Are mui zyu and lei, e Happy?

Emma-Lee Moss — aka lei, e, and fka Emmy the Great — is a singer-songwriter based in London; mui zyu — aka Eva Liu — is a singer-songwriter also based in London. lei, e features on mui zyu’s new record, nothing or something to die for, so to celebrate its release, the two got on a call to catch up about how David Lynch and the idea of happiness inspired its creation, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music 

Emma-Lee Moss: I’m the luckiest person alive to sleepwalk onto your album.

Eva Liu: Oh, no!

Emma-Lee: It’s so good. I listened to it the other day when I was doing the kitchen, which is my special time, and it was just — it’s a real keeper.

Eva: Oh, thank you. I feel super honored and lucky to have your vocals on there. It just made “Sparky” a whole other level.

Emma-Lee: I love the talking points too, because it’s very rare these days that someone’s like, “Let’s talk about happiness.” Like, what a concept! [Laughs.] 

Eva: Yeah. The song is named after the dog in Blue Velvet. I don’t know if you remember the opening scene: There’s this dog biting at this hose that’s spitting out water, and it’s sitting on its dead owner. It’s like a moment of sort of simple, blissful and honest happiness, but with an undertone of something very dark and sinister.

Emma-Lee: Is that sort of human life?

Eva: Yeah. I’ve been intrigued to know if that was an accident when filming or if that was intentional, and if that was meant to reflect humans and how we distract ourselves all the time and not really pay attention with what’s really going on around us.

Emma-Lee: I definitely went through a David Lynch phase — I have that Twin Peaks coffee table book in here. One thing I really love from Blue Velvet is, there’s a monologue where Laura Dern is talking about how beautiful something can be, and there’s a bird song in the background. David Lynch’s stuff, there’s some stuff that really haunts me. Evil Bob is the scariest thing — if I ever see anyone crawling, I get really scared. And the strange figure in Lost Highway is one of the scariest things. In some ways, his work leaves me with this feeling of pure bliss and beauty, of innocence and romance, and that idea of birdsong and a really a young teenager full of potential being like, “This is my dream” — it’s weirdly beautiful.

Eva: Yeah, definitely the imagery and the cinematography really stick in my head. 

Emma-Lee: What is the horror? Because if you ever hear David Lynch talk, he seems like an entirely sunshiny, optimistic, vaguely Buddhist, Transcendental-Meditating, happy elf. Why is he so capable of these images that horrify us for the rest of our lives? As a character, I feel so safe thinking about David Lynch. Pleasant, on the side of the light… I watched this Instagram video the other day from this Buddhist older woman, and she was saying, “I don’t think that it’s about dark and light. I think it’s about shadow and light, because the light is always there. I know that there’s so many dark things, but I think that the inherent thing is the light, and we just keep standing in the way of it.” Which I thought was really cool.

Eva: I like that a lot. “Sparky” looks at the pressures of being happy, and how the pursuit of happiness can ironically make you unhappy. We all have these methods to be happy, and are often looking in the wrong places. As a jump-off point, I wanted to ask: how do you define happiness? And has it changed for you over time?

Emma-Lee: I think so. I think this last five years of life, the world is changing so much all the time. We’ve been through some crazy stuff collectively. It feels like everybody is going through this very grief-filled period of human history. So I would say that I’ve done a lot of very deep thinking, relative to me. I don’t know if I’m looking for happiness — like, is happiness the picture of you as you throw your wedding bouquet? Or is happiness an endorphin? In which case, is it going running? It’s hard to pin down what that is and how to sustain that. Which is maybe why “Sparky” is the perfect image, because the hose keeps getting out of the way, and then the impulse for happiness starts again. I read this quote from the Guardian that said, at her age — [the writer] is maybe 75 — the pressure to be happy is not really a bother for her. She’d more like to be interested and authentic as a human, instead of being like, “I’m happy all the time.” It’s like, “I’m interested in lots of things as they meet me.” Like my pal Jon Ronson says, there’s no evidence that we are even supposed to be perfectly happy, you know? No evidence to say that we shouldn’t be flawed, anxious.

Eva: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

Emma-Lee: Giving in to that is part of what makes me just be like, OK, there’s no gold standard.

Eva: Yeah, absolutely.

Emma-Lee: This is a really weird thing, but happiness for me recently has been completely giving in to grief and just being like, Oh, my god, I regularly feel very, very sad. There’s change all the time. You lose people from your life, you don’t get them back. You change. You know you want something, you don’t get it, and that’s sad. And somehow just accepting that has made me feel maybe that more settled happiness of like, “Weather is nice today.” [Laughs.] 

Eva: Yeah. I feel like it’s also important not to feel like you have to chase happiness. I find for me, happiness is quite fleeting, and it always comes at unexpected moments. I never am like, I need to feel happy all the time. I’m happy in feeling angry. I think everyone should use that anger to make change. I don’t think being happy all the time is a healthy thing to seek. 

You often need to feel sad in order to feel happy. And I think it’s also important to be out of your comfort zone and to keep learning. But then on on the other hand as well, I think it’s also important to laugh and be silly.

Emma-Lee: Is that happiness to you? Is laughing happiness? I can’t even get my head into what happiness is now. 

Eva: Ever since I thought this would be an interesting thing to discuss, I have been like, What is happiness? I don’t know. I don’t know how to define it. 

Emma-Lee: OK, tell me a time that you were happy.

Eva: I think spending time with people who I really care about and people that also think life is absurd — those deep connections with people make me happy. Making art with other people makes me happy. 

Emma-Lee: Do you think happiness is about human connection?

Eva: Yeah, I think so.

Emma-Lee: Because I was thinking in Chinese how it’s “open heart” — “開心 [hoi sam].”

Eva: Oh, yeah! I always forget that that’s the actual translation of 開心. I was looking more into what it means to be happy and the ideas of happiness in Chinese culture, and I feel like a lot of it is centered around having good fortune.

Emma-Lee: Is that why we’re actually so sad now? [Laughs.] The idea of happiness as just, like, wealth?

Eva: [Laughs.] Yeah, I think in today’s modern, capitalist world, people probably interpret that as having lots of money, but I don’t know if that’s originally where it came from, having “good fortune.” Like the Five Blessings Symbol, with the five bats that represent longevity, wealth, health and composure, love or virtue, and timely, peaceful death.

Emma-Lee: Oh, that’s very relevant, isn’t it? We never think about that one. I was going to bring my one piece of Chinese art symbolism knowledge — the bat is the symbol for luck because 蝠 [fuk, the Cantonese word for bat] is the same sound as 福 [fuk, the Cantonese word for prosperity and good fortune]. Because my dad is a Chinese art specialist, one thing that I know is that if you see a bat, it means luck, because it’s a homonym. 

But that sounds great. I’ll take it. I don’t think they would have thought of wealth as what we do — in this society, wealth is like hoarding. “Oh, I’m a billionaire and I sit on my money, and people who work in my warehouses make less than they need.” Wealth and abundance in the kind of harmonic, traditional Chinese sense — I bet it doesn’t mean Scrooge McDuck, sitting-in-a-cold-room-with-all-my-cash. Chinese principles are very health-related, and I would have thought that the wealth in that would be more like a cycle of, “I have enough to give, enough to live and be healthy and well,” rather than what we think of as wealth now.

Eva: Growing up, I feel like the idea of success was to have a good job and a good income, and like that would make me happy. I used to think that as a child, and I was urged to pursue a stable career. But obviously, I did the opposite and pursued a music career.

Emma-Lee: There’s no career more stable than indie musician in 2024, Eva. A very sensible move.

Eva: [Laughs.] I know. How did your parents feel about you pursuing music?

Emma-Lee: My parents… I feel like they forced me to do it. [Laughs.] I’m always just like, “Did you do this for me? Did you push me into this role?” I’m always like, How much of my life did I do because of my own decisions, and how much was I just trying to make my parents happy? My dad is now an artist — after he retired, he became an artist. They always thought I was an artist. That was a nice thing. You know, I’ve got a lot of blocks in my life, but that’s not one of them. That voice in my head, whenever it’s like, Should I make art or should I do this sensible thing? The voice is always like, Make art. It was very, very, very lucky that I had my dad’s voice in my ear. My mum, I think she was interested in me pursuing a career that was slightly more tangible in terms of success measurements, but she sort of gave up on it. 

Eva: Yeah. My family definitely kept trying to push me away from anything creative. I was failing in most of my school subjects, but all the creative stuff I was much better at. But they were like, “But what are you going to do with that?” But, yeah, here I am today, still doing it. 

Emma-Lee: Yeah, and doing it amazingly, and making people actually happy when we listen to your music.

Eva: Thank you. I just feel like with this album, it’s been amazing, having collaborated with such great artists. That’s made me very happy to have that connection with people like yourself.

Emma-Lee: I don’t know if I said this while the recording was on, but I feel a bit too lucky. It’s just like wandering down the street in Hackney and you’re like, “Come inside and be on a great album!”

Eva: It’s been amazing having collaborated with you over the past few years. Even playing together at St. Matthias—

Emma-Lee: That made me really happy when we sang Cantopop together. That was a very deep happiness. Like, I had sung Cantopop before, and I’ve had amazing friends who have actually tried to sing harmonies in Cantonese with me despite having never heard Cantonese before. But to sit next to you and we knew the songs — and not only that, we were in London. No one had asked us to do these songs, we were just doing them. I think it shifted a lot for me. It was this catharsis of — sometimes there are things that make us happy because they’re resolving the things that make make us sad. Like, Wait, I never thought that this weight would be lifted, and look, it’s been lifted. That is a really nice type of happy. And I got that when we sang together.

Eva: Yeah, I know what you mean. Things like that come as a surprise.

Emma-Lee: You don’t know how important it could be to just sing a song out loud with a friend.

Eva: Absolutely. It’s a moment that I really will cherish forever, just playing with you.

Emma-Lee: And we’ve had some really special gigs. I think they’re some of my favorite ever gigs. My mum came to a couple of them actually — she just happened to be right place, right time — and I was like, “This is my friend, her band is called mui zyu.” And she was like, “Oh yeah, 妹豬 [“little sister pig”].” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, because you know what that means. I don’t have to explain it.” [Laughs.] She was like, “Aw, I used to call you 女豬 [neoi zyu].” So she called me her “daughter pig,” which sounds very cruel, but it was very kind.

Eva: Oh, that’s so sweet. I’ve been really enjoying whenever I say my name to Cantonese speakers. When I hear people say it, that makes me very happy.

Emma-Lee: I think that’s something for so long I had never — I mean, I’ve said this to you before, that when I was young trying to be a singer-songwriter, my representation was a Weezer album about Asian fetishization.

Eva: Is that the Pinkerton album? 

Emma-Lee: Yeah, yeah, which was my favorite record. And it was technically a satire on an older guy creeping on a young, half-Asian girl, but it’s what I’ve got, you know? And also, James Iha from The Smashing Pumpkins has one solo album — a country album — and that was my representation when I was trying to make music. I think the fact that people go to pieces when they hear your band name shows what a desert it has been, just how little Cantonese I’ve heard out loud since living in the UK. 

Eva: Yeah. So we’ve spoke a lot about dreaming and deep listening — is deep listening still a big part of your life?

Emma-Lee: Yeah. The deep listening really did make me happy. The acronym of deep listening that they tell you is a take on LOL — it’s like a joke, but it’s LOJ, and it stands for “lift off judgment.” They’re like, “when you’re listening, lift off judgment. Just because it’s a harsh sound — it’s a coffee machine sound, or it’s the sound of someone making a raspberry with their mouth — it doesn’t mean it’s a bad sound.” And then in your dreams, lift off judgment — just because you dreamed about your mother doesn’t mean you have to call Freud. Tai chi was part of it. I was really not inside my body. I thought of myself as someone who does a lot of thinking; I don’t dance at parties, my exercise is private to me. And then we were doing group tai chi, and gradually I just felt like I was lifting off judgment of my body. When you don’t judge yourself as much, that’s when happiness comes in.

Eva: Yeah, absolutely.

Emma-Lee: It really changed my life, and I still do loads and loads of dreaming. I do qigong now in the mornings, that I got taught during a songwriting retreat. It’s really great and it helps with the dreaming somehow. Before the gig that we did in Shoreditch Town Hall — which was my last gig as Emmy the Great, and I was so sad and under so much pressure — that was when I had my best lucid dream. In the dream I was like, Wait, this is a dream? And I picked up my kid and we were flying and we were like, “We can do anything we want!” I woke up and I was it was like I’d had a juice cleanse and then done seven hours of yoga, and then someone gave me a cocktail featuring psilocybins or something. I woke up and I was like, I feel so good. Do you fly in your dreams? 

Eva: No. Not yet, anyway.

Emma-Lee: You can do practice flying. You can fly in your room and practice how you want to fly. I think it helps. I changed how I fly in my dreams from doing that…

Eva: Oh, really? I guess another question, sort of referring back to happiness, is: what do you do for fun that makes you happy?

Emma-Lee: You know, I’m really realizing that a lot of the things that make me happy are work related. You know, this makes me happy; I know this is friends hanging out, but it’s also related to our music practices. And I love writing a song. I love teaching songwriting. Recently I was thinking a lot of the ways I hang out with my friends is through professional [channels] — I’d be like, “I just hung out with my friend!” No, you just did their podcast. [Laughs.] I like gardening. I like looking after my plants. I’d really like to find a way to be amongst people and be happy without having a role to play, as a facilitator or a podcast guest or something. How about you? What makes you happy?

Eva: I mean, I love going for walks, just even walking around London. It’s such a great way to step back and reassess stuff — somewhere with huge trees, that’s a bonus.

Emma-Lee: Trees are so amazing. I took a train this weekend, and I just felt so excited about the landscape, and for a moment I was happy. And then I was too excited to actually truly call myself happy, because I was just like, This is so amazing! I have to think about this landscape — what does it mean? Oh no, it’s gone! Doesn’t happiness so often trip over into anxiety? 

Eva: Yeah, that’s so true.

Emma-Lee: I think people can feel happiness because of awe, but it trips too quickly into, “Do something about it.” Cultivating that stillness is a big part of happiness. 

Eva: I find sometimes you want to grasp on to it, but as a result, you’re stressed it’s gone.

Emma-Lee: It’s like when you have a camera at a party and you’re like, “This is great, I should take a picture!” You can’t enjoy yourself.

Eva: You just need to let it happen and absorb it with your eyes. I mean, I’ve been really enjoying playing the piano more recently, and that’s been making me feel very happy, I guess. Because I used to play the piano when I was younger, and then when I started pursuing music writing, I’ve always just used the guitar. But I’ve recently gone back to playing the piano more and learning pieces that I really love. And just exploring another person’s work… The sound of the piano always makes me happy.

Emma-Lee: It’s like a sound bath you give yourself, isn’t it? The harmonics.

Eva: Absolutely.

Emma-Lee: I want to talk to you about harmonics, because “Sparky” is this really interesting song. It’s about happiness, but it’s kind of ominous chord-wise, you know? And the melody for me — I’ve got quite a robust backing singing history, and I just kept losing the melody. I was like, What is this?

Eva: [Laughs.] I’m so sorry.

Emma-Lee: It’s an incredibly slippery note sequence. I was just like, Wow, the song is about happiness and it’s telling a completely different story musically. I love that about your music. Your music is so dark and light and you always do something slightly unexpected, but not so unexpected that the ear doesn’t enjoy it. It’s just so cool.

Eva: Oh, thank you. When I’m writing melodies, I like to do something that’s a bit uncomfortable or a bit surprising for a listener. And sometimes I don’t do it intentionally — that’s just how I’ve become comfortable writing, to make something a bit uncomfortable. I’m always interested in unusual melodies and contrasting melodies with quite sweet lyrics, and just making it a bit more jarring.

Emma-Lee: The songs are very pondering. They’re very philosophical when you’re listening to the lyrics. It’s a lot like David Lynch! I think you’ll take this the right way — I think of your melodies and chords as slightly gruesome. You’ve got a horror element to it, in this like, “Dun dun dun — you didn’t expect that!” Then there’s this very sweet pondering on top. You come away as a listener with an optimistic view of the world. 

Eva: Yeah.That’s a great observation. I welcome that.

Emma-Lee: It’s a sweet darkness. It’s just a really nice contrast, and it leaves a great feeling. 

(Photo Credit: left, Tia Liu; right, Alex Lake)