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Profile | She’s worked with the Jackson family, and Jacky Cheung: for Roxanne Seeman, songwriting is ‘like a passport’
- New Yorker Roxanne Seeman has been penning hits for 50 years; China is her current focus. She’s writing songs for Cantopop and Mandopop stars, films and TV
- She reflects on how she ‘learned about artists around the world by travelling’, her song for the Jackson family and the one thing she is ‘super proud’ of
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“Songwriting is like a passport. I learned about artists around the world by travelling,” says veteran lyricist Roxanne Seeman on a video call from her cosy Santa Monica, California, apartment in the United States.
“The fact that I could make a life out of doing this – I pinch myself.”
The native New Yorker has a portfolio like none other. Seeman has been penning hits across the globe for five decades for the legendary Barbra Streisand and the Jacksons, Spanish superstar Alejandro Sanz and Cantopop icon Jacky Cheung Hok-yau, and China is the focus of the latest chapter in her career.
I met Seeman last year, at the wrap party of a Universal Music songwriting camp in Hong Kong. She was in the city for six weeks, mingling with regional talent and collaborating with her mentee, Vince Fansheng Gao, a musician from Shenzhen in southern China.
A graduate in oriental studies from New York’s Columbia University, she studied Chinese arts and language at a time referred to as the golden era of China-United States relations, propelled by then US president Richard Nixon’s icebreaking visit to Beijing in 1972.
Cyril Ip joined the Post in 2021 after graduating from the University of Bristol with a degree in Sociology, specialising in postcolonialism. He wrote opinions for Young Post between 2016 and 2020 and has interned at the Trade Development Council and the New People’s Party.
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