Music of the Mountains Replay Episode: Wendy Woo

Wendy Woo will be coming back to the Peak to Peak area when she performs at Oskar Blues Grill and Brew on Friday, May 22, 2026. In anticipation of next month's performance, we're bringing back her segment from November 2025!

Wendy Woo is a performer rooted sturdily in Colorado. Originally from New York, the acoustic singer-songwriter moved to Boulder with her parents as a kid, going back and forth between Boulder and Nederland.

Both of her parents, Bataan and Jane Faigao, served as founding faculty members at Naropa University and co-founded what has since developed into the school’s Traditional Eastern Arts program. She’s performed seriously in Colorado since the 1990s, and she currently lives in Loveland with her family. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Also be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcast and share it with whoever you see fit. And now let's get into the replay of my interview with Wendy Wu.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

Do you mind just introducing yourself real quick?

SPEAKER_03 1:41

Yes, my name is Wendy Wu and I'm a Colorado musician. I spent lots of time in Netherlands um when I was a kid growing up and in my young adult years. Um originally from New York City and I moved to Boulder when I was a kid with my parents, and then kind of like back and forth from Ned and like we were just saying, Coal Creek Canyon, Denver, and now I live up in Loveland, Colorado, up north.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Sweet. And uh you'll be coming back to perform in Ned for a benefit series that BC Bruce is putting on in a bit.

SPEAKER_03 2:11

Yeah. Yeah, and Netherland looks great. I drove through it the other day. I forgot I had some casino gigs and forgot that you could go up that way through the casinos and it was to the casinos. It was just beautiful. Beautiful drive through Netherland and Rollinsville and it was just all filled with memories.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

For sure.

SPEAKER_03 2:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

I I was pretty I was pretty clueless about your Colorado background here before I got into the interview, but you know, as I dug into the background a little bit, my mind kind of exploded. So I was I was curious about like just starting off, where did you get your musical spark? You know, how long have you been developing your musical career and performances?

SPEAKER_03 2:48

Well, growing up in Boulder and I went to Boulder High School and graduated in nineteen eighty-nine. Kind of the only thing I was really interested in was singing. I was in a choir, chamber choir, with sixteen of us. So you know, there's four altos, four tenors, four bass, four sopranos, and so I really got to learn about all the different voicings of singing. So I got out of high school and started some playing the guitar a little bit. And just some traveling for some years, just playing guitar and seeking out drum circles at Grateful Dead shows, to be honest. Did that for a couple years and came back. I went to see you as well. I went to their music program for three and a half years. And then I went to work at the Fox Theater as a server and then a bartender. And then that was kind of a way for me to experience the music business while still making a living in the service industry. Which you should be good at if you're a musician. So you can always go back to something 'cause music's so up and down. But yeah, and I just kinda learned how to perform on stage and got it open for Cheryl Crow before she blew up and worked there for ten years, moved to Denver, bought and sold some properties, owned some properties in Netherland. My mother lived up there. So and then I wanted to have kids, so I came up to Loveland and we bought kind of a bigger house for less money and I'm raising kids in it.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Amazing. Yeah, and in general, again, just looking into the background that you've had in Colorado and with music in general, it sounds like your whole life really has been kind of immersed in the arts, not just music, but just the arts in general as well.

SPEAKER_03 4:12

Yes. I mean, when I was growing up, my parents were Tai Chi artists and they moved here to help En Europa University. They were founding faculty members for the Tai Chi School, which later became the traditional arts program where you could get a degree in traditional arts. And my mother put on a thing called the Jack Kerouac Conference in the eighties. So we had lots of beatnics in and out of the house for that year. That was a huge success for her. And yeah, so lots of arts growing up. Specifically music though. So my bass player now, I think I'm playing this gig solo, but my bass player now, Lisa, she made all her money doing pop-up paint parties, and she's an artist. So she plays bass and she paints. So I think that's impressive. I'm not a painter, but she says if I go to her pop-up party that I could paint something. Is that what you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Yeah. There's been that immersion, and so I guess I'm curious also what stuck out to you about music in particular? What's kept you coming back to to music?

SPEAKER_03 5:06

Um it's kind of the only thing I was ever very good at. I mean, I tried other things and I always came back to music. It always seemed to just provide for me better than whatever I was doing. I mean, there were ups and downs. I've had other jobs along the way, you know. But music has it's just always called me and now as an older person I'm immersed in it and I'm constantly getting better and I'm playing with really great players and I'm playing with some very beginner players and I've just immersed my whole life with it. And it's been amazing 'cause I'm fifty-five in January and it's wonderful to just I feel like I know so much about it. And then I also feel like there's so much to learn, which is cool about music because you can start to play and be successful and it can be fulfilling very quickly, but you can still play for your whole life and still learn. So I kinda like that. But yeah, music's always called me back.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

And you've played in a whole ton of different performances, both on your own and with others, and you've been writing songs for the majority of that time, I assume. When did you start start kind of delving into your own songwriting as well as performances?

SPEAKER_03 6:03

Right away. I had some musical inspirators, uh people who inspired me musically. A lot of the acts from the Fox and you know, a lot of really popular like lyricists. So I've been writing songs the whole time. I've just recently started playing covers because I'm a people pleaser and I like a happy crowd. So I've just been recently doing a lot of covers with my Girl Crush band. But I've been writing original songs my whole life. I can hear them in my head all all the time right now, but I don't know if people honestly, I don't know if people want to hear original music anymore. Maybe they do in Netherland. I recorded one of my albums at the Netherlands Acoustic Coffee Shop in, I don't know, 2000? Yeah, in 2000 or something. It was a live performance and it was all original and it was a full house. So Netherland definitely had a lot of appreciation for original music and probably still does. But I've been constantly writing and also learning other people's stuff.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

For sure. And what's kept you coming back to songwriting in general? You know, was uh there been any consistent processes for you, or have there just been things about writing songs in general that have just stuck out to you?

SPEAKER_03 7:05

Well, it's very therapeutic. I mean, so many of the songs they've written just to work through stuff. I don't even share because they're so sad. You know, I'll tear them on Instagram with a message or something, but yeah, it's very therapeutic. I work through all of my stuff by writing songs. Sometimes it just pours out of me. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you have a writer's park, but I've been doing it for so long. I just feel like I mean, do other people hear like songs in their head? I mean, and I don't normally listen to music because I feel like there's so much going on in my head. I always try to listen to for that.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

So And yeah, throughout that time, you know, you've written a lot of songs and you've performed a lot of performances live, and there's one that I really wanted to talk about and take your brain on, especially since I think it's gotten a little bit more relevance recently, actually. You were a part of the the 1999 Lilith Fair. Yeah. And so do you want to talk a bit about that experience? You know, how that performance kind of came to be in your world?

SPEAKER_03 7:59

I mean, I'd heard of the Lilith Fair, of course. It was so big in the nineties. And it's a great idea for publicity and marketing, but they would hold a competition in every city that they played in, and they took the top two people and gave them plots at the Lillis Fair. And then they let us come up. I think I played the very last show. Maybe I played the very last show. But it was the very last show of a tour. And so and then they brought everybody up at the end of the night on this big stage at Fiddler's Green and with Sarah McLaughlin and the Indigo Girls, Sher Crow, and I mean all these all the great. So I got to play there. It was 1999. I just put out my album Wide Awake and Dreaming, and Yeah, it was great. I mean, it was exciting. I have a style of guitar playing that I do that I call Slap Tap, where I just kinda use the whole guitar like a drum, using the body sounds and then using the harmonics. And I've gotten better at it over the years, and I have about six or seven songs I do it with that I can play. When you do a competition and they let you play one song, that's the song I play. And I've had a lot of luck standing out from like a group of others because that's so different and unique. And I see other people do it, but I don't see a lot of other people do it. So I don't know. But I felt very lucky to be a little I mean, it was huge. My mom couldn't believe it. My mom was dying of cancer at the time and just came and sat in the green grass at the Lillis Fair and watched me play. It was awesome, you know?

unknown 9:17

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_03 9:18

We yeah, we had uh my mom took me to all the Bonnie Way concerts. So one was at Fiddler's Green and also at Red Rock. I think it was really cool for her to get to see me on the big stage, you know, before she passed away from breast cancer in two thousand and one. Maybe it was two thousand. Anyways, whatever year the nine eleven was.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

That's beautiful that she got to see you on there for sure.

SPEAKER_03 9:37

Yeah, she was a big personality for sure. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

But yeah, finding that background as well, I found it interesting that now ABC has I guess released an official documentary about it just this like when it was being made, or was that kind of something you found out after the fact or no, yeah, I just I read about it on Facebook, Facebook news, and I just commented.

SPEAKER_03 9:59

I was there. I was there in ninety nine.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Amazing. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna miss it. I haven't watched it yet.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

I'll be haven't watched it because I'm probably not in it. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

It's so cool.

SPEAKER_03 10:10

Yeah, no, I'll have to watch it. I'll have to sit down and watch it. I call myself a jumper upper. I have a hard time sitting and watching stuff. I'd rather jump up in like my service industry like background and have four kids that I wait on and they're always they tell their friends to refuse to be a waitress.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

And I'm curious too about that method of guitar playing that you developed the slap tap method that you've worked on for all that time, you know. When did that first kind of spark, I guess? When did you first kind of realize that was style you could lean more into?

SPEAKER_03 10:40

Okay, so I was eighteen years old, I got out of high school, and all I wanted to do was surround myself with guitar players. I was obsessed. And so I was hanging out at the Skippy House, right, and I use the river. And then there was some traveling guitar player in the corner, about five or six years older than me, playing guitar like amazing. One of the best guitar players I've ever seen in my life. And so I kinda gravitated towards him and we dated for like five years, and he was he was from a broken home and an abused family, and he was definitely a messed up human, but he played guitar amazing, and we wrote that song together. The song's called Down and Dirty. It was the first song I probably ever wrote, co-wrote with him, and he did that style and taught me that open tuning. You know, so I'm 19 years old and he introduces this style guitar playing. And I just took it and made it my own, you know.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Amazing.

SPEAKER_03 11:26

Yeah, I've I mean I've just it's amazing to like tap on the guitar like that and feel the vibrations. Pardon me sound like it's E from Boulder, but the vibrations of the instrument is just very therapeutic and healing. Yeah, I love it.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Absolutely. And in general, you've immersed yourself in music for all your life and you've written songs and you've performed all this time. What has stuck out to you about performing live? What have you loved most about performing live, whether it's in the context of something like the Lilith Fair or whether it's the context of something like BC Bruce, you know, this this local event?

SPEAKER_03 11:55

There is an absolute charm to all of it, and you have to embrace it all because you can be playing Red Box one night, and then you can be playing a little coffee shop to five people the next night. And you still take it all in and love it. Like the energy of a filled out show at Red Rocks, and then the energy of like you and a couple of people in a room, you know, it's the same and some it's hard. Like if you play for a big room of people that are all listening, that's terrifying. Like if it's totally quiet, it's terrifying. But then, you know, a lot of the work now is breweries which aren't made for music, but they have music. And so you can play in front of a crowd where no one's listening, or you think no one's listening, but then you realize everyone's got an ear. But I I understand people like to talk. I mean, listen to me. I talk all the time. So yeah, you can play in front of a small crowd, a big crowd, a loud crowd, and it's always the same, you know, you just deliver the same power and energy no matter what.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

And over the thirty years that you've been performing music and writing songs and connecting with audiences through that. Has there been anything that you hope people kind of take away from the shows that you perform or the for the music that you write or well I'm a people pleaser.

SPEAKER_03 13:01

So if I can play I play a lot of covers in my Girl Crush band with another young singer, because my voice is getting older, as you can hear, kind of a cold. As a young singer, we do a lot of covers and people dance harder than they ever have to these covers. So I love that. I mean, I love that energy. But I also do my acoustic shows, and I had said earlier that I write about emotional things to get through emotional times. And sometimes I break those songs out and I feel like it really rings truth to some people and then becomes very emotional. So sometimes, you know, I'll see someone crying in the audience and sometimes I will cry on stage and that's embarrassing. But you know, I break out these really em emotional songs. I some of them I don't even play. But you kind of read the audience and see what they're doing, you know, see what they want to do. You don't want to play a depressing song to a crowd that wants to dance. But a listening room, you know, I break out those songs. I have a song about when my father died. He bought a ticket to China, he's Chinese Filipino. He went to China and to the birthplace of Tai Chi and he died there. And that that was the inspiration for my song called Playing to China. And I think a lot of people that are experiencing, especially my age, parents passing away, I think that really rings true for them. And they can really feel that. I guess the line in that song is when I asked him if he believed in heaven, he said, I sure hope so. That would be nice. That was the chorus. I recently I had a friend, a young friend, who committed suicide, who I knew since he was in kindergarten, and I wrote a song that I think is so beautiful, but it's so sad I can't play it. So after I when I found out that this child had killed himself, my my s oh my god, it's so sad. My daughter who's thirteen is really struggling because it's hard to be a thirteen year old girl, I guess. And she says, Well, Mom, look on the bright side. At least you won't have to wake up in this world tomorrow. So, like that was the chorus. But then the true chorus is because life is beautiful. And I sing I sing that and cry. It's crazy. My first ex-husband says, You make your song so personal. And like, yeah, that's all I know, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

I think that's the key, isn't it? You know, finding that thing that really resonates with you as well.

SPEAKER_03 15:03

Yeah. Yeah, like I write the song, whether I share it or not, I don't know. And now it's so easy. You can just jot it down on your phone. It's amazing. Like how much technology has changed the music business in the thirty five years I've been doing it is unbelievable. And you have to keep up, but you use all your tools and you can stay in the game. I think honestly, one of the reasons I kinda have so much longevity is because I'm from here. So I see people from all walks of you know, from every chapter of my life come to the shows. People I went to kindergarten with, people I went to high school with, people I used to work with at the Fox. So a lot of my fan base is people I've known my whole life. So I don't know if people are interested. It's hard to get recognized now as a musician. Because everyone's so inundated. You know, how do you stand out in the crowd of a song like that? How do you stand out amongst all of us? I have a song that says, How do you stand out in the crowd? And baby be loud, baby be loud. They've been kind of loud, quieter now that I'm fifty-five.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

But clearly there's been something that has stuck out to you about the Colorado music scene as well. Not just the fact that you grew up here, but just about that environment that has stuck with you.

SPEAKER_03 16:06

Yeah, like not only was I immersing myself with music, the Colorado music scene was just exploding. Great acts here. Daniel Waitcliffe from Fort Collins, and then the Frey and Lumineers from Fort Collins, and just all the big names that came out of here. But at the same time, you know, you can make a middle class living playing music, you know, you don't have to do the billboard chart hits or whatever, which would be nice, but you can actually play live music five nights a week if you want to. And it's always a little bit better pay than you make waiting tables. That's alright. A little bit more money than parts and maybe.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

In terms of the musical performances that you've got now, you've Girl Crush is the band that you're kind of focusing on at the moment, I assume. Is that like your main project at the moment? Do you s perform solo every once in a while, you know? What's kind of your musical focus currently?

SPEAKER_03 16:53

I do play solo, which is how I started. I'm playing at the Legacy Theater in Eton on December 6th. About relentless promotion. But solo acoustics like an evening with. And then I have the Wendy Blue band. And I just hire like these kind of badass, hard-hitting players. And they all know the book and it's all very intuitional for them. So I do that, but it's hard to get commitment from them. Because they go to the highest bidder, first come, first serve. So I have a bunch of girlfriends, and I thought the idea of an all-girl band was so charming. You know, I thought it up in 2020 after I heard the song for the first time, which is a little big town song. And so since then I've been trying to teach all my girlfriends how to play music. And my friend Dana learned the drums, and she's great. I found a bass player who's already been playing her whole life. A great fun keyboard player, and then what I found was another singer, a younger singer, which I've been in need of, because sometimes I lose my voice. You can hear it today. I found this young singer, she was waiting tables at a place that I was playing every Thursday night during the pandemic. And she was always busy, and I was always busy. But people kept saying, You gotta get Jillian up there to sing. She's really good, you know, you gotta get Jillian up there. So one day she came up to sing with me, and I was like, That is just the most beautiful voice I've ever heard. And so I recruited her, and then that's kind of what Girl Crush became. We wanted to play a lot of covers and uh a lot of harmony and kind of just make people happy and make people dance. And since I've been in the music business already for twenty some years, I really felt like it was time for me to reinvent myself a little bit to stay relevant in the music scene. So it was kind of my like, hey guys, I'm still here. I'm still doing stuff and this is a cool band.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

For sure. I mean, clearly I mean, along with Girl Crush, you still find ways to jump around and keep playing and keep working in the music scene in here and keep any going.

SPEAKER_03 18:39

Yeah, I feel so lucky. Last night I got invited to play by Mark Diamond, who's a bass player, upright bass from Boulder. And I got to play with him and John McKay on Keys, who used to play with the Derek Truck Pan and Leftover Salmon and Van De Jour for anyone who's been around forever. And we set up in the corner of this bar last night, and I got to sit next to all these great players, like two feet away from this amazing keyboard player. Watching him that close was amazing and D Ivy on drums. So it was so funky and it was a great jam. And then I get invited to do some other stuff. I played with Cody Quails, who used to play with Safe, and we co-wrote a song together called My Work About Music. And uh, it's super funky. So I got to play Neesy with his hand. So I get invited to do stuff, and I invite people to do stuff. I'm glad to be on people's minds, you know. So call Winnie Wu.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

And yeah, I don't know. I those are kind of the big points I wanted to make sure I covered. Is there anything that we haven't brought up that you want to make sure is is mentioned, or anything you want to talk about involving the benefit, or I don't know, just anything else you wanted to mention? Well, sure.

SPEAKER_03 19:41

I'll just tell you my own history of the Netherlands. Oh, yeah. Yeah, to that Katie guitar player person that I was dating for some while when I started working at the Fox, we broke up, which was good. And uh he moved to Netherlands and we sort of broke up, right? So I was still up there visiting him, and I lived in a little cabin of caribou with him and my dog Katie and some great hippies up there and spent a summer up there with him, kind of like decoupling. So I have all those fond memories. And then my mom moved up to Netherland and bought it, it was one of the original houses that was originally by the lakes. But they picked the house up and moved it to Third Street, and it's this beautiful little cabin. And so I spent some time up there with her. When she passed away, I sold the cabin to one of her Tai Chi students, two of her Tai Chi students. And so they still live there, and they've made it into a Tai Chi sanctuary. And I've recorded one of my albums up there. And, you know, Netherlands just always been filled with memories and a place in my heart, and so sad to hear, so devastated to hear the f about the fire. You know, the mountain businesses struggle already among the winners, and so you know, I was so excited to have been invited because Netherlands been even though I'm not there now, it's always been a real special place in my heart.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

And I think those are uh big things I wanted to cover on my end. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Thank you so much for the conversation and the great questions. Thank you so much to Wendy for coming on board and joining us for the podcast. To learn more about Wendy Woo and her music, please go ahead to our website at Wendywoo.com.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

Desert Moon. I'll be hosting.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

The song that you are currently listening to is the title track from the latest album by singer-songwriter Wendy Wu, The Immigrants, which you can find along with her previous releases wherever you get your music. She'll be performing at Oscar Blues Grill and Brew, located at 303 Main Street in Lyons, on Friday, May 22nd, 2026, starting at 7 p.m. To keep up with her musical endeavors until then, be sure to head to her website at Wendywoo.com.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

It's just something you learn along the way. Everything leads me back to you. It will be wonderful. I'll work just another day. It will be wonderful. It will be wonderful today.