Comfort Zone

Dou Jingtong performs at a livehouse venue in Beijing to promote her latest album, Kids Only. Photo Provided To China Daily

"I'm not annoyed or offended that I'm always introduced in the context of my family. But it's nice. It's refreshing to be introduced through my music, rather than something that's irrelevant to my music," Dou Jingtong said in an interview last year while touring the United Kingdom as a supporting act for the indie pop band Bastille.

A day before her latest performance in Beijing, Dou Jingtong showed up in a five-star hotel downtown, diving into a conversation about her new album.

"While making this new album, I started to think about a question - what is Chinese music? Maybe it's the instrument I use, the lyrics I sing or it's just in my DNA to make music, which is from China," says Dou Jingtong, adding that she gave an erhu (two-stringed fiddle) to the band Bastille. She also toured the United States early this year.

"People came to my shows not because of who I am. They may not know me (in the US) but they came to listen to the music. It felt great."

Dou Jingtong's new album, released in digital form by Tencent Music Entertainment Group, took her one year to complete. She says the process of her songwriting usually begins "with a feeling".

Like her first album, she wrote all the 11 new songs in the latest offering, most of them in English.

The title song of the new album, Kids Only, was inspired by a BBC documentary, in which people of various ages were asked the question: "Do you want to swim with sharks?"

"The children reply unanimously with 'yes', while the adults answered 'it's crazy,'" says Dou Jingtong.

"Children are open to the world with their curiosity. I want to create a club, called Kids Only, to those who dare to dream and are willing to try everything."

One of her new songs is called Wu, which is her first one performed in Chinese. She had planned to make it into an instrumental work but during the recording, she felt right to sing in Chinese to the music. She wrote the lyrics in the recording room impromptu, she says.