In a Noisy, Impatient Music Scene, How Xu Wei Stays a Singer of "the Slow Old Days"

Xu Wei is always tinkering with his music, but "the next album may be three years away. At least three years..."

In September, Xu Wei released a DVD.

His team marked it the old-fashioned way: a launch event at a Beijing cinema, followed by an autograph session. It hardly looked like 2015. Ten years ago, this was how singers did things. Few still do.

What Xu Wei released this time was not an album but a DVD of his Here and Now (《此时此刻》) tour. The tour opened in Beijing two years ago, passed through 15 cities and ended back in Beijing, 17 shows in all. At the start, the team agreed to film whichever show felt most relaxed. In other words, they spent at least two years on this "out of step" DVD.

At the launch, Xu Wei wore a dark jacket zipped up to the collar, about as inconspicuous as clothes get. But that is also what he wears on stage when the weather turns a little cold. Chatting with entertainment reporters, he rarely talked nonsense. He held up several microphones himself and explained, quite earnestly, what he thought was good and not so good about the DVD.

Later, in our interview, as he talked on, he sometimes resembled the "math fiend" from your middle-school class explaining the three ways he solved the last big problem on the exam. When he talks about music, he is genuinely happy. So much so that even someone who isn't a fan might leave thinking this "outdated" music product is rather interesting after all.

Xu Wei says he made the DVD as a keepsake. "It still has to be made. Like CDs and new albums: maybe fewer people buy them now, but you still have to make them, or there's nothing to hold the memory." The people on stage and the people in the audience both need a shared memory.

Xu Wei says his next round of concerts is probably three years off, because he only tours when he has a new album, and a new album takes at least three years. An album needs time to settle. It isn't a question of how fast you write songs. If you are writing from a mature place, a whole album takes at least three years.

Xu Wei believes this is the only way the industry can stay healthy.

A performer should give concerts only after the arrangements, the stage production and his own state have moved on. If a performer has stopped growing and still tours, there is little point. "It's like when we love a director or an actor, say Stephen Chow, he's my favorite. The new film he puts out after a while is bound to be different from before, something that gives me a new feeling," Xu Wei said.

That is why, in nearly 20 years since his debut, Xu Wei has done only three rounds of concerts: in 2005, 2009 and 2013. Each time he had a new album and felt he had something new to give his fans.

Xu Wei takes concerts seriously; he sees them as memories he shares with his fans. So he spent more than 2 million yuan on the Here and Now tour DVD, more than it cost to produce the studio version of Here and Now.

At first the DVD was to be sold only in a limited run through crowdfunding. But many fans missed out and kept asking on his official Weibo account how to buy it. So the team simply put it on general sale. They chose JD.com as the platform, with two editions, D9 and Blu-ray, at discounted prices of 89 yuan and 269 yuan.

A member of Xu Wei's team told us the DVD sold out three days after going on sale; buyers can now only pre-order and wait for restocking. Another reason it sold out is that the first batch was small, just a few thousand discs. Even so, the DVD reached No. 7 on the October "JD Music Chart."

Plenty of fans came to the signing, from three-year-olds brought along by their parents to people in their thirties, forties and fifties. In line you could hear them chatting: "Hey, how many did you buy? I'm one short, can you spare me one to get signed?" Others were counting off which fans they knew had been caught on camera when the concert was filmed.

Xu Wei's songs have been popular for many years. Everyone can hum a few lines of signature songs such as Blue Lotus (《蓝莲花》) and Free as the Wind (《像风一样自由》). But press people a little and, after saying his songs sound good, they will also pick a few holes.

For instance, that his songs all sound alike, and that he sings far too much about joy, freedom and faraway places. Xu Wei has answered this complaint: it is instinct, he says. A singer finds a way of singing that feels "comfortable" and "right."

Of course, his songs became so popular, played all afternoon in bars, cafes and hard-seat train carriages, that praising him no longer wins you any credit.

Still, he has diehard fans, the kind who follow him to show after show on tour, round after round. In one of Wang Shuo's novels, "Old Wang" praises this "singer surnamed Xu" who sang "Nothing can stop me, my longing for freedom."

"At least to me he's the best. Don't you think his voice just melts? The best time to listen to him is early morning, when the buzz is wearing off, a roomful of people all spent, sunk into the sofa, watching the sky lighten bit by bit, hoping there's no sun, hoping for an overcast day. Driving is good too. Take the elevated road, look out over half the city, just you swaying along, the whole car singing about you. It gets right into the cracks of your flesh."

In recent years, as music talent shows took off, many singers the younger generation had almost forgotten became active again. Wang Feng and Zheng Jun both became judges and mentors, and branched out into headphones and a music app respectively. Cui Jian made an appearance in the season-three finale of I Am a Singer (《我是歌手》), singing Love of Fish and Bird (《鱼鸟之恋》) with Tan Weiwei.

Fans get far fewer chances to see Xu Wei. He says he still isn't suited to that kind of setting and would feel awkward there.

As for writing and singing for others, he has written a few songs for Meng Jinghui's plays and a theme song of the same name for the documentary The Third Pole (《第三极》). He also recently sang the theme song Utopia (《世外桃源》) for director He Ping's experimental film about drifters in Beijing. Avant-garde theater, cultural documentaries, experimental film: all of these are niche to begin with. Any collaboration has to be the right fit.

Beyond that, he plays some music festivals. Recently, as big companies have begun investing in music, he has reportedly also taken part in Gao Xiaosong's new album project, singing a song for one of Gao's artists, as several other singers have.

"To be honest, I don't much like dealing with people in very busy settings," Xu Wei said. "I'm 47. I can't go forcing myself. I like a quiet life, getting to know myself slowly."

While he gets to know himself, Xu Wei wants to keep learning. It was one of the topics he spoke about with the most passion during our interview.

Music, he will tell you, first takes a great deal of practice, constant practice on your instrument.

"You can't say, I feel the music, so I'll just listen to it. You have to practice too, for instance improvising: give you two chords and two rhythms and you can go. Those great hip-hop artists just put on a beat in the street and start rapping, and they got there show by show. Creative singers and songwriters all have to do this." As he said this, his tone turned serious. "It's a lifelong thing, there's no end to it. But as long as you do it, you get better."

After practice comes a great deal of listening. Xu Wei compared it to the theater director Meng Jinghui, who goes to see the best plays in the world and comes back with wider horizons. "You know what the best is, and how you should go about it yourself."

"Besides what's current, there's good art from the past, and you have to learn from that too. Spend some time looking at Huaisu's calligraphy, look again a while later, and you feel something different. Good art keeps giving you revelations, and you have to keep deepening what you learn and feel. You keep perceiving."

Good films and literature, like music, shape people's physical and mental state and their inner world, and Xu Wei feels one should spend time on them.

Xu Wei once went to see U2's 360° tour in Melbourne and was shown around backstage. He saw how a top band designs and builds the stage for a concert, and how the whole crew works together on the show. For example, they have two sets of stage: while one hosts the show, the other is already going up in the next city. The lighting is not switched by hand but programmed second by second. Questions of how music is presented are things Xu Wei likes to think about too.

Sum up what Xu Wei is doing and it may come to this: taking music a little more seriously. Commercially, this may be his path. And it may be why people like him and accept him.

So when Xu Wei talks about the DVD, you hear a great deal about how it was made and performed.

The last show, for example, was the one where he and the band were steadiest and most relaxed. And because the tour was about to end, everyone grew excited toward the finish. That state is good, but it is bound to bring flaws.

When he came out to sing Orchid in an Empty Valley (《空谷幽兰》), he could hear his own nerves and excitement, the mix of emotions making his voice unsteady. With today's computer pitch correction, all of this could have been polished to perfection in post-production. In the end they left it.

"Live is supposed to have that roughness. Including the rough, distorted tone from the guitarist's hands as he plays. If you make everything perfectly pretty, it isn't live at all." Don't over-polish; keep it as close to the real thing as possible, so that the moment you hear it, you feel you are back at the concert.

Xu Wei gave a few more examples. The concert's drummer, Geoff, is from Britain and backs many singers around the world. The DVD includes one of his solos. Xu Wei adores him. "He's a formidable professional musician, and he has age on his side: his drumming is fluid but restrained, and the sound is full of energy. Fifty of the albums he has played on have won Grammy Awards. Geoff doesn't like things that sound heavily produced; he cares about the essence of the music. He says the British idea has always been to capture people's real state as faithfully as possible."

This reminded Xu Wei of Chinese calligraphy. "Traditionally, the finest and second-finest pieces of running script under heaven are both drafts. Wang Xizhi's Orchid Pavilion Preface (《兰亭集序》): the next day, sober, he tried to make a clean copy and found it was off. That state, that spirit and energy, were gone. It's the state of the moment, which is what this album, Here and Now, is. Yan Zhenqing's Draft Eulogy for My Nephew (《祭侄文稿》) is a draft too. But it's the most precious; everyone who sees it is moved. It's overwhelming."

To explain this taste, Xu Wei also brought up ripped jeans and the two vintage Fender guitars with worn-off paint that he has collected.

His point is that "this DVD is live, not a studio work. It's the live moment, a heightened sense of beauty and a heightened experience of life." It is like a person's life: you come to understand that you can't do everything perfectly in one lifetime. Not everyone will treat you well. That's life, and there are bound to be mistakes. But overall, your attitude toward life is what matters most, and how you understand it is what matters most.

So, set against the manufactured controversies, idol economy and noisy talent shows of today's music market, what Xu Wei chooses to talk about is rather different.

The team behind the DVD has its own story, too.

After the 2009 concerts, the band had such rapport, and were so reluctant to break up, that they decided to stay together as a fixed lineup. Musicians like guitarist Li Yanliang, keyboardist Beibei and recording engineer Li Jun are among the busiest in China. They don't depend on Xu Wei for a living, but when there are shows they do their best to get together. Xu Wei also works with members of the team on his new albums.

Xu Wei says the team has taught him a lot, both new information and new technical skills. For the first few shows of this tour they brought in an American drummer, John, a professor at Berklee College of Music. During rehearsals he told Xu Wei a great deal about groove: how to practice it, how to feel music, how he himself would play Xu Wei's songs. "John recommended three players he thinks have the best groove in the world in Black music. I was so happy."

Then there is Feifei, who knows jazz well and taught him how to practice rhythm. "He said you can't just take a triplet on its own and a quadruplet on its own and practice them together." You have to hold the quadruplet and the triplet in your head at the same time, running on two tracks at once; only then are you really practicing polyrhythm.

Another example: music often calls for improvising rather than thinking. He had known for years that improvising over a single chord can spark creativity, but one chord can be very monotonous. He thought that if you could express your feelings richly within one chord and still make it sound beautiful, that would be wonderful. Xu Wei had been practicing improvisation over the major seventh chord on the first degree, "1357." But it wasn't right; it didn't sound good and didn't inspire him.

Later he asked keyboardist Beibei, who suggested "4613," the major seventh chord on the fourth degree, saying it is brighter and sparks ideas. Beibei sat down at the piano and played it for him then and there, explaining inversions. The two of them ended up improvising together for more than an hour.

"It got me so excited!"

"I could tell right away it was different. When nobody tells you, you're still stuck there struggling: why isn't this working? This is concrete knowledge about singing and music, and you need a 'teacher' to point it out," Xu Wei said. At the same time, music has to be boiled down from the complex to the simple. The complicated parts are for you to know; what you present has to be simple.

Before the interview, music was playing in the lobby. Xu Wei said he liked it so much that he looked it up right away. It was by a German musician.

He is in fact very interested in ambient music, music to listen to in nature, before sleep or as prenatal music. "Lots of musicians around the world are doing this now. The producer behind U2 and Coldplay made one ambient album, called Neroli. He produced Coldplay's Viva la Vida. He also produced U2's The Joshua Tree, the album that won eight Grammys in '88.

"He's a rock musician, but he makes ambient music. Quiet your mind and take in Chinese guqin music and landscape painting, and your heart opens wide, with a feeling of being one with nature." So Xu Wei thinks Chinese musicians can do this too.

"When you're tired from work at night and lie in bed and put on music, before you've even closed your eyes you feel you're out in nature, in fair weather, at peace, your mind reaching far." But Xu Wei said this is only a wish of his. "It's not about finding a bunch of people to program a couple of beats, add a few sounds and get someone to play a bit of flute. You really have to understand our culture, and the newest sounds in Western electronic music, and how those sounds affect people. Until you're at that level, you can't do it."

That's how it is. Ambient music like Neroli sounds very fashionable. Yet it is in fact obscure and reserved. It is exactly the "fair weather, peace and far-reaching calm" Xu Wei has always been after.

In the interview, Xu Wei mentioned a guitar he had collected whose paint had worn off. He found it especially beautiful, loved it, and could stare at it for an hour at a time.

"Really, I can stare at it for an hour every time. Look at it for a while, play it for a while, look at it some more, sit there drinking tea." So although Xu Wei now avoids staying up late to protect his health, sometimes once he starts practicing he can't stop, "so I just have to go to bed a bit later."