[2] Yang Xian attended college at National Taiwan University where he studied agricultural chemistry,[1] during which time he joined the choir, which began his interest in music.
He attended NTU's Institute of Oceanography for graduate school, and in his free time he would go to the Columbia Café on Zhongshan North Road to listen to singers such as Parangalan.
He set Yu Kwang-chung’s (余光中) poem "Four Rhymes of Nostalgia" (鄉愁四韻) to music,[6] and performed it at Parangalan's personal concert in the summer of 1974.
[9] In total, there were nine pieces set to Yu's work, all of which were featured on Yang Xian's first album, "Modern Chinese Folk Song Collection".
[1] The style of Yang Xian's pieces have the breath of the traditional Chinese arts, while also having absorbed American folk and country music elements.
[10][11] Following this, in 1976, Yang Xian's middle school classmate and fellow Columbia Café regular Li Shuang-ze began the "Sing Your Own Songs" movement, officially starting the campus folk music era.