Ding Wei, a Singer Who Always Went Her Own Way, Is Back. After More Than a Decade, Does She Still Have That Sound?

Her new album, Unbound (《松绑》), comes out on June 23 — nine years later than planned.

On May 14, the singer Ding Wei gave a talk at the speaker series Yixi. When her name went up on the screen, the audience looked a little lost. People whispered to each other and pulled out their phones to look her up. Only when Ding mentioned partway through that she had scored the TV drama The Road We Have Taken (《人间正道是沧桑》), among other television and film work, did the several hundred people in the room suddenly react.

For a singer who has gone ten years without an album, that scene is nothing unusual.

These days, apart from her scores, the surest way to jog anyone's memory of Ding Wei is to bring up her old glory. Around 2000 she was sweeping the major music awards. Butterfly with Broken Wings (《断翅的蝴蝶》), Winter Has Come (《冬天来了》), Girl and the Quartet (《女孩与四重奏》) — each was a hit the moment it came out.

For years her name has come attached to labels: "avant-garde," "alternative."

In 1993, still a university student, she signed with Dadi Records. The next year the label put out Campus Ballads 1 (《校园民谣 1》), which included her song Office Worker (《上班族》).

That album — which also carried You at the Desk Next to Mine (《同桌的你》), The Brother in the Bunk Above Me (《睡在我上铺的兄弟》) and Lonely Because I Miss Someone (《寂寞是因为想念谁》) — became a collective memory for a generation of students. Ding doesn't count herself a standard-bearer of campus ballads, though: "It's just that I was still a student when Office Worker came out."

In 1995 Ding released the single Butterfly with Broken Wings; the album of the same name followed a year later. She had written only four of its songs, so she could not yet be called a professional songwriter. Her output grew after that, and not only for herself: she wrote I Want Every Day of Yours (《我要你的每一天》) for Andy Lau and Love Needs You to Be Perfect (《爱要你才完美》) for Na Ying.

Along the way she drew heavily on electronic music, classical music and rock, and built a style of her own. Mainland pop in the 1990s belonged to Hong Kong and Taiwan ballads, and Ding's voice stood apart from all of it. Few listeners then had heard much Western music either, so the foreign elements she folded into her songs — she had grown up on Western records — sounded fresh. Critics reached again and again for "avant-garde" and "alternative."

Looking back, Ding sounds a little pleased with herself: "I think about it now and, yes, making something like that in 2000 really was pretty startling." The shock of her pre-2000 work, she says, may have been sharper than anything Unbound will deliver this time.

Unbound was due out in 2008. It slipped, and kept slipping, until June 23, 2017.

Ding benefited from the record industry's golden age. In the 1990s labels made enough money on mainstream releases to spend part of it on music with a smaller audience.

She signed with BMG in 1998. Andy Lau, on the same label, could sell a million copies of an album across Greater China back then, she told QDaily, so BMG had cash to spare on alternative singers like her and Li Quan. The label was not putting much into them, but it was enough to get their music heard.

When the labels hit trouble, she was among the worst hit. Piracy spread from the late 1990s on; after 2000, more and more free songs appeared online. As fewer people paid for records, labels sacrificed alternative music and chased the market with mainstream songs. Ding kept trying to make something inventive, but her 2004 album Dear Ding Wei (《亲爱的丁薇》) was packaged as pop — a compromise she had little choice about.

"My third album, Dear Ding Wei, had a problem like that: the cover had nothing to do with my music, and it actually misled people," Ding said. "People assumed Ding Wei had made a very mainstream record, so they went looking in it for something that matched the cover and decided that was my style. It was exactly the opposite — the parts of that album with the most character were the ones never brought to the front."

After Dear Ding Wei, Ding vanished from the front of the pop world. The album now due out, Unbound, was originally to be called Remembrance (《纪念》). In the years between, she released almost no singles and rarely appeared in the press.

The reason, in the end, was disappointment with the music business as it then was.

Ding cares about individuality. It was voices with individuality that pushed her onto a music career in the first place. In college, Zhang Peiren, who ran Magic Stone Records, mailed her two albums: Tori Amos's Little Earthquakes and Rickie Lee Jones's Pop Pop.

"When I first heard Pop Pop, I thought it was so strange — why does she sing like that, she even sounds a bit out of tune. I listened for years and then one day it hit me: no, wait, she sings beautifully. You don't know her, but just from the record you feel you can see every expression on her face," Ding said.

Before those two albums, most of what Ding knew was the work of hall-of-fame pop singers — Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson. Her own voice was so far from theirs, she thought, that she would never be a good singer. It was Tori Amos and Rickie Lee Jones, two alternative musicians who were never huge, who showed her that what moves people in pop music is the expression of each person's own character.

She says "I've had little to do with the pop world these ten years," yet in the decade since 2007 she has written scores for more than 40 films and TV series. The score she and the producer Salt Lin Chaoyang wrote for Love Is Not Blind (《失恋 33 天》) was nominated for Best Original Film Score at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards.

Scoring paid well enough to keep her going through the years without an album. By her own account, albums were never her main income anyway. As a professional songwriter and producer she has released more than 100 songs.

To promote Unbound, though, she now has to do a string of things she has never done.

The Yixi talk was one. Like the other speakers, drawn from every kind of work, Ding told her own story on stage: how she came to write, and what she believes. The half hour went smoothly. She had spent roughly a year and a half preparing it.

Had Yixi come to her when she first broke out and made her name, she would probably have said no. Ding trained at a conservatory from childhood, and for a long time she believed a musician should take part in nothing but making music. When she was young she treated anything outside writing as forbidden, and refused so coldly that the other party was left embarrassed.

At Dadi Records, someone asked her to shoot a toothpaste commercial. "I've got a mouth full of tetracycline-stained teeth, what's there to advertise?" she said. A director who loved her music tailored a part for her and said she wouldn't have to do anything but appear on screen. "I absolutely will not do anything that isn't music. I can't act. Find someone else," she shot back.

"Because I was very aloof when I was young," Ding said. "But later I came to understand a few things, and I handle them more gently now."

Ding has a song called Winter Has Come. She was living in Beijing far from home at the time and fighting with her record company. She chose to shelve herself: no releases, and so no income. It was the first winter the southern-raised Ding spent alone in Beijing. Worse, her father had just been diagnosed with cancer. Out of that hardship she wrote the song.

"Almost anything can start me on something new — a rhythm I find charming, say, or a drum tone that's interesting; I pair it with something else, and out of the pairing a new thing may come," Ding said.

Dog (《狗》) she built purely out of imagination. A friend asked her for a song; thinking of the dog the friend kept at home, the opening lines arrived from nowhere: That year, on the road home, I met a dog / pleading eyes looking at me / he seemed to like me, he wanted to come along / but I hesitated over whether to take this poor thing...

A song with no true story behind it got a warm response in the real world — an animal-protection group left her a message of thanks. What made Ding proudest, though, was the new ability Dog gave her.

"I was really excited, because before that I always wrote the melody first and filled in the words after. I rarely wrote lyrics that told a story; mine tended to be abstract, or held back," she said. "The words of Dog are very plain, and plain is exactly the way of saying things I'd always wanted — to use ordinary words and hide a feeling inside them, not stated outright, not spelled out. And once it was written, there turned out to be a kind of philosophy underneath."

Strictly speaking, though, "Ding Wei had nothing to do with pop music for ten years" isn't accurate. She judged Super Girl in 2006 and Super Boy in 2007, and as late as 2014 she was judging The Perfect Star Debuts (《完美星开幕》) on CCTV's variety channel. That last show brought her a good deal of trouble, thanks to her blunt comments.

Producers won her over to the talent shows, she said, with the argument that they gave her a chance to influence young people.

She repeated what they told her at the time: "You shouldn't look at it that way. Don't just see a platform that isn't professional enough — it's still about music, you can say what you think about music, you might influence some young people, so why not?"

Now it is her own album's turn to influence young people.

A first mix of it was finished back in 2008. "I don't know where it went wrong," Ding said. "It somehow seemed worse than before the mix, worse than our demo. We felt pretty low."

There was the market to consider too. "After we came back from mixing it in Sweden, we found the market was just too bad. If we'd put it out, all we'd have done is add ten more free songs to the catalogue," she said.

Ding wanted to hear how listeners responded to her music, not watch it drown in the internet's flood of information. Releasing then held "not much hope," she decided, so she and her producer Salt Lin Chaoyang set the record aside.

In 2015, a year after Ding judged the time right to restart it, she signed with the British independent label Cooking Vinyl. The label isn't well known in China, but it has worked with many singers she likes, including the wild Marilyn Manson and her beloved Suzanne Vega — and Ding got the collaboration she wanted: Suzanne Vega joins her on Gypsy, the English version of her song Wanderer (《流浪者》), on Unbound.

Everything from the musicians she brought in to the recording itself satisfied her. The guests on Unbound include Sting's guitarist Dominic Miller and Eric Clapton's drummer Ian Thomas; the recording and mixing ran through legendary rooms — Abbey Road in London (where the Beatles, Pink Floyd and other bands recorded), Metropolis Studios (where Amy Winehouse made her signature album Back to Black) and Air Studios (founded by George Martin, the man credited with discovering the Beatles).

Ding has described the idea behind Unbound this way: "Time and growth, love and parting, loneliness and freedom, confusion and conviction, independence and following the crowd — everyone carries these feelings, which are opposed and yet one. I believe many of life's regrets are in fact beautiful. Music has given me a heart both steady and free, and I hope people can find an echo of each other rather than stay indifferent."

Unbound will get something close to a worldwide release, the widest reach of anything Ding has made. That also means she has to try many things she has never tried, to fit into a market she doesn't know.

Even with Cooking Vinyl's resources behind her, that is hard. Language sets up a natural barrier. Take Britain itself: its radio runs several channels, each playing to a different genre and audience, and the most mainstream, Radio 1, plays only mainstream idols like Justin Bieber. Ding expects her music to land on the smaller channels given over to alternative or world music.

She mentioned some of the feedback she got while making the record.

"We've already met a lot of British people while making this record, and everyone who's heard it thinks language isn't a problem. Even without understanding a single word, they say they can still understand it — the emotion the music carries," Ding said. "The words are really a support; they aren't what decides it... We have confidence in this record because we think the music on it is really good."

She clearly hopes for as much, or more, at home.

We also talked with Ding Wei about Unbound, songwriting and the market today

Q = QDaily

D = Ding Wei

Q: How do you see the music business right now?

D: I think the environment is slowly getting better — copyright is being standardized across the different websites, and everyone can talk terms now: paid downloads, free previews, it's all negotiable. Information is relatively more transparent too. Compared with before, even an independent musician with a single album can go and negotiate a sales deal with a website. I think that's pretty good.

Q: You used to criticize record companies for not being diverse enough. Do you still see it that way?

D: I don't think diversity was ever something record companies thought about. There was a period, in the '90s, when labels were making a lot of money on mainstream albums, and with the whole company flush they were willing to put a small part of it into singers with more character, more alternative ones.

That's how people like us existed. Magic Stone too — it only existed because Rock Records had money. If Rock Records hadn't been making money, there's no way it could have put everything into that. At the time BMG had Anita Mui and Andy Lau. Andy Lau could sell a million copies of an album across all of Greater China. What does a million copies mean? You probably have no feel for it — a record cost about 100 Hong Kong dollars. However you count it, a label was certainly getting forty or fifty yuan back per record, minus some production costs. Work out a million copies for yourself. So BMG figured they could sign people like me and Li Quan too, because doing it wouldn't cost them anything they'd feel.

Q: And how are things now?

D: Individuals can start to diversify, though of course that depends on each person's situation: what kind of music you choose to make, what kind of person you choose to be, whether you want to be an artist or a famous performer, or a folk singer the public adores. It comes down to how each person plans for herself, and to the character of her own work — the environment has room for variety. But some people just want to succeed, and success comes in only a few shapes, so naturally they don't think toward variety.

Q: Compared with your last album, what's different about you now?

D: I don't set out saying this stage of mine should be like this or that, because I don't like repeating what I've already gotten good at. So when I make something new I give up some habits of thought. You've heard Winter Has Come — I basically wouldn't write that same song again.

Q: So if an idea feels too much like something you've done before, you'd drop it? Is there a deliberate process like that?

D: Yes. Every time I finish something I check it the way a teacher checks homework. First, it absolutely cannot resemble anyone else's work; if I find a line that seems off, that sounds even a little like someone else's, I have to change it. If changing it breaks the flow of the song, then maybe the song goes. Second, if I find that in writing something — my own work especially — I've dropped back into a habit, this chord always followed by that chord, the drums always doing this at this point, I remind myself to go think again about what else is possible.

A person's taste, and much of how she writes, can't change, and can't change much. Within the range I'm aware of, wherever I know I can change something, I look for another angle on the problem. I want it to be new; it's that simple. In fact a person changes without noticing. Maybe you've been listening to some music lately, or you saw a film, or you've been working over some subject with someone — all of it naturally shows up as change in the new work. But it's gradual, not deliberate.

Q: Making this album in Britain, did you worry about cultural differences?

D: We've already met a lot of British people while making this record, and everyone who's heard it thinks language isn't a problem. They think that even without understanding a single word of it they can still understand it — the emotion the music carries. The words are a support, not what decides it. You can listen to a piece of music and know what it's really saying without the words, especially given the way the vocabulary of music works. We have confidence in this record because we think the music on it is really good.

Second, I think in the West people have no concept of Chinese music at all — nobody knows what Chinese music sounds like, and hardly anyone cares. But China looks so powerful from abroad now that when people mention Chinese people they think of money; they think Chinese people are simply rich. I think we should use whatever chances we get to let people in the West hear that some Chinese music sounds like this, and that in the way it says things it has plenty in common with what they have, so they can follow it. What's interesting is that people in China may find my record very foreign, not Chinese at all — nobody here takes it for a Chinese pop record. But foreigners listening to it still feel there's an Eastern flavor in it. Interesting, isn't it? We can't hear where the Eastern flavor is. I can't find it myself.

So I don't think you need to make a point of "the national is the global," that you must add a bit of Eastern element, that you must put an erhu or a pipa in there and call it a fusion of East and West, or that you must use the Chinese language to do this or that. Whatever you do, you're still Chinese, and your music will carry that flavor anyway. So on one hand we thought: we've already had so much good feedback while making this, why not try.

Pop songs are a bit different, of course — they do have words. If you had no words, or if it were more like world music, it might be easier over there. That's why we ended up making one song in English: otherwise we'd be handing the label too hard a problem, not letting them understand a single song.

Q: Who are your ideal listeners?

D: My listeners already have their own taste in music. They're not beginners, certainly not people who've barely been exposed to music. They've listened deeply and they want something different. In a sense they're the same kind of person I am — we must have something in common; birds of a feather. So I hope it's people like that, and that we can find each other. That's enough. I'm not asking everyone to like me, which isn't really possible. I only hope we don't miss each other. If someone truly likes this music, he should have the chance to hear it, and then he can decide for himself whether he likes it.

Cover image courtesy of Yuetong Music.