Name: Wang Hua Li aka Hua Li 化力
Nationality: Canadian-Chinese
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Current release: Hua Li 化力's ripe fruit falls but not in your mouth is out March 27th 2024 via Next Door. She is also about to embark on a tour of the US and Canada. Get tickets here.



Recommendations: Haruki Murakami always seems like an obvious choice to me, but Killing Commendatore has been on my mind ever since I read it. A lovely depiction of grappling with the creative process.
Another great book I read recently, Uneasy Listening: Notes on Hearing and Being Heard - a conversation between a luthier and a psychologist on how they listen. Beautifully written with plenty of unexpected moments.

If you enjoyed this Hua Li 化力 interview and would like to keep up to date with her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Soundcloud, tiktok, twitter, facebook, and tumblr.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

Generally, I listen with my eyes open, but I will close them if there's a special part I'm trying to focus on. When I'm really excited about something in a track I've been known to pause, relisten, and figure out what it is on the piano.

If I'm listening passively I like to dance to whatever I'm hearing - even slow jams will get a gentle sway out of me.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to listening to and creating music?

I think of making music as a world building process - there is the language-based storytelling in the lyrics but the sounds around those lyrics should help to set the environment and emotional impulse of the song.

My music tends to be confessional in nature and I try to invite my listener into my memories so that we can relive and transmute the nature of those memories together.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience?

I was a classically-trained pianist as a child and got my first paying gig as a musician at the age of 8. As a kid I rarely suffered stage fright but every so often I would have a total memory lapse and wouldn't be able to remember a single note once I got on stage and sat behind the piano.

I went on to study jazz and I'm sure that choice was unconsciously motivated by a desire to be in a space where I could improvise myself out of forgetting the notes.

Experience has taught me that you can never practice too much and each time you play the same thing, it's best to find something new to love about it.


Hua Li 化力 Interview Image (c) the artist

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

Music has always been an important part of my life, but I do envy how many things I got to discover for the first time in my early teens.

Those were the days of MySpace and mp3 blogs - I took a lot of pride in finding out about new artists and listening to as much as I could. The more obscure, the more I liked it, and I was open to pretty much any genre, from post-punk to Mile End indie rock to noisy and experimental rap. At the same time, I was practicing Beethoven Sonatas and Chopin Valses while trying to wrap my head around the freedom of jazz pianists like Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson.

It's so special to hear something with brand new ears.

How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument, tools or equipment?

I've definitely gone through phases where I was a lot more of a gear enthusiast.

Over the pandemic I was splitting my time between my home in Montreal, Quebec and my mother's home across Canada in Victoria, BC. I'd spend months at a time at my mom's place writing with the acoustic piano of my childhood, a single microphone and a trim midi controller. Of all the studio gear I had in Montreal, the only things I really missed were my studio monitors, 1969s Wurlitzer and one analog poly synth.

As a result I've started setting up these things as the creative centre of my studio and I've sold off a lot of bits and bobs I wasn't using.

Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

I believe music is hiding everywhere and it's my job as a songwriter and composer to pay attention to where it might spring up from.

I love to pull lyrical inspiration from dreams, 'paintings and books. A lot of my songs come out of my personal experiences, whether it be things I overhear when I'm out dancing in my neighbourhood club or the life stories of those around me.

Politics act as an inspirational overlay - expressing myself through music is important to me because it is a marker in time, but it is also a space where I can express my desires for the future and imagine the world in which all individuals have freedom.


Hua Li 化力 Interview Image (c) the artist

Are you acting out parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these? What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music?

When I first started the Hua Li 化力 project in 2015, I thought of it as a musical space where I could be wilder, more provocative and outspoken than I felt I could be in the jazz world.

Over time I feel that I've pretty much integrated those characteristics into my personality - Hua Li and I have become one.

Now that I feel the same fearlessness that Hua Li embodies for me, I'm interested in exploring vulnerability and softness in the emotional content of my songs.

If music is a language, what can we communicate with it? How do you deal with misunderstandings?

The beautiful thing about misunderstandings in music is that they invite deepened conversations. Imagine I sing a melody and expect a saxophonist to play it back to me. That musician might misplace a note or rhythmic figure, and that might push me to respond differently, augmenting the idea into one of endless variations.

There are so many layers of communication available to us through music. A basic example would be an energetic, danceable song with deep and tragic lyrics.

Music is one of the only artforms that must be experienced alongside the passage of time - a painting sits on a wall unchanging, but if you stop listening to a song for a couple minutes and come back to it, it might be over! All sorts of misunderstandings and new interpretations of music arise from the passage of time - songs that remind us of positive or negative memories, people come and gone etc ...

That's the fun of music, that we each experience it differently and each listen to a song is different in its own right.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches and musical forms you may be very familiar with?

One of my early mentors in jazz, Louise Rose, used to always say, "We don't work music, we play music." I think of her often when I'm at my instruments - practicing is much more worthwhile when I find the joy in it.

No repetition is exactly the same - there really is something to discover in every note we play.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

The sounds of nature are the building blocks of music, and in many ways I consider them to be the most purely musical thing that exists. Our heartbeats are what teach us about rhythm from the earliest moments of life, and everything we hear from then on informs our sense of what sounds are moving.

I've heard music described as organized sound, and it's a definition that resonates with me.

There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in algorithms, and data. But already at the time of Plato, arithmetic, geometry, and music were considered closely connected. How do you see that connection yourself? What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?

The logic of music is very mathematical and I applaud all the very smart people that have an interest in investigating the math of music. The work of music theorists has informed the way I think about harmony, rhythm and melody a great deal.

That said, when I write these days, I try to forget everything I know and let my ear, my intuition and my heart guide me.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I process my emotions through writing music - oftentimes I'll write a lyric and I won't understand what it is trying to reveal to me until some time later. My songs are known to outsmart me.

Listening to music and understanding how other artists communicate via their music helps me maintain compassion and curiousity about others, making me more open to communicating and understanding others in all forms of communication.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

Silence is part of what gives sound meaning. That said, I can be quite uncomfortable with silence and I listen to either music or podcasts or tv shows in the background pretty much every waking moment of the day.

I don't think it's healthy though, to avoid silence in this way. I hope to cultivate more silence in my life.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more "mundane" tasks?

I think there are both similarities and differences. There is a lot of intentional repetition when it comes to making music - in practicing one's instrument and in performing one's repertoire. I try to appreciate what is unique about each repetition, and that spirit translates into things like making a good coffee too.

However, because music is my chosen artform, rather than coffee making, I am more practised in expressing myself with specificity in music.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

I'm excited by the collapse of genre and how often artists are pulling influences from unlikely sources and trying new sounds on.

I look forward to a future where artists are identified by their unique sonic signatures rather than their adherence to a genre categorization.