Sandee Chan Gives Every Album a Strange Name — Music Is Only One of the Ways She Speaks | 100 People With Ideas

What stands out most about Sandee Chan may be how closely she watches the society around her, and how hard she thinks about what she sees.

Chan likes to bury metaphors and hints in her work. She does not like to spell things out.

You don't have to dig far to see it — the album titles are enough. From Washington Chops Down the Cherry Tree (《华盛顿砍倒樱桃树》) and Riding the Jet Away (《乘喷射机而去》) to As If Sadness Were Downloaded Twice (《如同悲伤被下载了两次》) and her latest record, War God Kaldia (《战神卡尔迪亚》), her albums tend to carry names that read like riddles. And she refuses to give the answer.

Asked what the titles mean, Chan did not answer directly. She talked instead about how she works and what she has noticed. "Let me tell you something related to this," she said. "From my very first album until now, there have been a lot of metaphors in my work. A lot of the early songs were described as something like modern poetry. What I found interesting was that when fans discussed my work, they came up with things I had never imagined — all kinds of guesses about the meaning of the words, of the lyrics."

You may have come across Chan's name through the singers she has worked with — Jeff Chang, Huang Pinyuan and Sandy Lam early on, Bibi Zhou, Hebe Tien and Yoga Lin more recently — or through her own records. She started out a cult favorite in the indie scene and was later recognized by the Golden Melody Awards.

Along the way she built up her name and her experience bit by bit, turning from a singer under contract to a record label into an artist signed to no one, who handles nearly every stage of the work herself: writing the words and the music, singing them, even designing and promoting the album covers. Her attention has since moved from the music itself to something further in.

"With the skills I have now, arranging a song well and making the production beautiful — that isn't hard," Chan said. "What takes the most time is watching the world and society. I know that in pop music today people pay attention to the surface. But I don't think I place myself, or expect of myself, only within music and entertainment. I believe there is still a lot of interesting work to do. So I still spend a lot of time imagining and planning. This album, for instance (War God Kaldia), had a fairly careful plan behind it."

War God Kaldia, released in October, uses the form of a full concept album to look at what people feel, virtually and in real life, in an age the internet governs. Chan buried metaphorical Easter eggs all through it. "War God Kaldia" is an online handle, standing for the second identity people take on the internet, the one set against real life; inside that identity they do things they have never done offline and say things they have never said. Kaldia is also the name of a wind god — a metaphor for the online habit of steering which way opinion blows.

While shooting the video for the title track, Chan first put out a teaser, then turned the comments and messages it drew back on the people who wrote them in the finished video, a form of mockery. She has done this before. She has also posted things on Facebook she knew were untrue, and plenty of people took the bait, treating the words as evidence without checking them.

"In this era everything we have — Weibo, Twitter — is so short, so easy to quote and to clip, that quoting out of context has become the norm," Chan said. "We use these very short forms to express ourselves online, to forward things, to show what we agree with. It's a very easy thing to happen."

The tour Chan mounted for the album carries a name that also needs decoding: 6502. It comes from the 8-bit microprocessor MOS Technology developed in 1975, and it stands for that year, an extraordinary one in the history of music and popular culture. In 1975 David Bowie put out The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and Bob Dylan put out Blood on the Tracks, called at the time his most flawless work yet. On War God Kaldia, Chan salutes that vanished age of chasing dreams with the line "He wanted to be that rolling stone."

"Of course I know this era works in singles, but a single can carry relatively little information," Chan said. "I would rather use a lot of complicated concepts and more symbolic metaphors to talk about things that go deep but touch our own lives. So I suppose what I'm doing runs against the current, but I believe the meaning of the work matters most. I hope the whole album — the music and the information it carries — means something in this era, something that can make a lot of people think again."

The title track of her previous album, As If Sadness Were Downloaded Twice, made with Yoga Lin, also touched on what the internet generation feels, and so did the album before it, I Love You, John. Both can be read as a prelude to War God Kaldia.

On that album Chan did something she rarely does: she did not write all the lyrics herself. She invited ten guests from the art world to write words for her, and sang them herself, because she wanted to step outside her own circle and find out what other people were thinking. The result is a record full of names not usually attached to music. Their backgrounds differ widely, but Chan admires all of them: the Taiwanese designer Aaron Nieh, the writer Luo Yijun, the film critic Han Songluo, the artist Tsai Ming-liang, and Ding Dingzhang, whose "writing reads with the satisfaction of going to the bathroom or just catching a bus," among others.

Chan sent the invitations by private message on social media. Her request was simple: write about whatever you care about most right now. What came back surprised her. Aaron Nieh's Shut Up was grand in its language, reaching for images of war, heaven and earth, and faith, with English mixed in — and it was hard to fit to the melody Chan had written. Han Songluo wrote Quicksand World (《流沙世界》) "from a very economic angle." Luo Yijun's A Ginkgo Forest Swirling Across the Sky (《漫天纷飞的银杏森林》) was full of pictures. The lyrics the poet Jing Xianghai wrote for To Those Who Want to Kiss Me (《致想要亲我的》) struck Chan as better than a professional lyricist's. Tsai Ming-liang was "of one mind" with her: his That Afternoon (《那日下午》) spoke of birth, aging, sickness and death, and Chan directed the video herself in memory of her late parents.

The cover of As If Sadness Were Downloaded Twice, which Chan designed with the designer Hitsu P, won Taiwan's Golden Pin Design Award and the DFA Design Award. Hitsu P, in his early thirties, works in fashion design and has long been a friend of Chan's.

"On that album I brought in a lot of writers and people from other fields, so it laid particular stress on the virtual and the real," Chan said. "That's why we did a design with a false perspective, something like a book."

The two kept working together on War God Kaldia. "It's hard to find a young designer willing to spend a long time thinking about what a work means," Chan said. "In the early stage of the album's graphic design he spent a great deal of time thinking it through. Later, for the album as a whole, we used a mirrored material. He said that online we usually see ourselves in other people, and confirm ourselves through what other people do, so he wanted to take that further with a mirrored surface."

Chan counts leaving Friendly Dog Studio, a unit of Rock Records, as the turning point of her life: after that she never signed a management contract with any company again, and stayed independent in her work.

Her first four albums were all made there. Friendly Dog was founded by two former Rock Records employees, Shen Guangyuan and Luo Hongwu, and made its name on the work of a group of singer-songwriters that included Chan, Huang Pinyuan and Huang Yunling. But battered by piracy and the internet, it dissolved its record division in 2000 and turned itself into an internet company.

Chan's years at Friendly Dog were prolific. She put out her own albums and took invitations from all sides to produce records for other singers. More important than the output, this was also when she thought a number of things through, among them whether she needed so many people deciding what she wore, what makeup she put on, which reporters she talked to. Turning it over, she decided she could manage all of it alone — and that she still had plenty she wanted to say.

"I'm sure a lot of people think it's rotten luck to finish a record and then have the company fold. Or that running into one setback after another at work is simply hard," Chan said. "But on the whole, having made music for more than twenty years, I think that without those setbacks and that hardship there would have been no way to learn some very important things."

With nothing holding her, Chan could try more things. She published an art book, put on a photography show, wrote music for films. The most important of all, for her, may be that she now had far more time to go to film festivals and watch films of every kind.

"I'm always watching movies," she said. "I think I spend more time watching films than making music."

Chan thinks Taiwan's independent film has done well in recent years, and she likes the chance to see the work before other people do. One film that has held her lately is the black comedy The Great Buddha+. She has also been able to talk with filmmakers and get a sense of an aesthetic imagination outside the music business. This year she was invited to judge the Taipei Film Festival, where she met the director Tian Zhuangzhuang; talking with him, she says, taught her a great deal.

Tian struck her as an interesting man: he "rarely speaks and rarely eats," and carries an unhurried air she thinks is worth learning. Rushing from screening to screening every day, he still looked at ease — meeting friends, having a drink, having a meal. "I think that mood and atmosphere is well worth learning: keeping your own pace steady," Chan said.

Like Chan, Tian has the habit of using metaphor. "He's someone with a lot of ideas, who plants a lot of hints, doesn't say much and leaves a lot of gaps," Chan said. "To some degree I do the same. Maybe neither of us belongs to the youngest generation. So in the imagining, there's a lot left for other people to fill in."

Another person Chan gets on with is the Hong Kong singer and film director Juno Mak. The two of them recently had a keen conversation about a subject that sounds abstract: "quiet is a violent thing."

Chan couldn't sleep that night and ran into Mak online; his days and nights had been turned around by the shoot for his film Sons of the Neon Night. It was early morning. Mak had just wrapped, Chan had not gone to bed. Neither of them knows how it started, but they talked about that subject for an hour or two.

"It was really interesting," Chan said. "The content sounds cold and serious, but the process was warm. Because finding someone you can reach on the level of aesthetics is a rare thing in this world."

Sometimes Chan doesn't need language at all. The Taiwanese designer Hsiao Ching-yang once worked with her on the cover of Riding the Jet Away, released in 1995; Chan took part in the design herself, picking up crayons to sketch drinks and other odds and ends of daily life.

"Watching her, I understood one message: that making things comes out of living," Hsiao said in an earlier interview with QDaily. "Once I had that message, I started drawing elements out of my own life and turning them into work. Even after all these years working together, I still can't follow what Chan says — but I feel that language is shared."

Over the past two years, besides War God Kaldia, Chan has produced for other singers: she wrote both words and music for Hebe Tien's single To Hebe, and the lyrics for Bibi Zhou's Two Traps (《两陷》). "What I have to watch most closely is that the work says what the person singing it wants to say about her life right now. So I think it's worth spending that time discussing things with them and taking part in their lives," Chan said of what a producer does.

Talking about things other than music interests her too; she can feel the different states the singers are in. Tien is a fan of Chan's, and although the two are close now, she still slips into a fan's admiration. When Chan is with Bibi Zhou, they spend a lot of time trading barbed jokes.

So far War God Kaldia has not landed the way she hoped: a fair number of the metaphors have been dug out, Chan says, but many more have gone unnoticed — which she finds thoroughly interesting.

So what is still buried?

The answer was about what you would expect. "I'm not telling you," Chan said.

Cover image and photos in this article provided by the interviewee.