been a fun process.”
Was it nerve-wracking during that initial selection process because you did not know what you were getting yourself into? Even if you think you did, you couldn’t have been completely prepared.
“It was definitely nerve-wracking, but I think for us, we all just wanted to try for our dream. This is what we wanted to do for a long time. In life, there are always things that make you nervous or scare you, but you’ve got to do stuff that scares you. Do one thing a day that scares you.
Things are not clear for us all the time, but we just go ahead and work for it and believe in your dream and believe in the people that are surrounding you and believe in your fans that are supporting you. They love what you do and we want to give them great music, and make them ‘Blush’.”
Blush has toured before, but this is your first official national tour. What’s coming up on the schedule?
“This one is going to take us to California. We’re in Arizona. We’re going to go to California, up to the Bay area. Then we’re going to head out to Texas and cover Florida, and we’re ending in Louisiana in New Orleans. This will be really like going from East to West Coast. Last time we did a section of the midwest, and then we did the East Coast. We’ve done the West Coast before so it’s all been kind of cut up. This one’s kind of spanning across the country.”
How do you prepare for going out on the road for a lengthy tour?
“Actually we’ve been really lucky with this tour. First, we were told it’s five to six weeks, and we were like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ [Laughing] Could you imagine the packing the girls have to do? The number of shoes? Your on-stage shoes plus the shoes that you would want to wear during your off time, and then maybe you might want to go out one night so you’ve got to bring some heels. We were like freaking out and then we found out that actually we come back to LA quite often in between. For example, we started yesterday. We’re coming back on Friday, and we have the weekend in LA. Then we leave again on Sunday, and we start another week.
We’re actually pretty lucky. We come home quite a few times, so we get to do laundry a lot, so we don’t stink.[Laughing] We sweat a lot when we do our set. Like yesterday it was so hot out here in Arizona. The audience was amazing. They were really hot themselves. But I don’t think the crew would like us to stink on tour. We use a lot of Febreze!”
It’s a really high energy show that the group puts on. It’s physically demanding and also vocally pretty stressful, isn’t it?
“For sure. We sing and we dance at the same time. Most of our numbers are pretty upbeat, especially for the tour. We wouldn’t do any ballads and such because the kids would fall asleep. We try to stay away from that. We try to do our up-tempo songs. We’re doing our latest released song, ‘Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That.’ The kids love that! They might not even have heard the song, but they’ll be singing it by the first chorus. They’re singing along. They’re making up moves to ‘Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That.’ It’s great. We feed off the energy. That gives us even more energy, so we’re really busting out the moves.
We have another song called ‘Adrenaline’ which we kick off with. It’s all about adrenaline and trying to get them pumped up. It’s a love song. It’s unreleased yet, but they still love it. We have our older released song called ‘Miss Out’ that we’ve been performing. We have like a dance break, and we get some of the kids to come on stage with us, dance, and we show them the moves if they’re not too sure, and then they’re busting out their moves. It’s a great way for them to perform to their crowd, their homies, and everybody else in the audience. It’s just really fun for everybody.”
You talk about feeding off the energy of a live audience. Is it a lot different when you are just performing in front of a television audience or doing something in the studio than it is going out on the road and getting to interact with the fans? What’s the adrenaline buzz like for you?
“Oh my gosh. Mentally in our heads, we’re always like, no matter how big your audience is, even if it’s just one person, you give your 110%. You give your best energy, and you give your best performance. There’s just something different when you have that energy feedback to you and then you can play off that. There’s this rush that’s pretty unexplainable. It makes us really happy. It’s almost like an appreciation from the crowd that they love what you do and you just want to feedback and give back the love.
We meet the kids. We have a meet and greet after and then they come up, and they’re like, ‘Oh, can I give you a hug?’ They’ll actually ask you, ‘Can I?’ It’s like, ‘Just come here!’ We’re real big huggers, so we just love feeding off everybody’s love and energy and taking pictures with them and getting to know them. And keeping in touch with them on Twitter and social media – Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook – is a great way for us to keep in touch with everybody and get feedback from them. ‘I love this song,’ or ‘I love this. I love you guys.’ ‘You guys changed my life today,’ and things like that. Even offstage we can still feed off that energy and feel really encouraged and supported in that way from our fans. The tour’s been absolutely great for us to meet our fans and to get to know them, too.”
Social media’s a great way to interact with fans, but isn’t it also a little difficult to have any privacy because everybody knows what you’re doing?
“I think for us as artists, I think we just have to be quite picky and choosey with what we put on social media. Like you say, everything’s out there. But you can choose to put certain things out there and some things not.”
What were your musical influences?
“When I grew up I listened to Karen Carpenter and Celine Dion. I like ballad girls like Kelly Clarkson. Pink is amazing. She’s a mother, and she’s hanging off wires doing acrobatics. I used to be a gymnast so I look at her and I’m totally inspired by her. I’m like, ‘How do you do that and keep your family life and your working life and you’re hanging upside down, and you’re singing amazing songs?’ I’m inspired by all these amazing artists out there.”
Where do you see the group in 10 years?
“We hope to be doing a world tour by then. Let’s hope that we’ll step up from national level to world tour. We just hope to bring our music everywhere, to everybody in the world. We opened up for Jessie J in Asia. We did three cities with her: Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Singapore. We’ve done the Asian stretch and we’d love to do more of Europe. We hope we’re still singing and making the world Blush in 10 years’ time.”
You’ve opened up for a lot of big names in the music industry. Is there anyone in particular you really learned a life lesson from?
“Wow, there’s so many. Just watching everyone else do their thing. It’s been a great learning curve. Black Eyed Peas, watching them. They’re evolving from when they started to where they are now. Probably like really learning a lesson it would probably be from Diana Ross. She is the ultimate girl group girl. She looks like she’s only in her early 60s and she’s still doing this and going strong. She was on stage and she was doing a whole set with the full band. She was singing her behind off and she was doing so many costume changes. It was really inspiring just to see the tenacity. You just don’t give up. You keep on working. You can be singing until the day you die. You can still be performing no matter what your age. She’s still drawing in a crowd. Everyone was going crazy. It was a charity event, and everyone was up off their seats and enjoying the whole concert of hers. That, for me, is like people nowadays see artists that last maybe a few years, maybe 10 years, and she’s been here since the ’60s. That’s a long career and I think we have a lot to learn from that on how to keep a career that long.”
Everyone has those days when you get out of bed and you’re just feeling sluggish. How do you keep your energy level up on those sort of days when you have to take the stage?
“We play some Blush music in the morning. Sometimes you just have to play some music or think about the fans that are out there that are supporting us, and they want to hear music from us. That, a lot of the time, just gives us a big push of encouragement and push of support. Social media again, we’ll get notifications that somebody sent a tweet, and it’ll be like a really nice tweet like, ‘I love you guys. You guys really changed my life,’ or ‘You guys really inspired me,’ and just getting messages like that really gets you out of the bad mood.
We have to really thank our fans for really supporting us because there are days which you’re kind of like, ‘Ugh, I wish I could just stay in bed and just not have to do something today.’ They really give us a little kick and go, ‘Hey, we want your music. Get out of bed!'”
