Rocker Qiu returns from hiatus with new album

Rock musician Qiu Ye will release his new album and stage a national tour. [Photo by Zou Hong/China Daily]

Zi Yue, or It Says, is the Chinese rock band that once impressed many fans with its poetic lyrics and diverse tunes. But in the past few years, Qiu Ye, the founder, has not only been producing soundtracks for movies, he's has also been involved with acting.

That might now change with his recent "comeback" contract with the Beijing-based recording company Tree Music.

Qiu will perform at Moma Music Festival that is being organized by Tree Music and will tour Qinhuangdao city in Hebei province, Wuhan in Hubei province and Shanghai from August to October. He will also tour the country with his new album to be released later this year by the same company.

"I think the timing is right and I am ready to return," Qiu says, without offering details about the album.

He instead tells China Daily about the collapse of his band.

Since its inception in 1994, the band has had just two albums－The First Volume in 1996 and The Second Volume in 2002, but both were well received.

"I remember I had a show with the band in Wenzhou (Zhejiang province) during a tour more than 10 years ago and I totally forgot the lyrics of a song, which I myself wrote and had sung many times earlier. The same thing happened in the following days, and I realized that there must be something wrong with me," the 49-year-old Beijing native says of the process that led him to look into another creative medium.

By the time the band recorded the third album, Qiu had decided their songs were not working anymore.

"Those songs didn't feel right to me," he says, adding that he then spoke to other members of the band and told them that the band could break up.

Subsequently, Qiu put his rock career on pause and tried his hand at painting and drama.

But his passion for music remained. He wrote reviews of bands for the Guangdong-based Neweekly magazine.

In 2014, he made music for director Wang Xiaoshuai's movie, Red Amnesia, and starred in rocker Cui Jian's directorial debut, Blue Sky Bones.

"The job of writing and producing film soundtracks suits me. Unlike being in a band, I can finish all the jobs by myself," Qiu says.

Qiu's song Xiang Dui, or Gaze－a hit in the '90s－was used as the title track for a popular Chinese TV series, Struggle, in 2004.

Qiu has read classical Chinese novels since childhood and worked as an apprentice in a pollution-control factory after high school. He used his salary to buy his first guitar for 21 yuan ($3.50).

He also listened to a variety of music, from Taiwan pop to Western rock. It was Cui's iconic 1986 song, Nothing to My Name, that inspired Qiu to become a singer-songwriter.

He lives in mountainous Huairou district in the outskirts of Beijing and has developed a habit of going to bed and rising early.

He is also learning how to use software to produce music.

How long will his musical passion last this time?

The answer perhaps lies in his upcoming tour, Qiu says.