“I’ve been thinking about life stages,” Dadado Huang tells Apple Music. “When you’re a student, you really do have the sense that life is made up of stages like a ladder. Since leaving school, I’ve been in music, so the phases are like a blurred line, with no clear boundary between lots of events. I often pinpoint past events as occurring between particular albums—they’re the break points in my adult life.” The artist’s stage of life in 2024 is represented by 一切平常 [Everything Is Normal], his first album since 2016’s Insomniac. Eight years have passed since that album, long enough for Huang to reassess his life from a more expansive, mature perspective—as in album opener “我的朋友都結婚了” [“My Friends Are All Married”], a brass-driven, self-mocking dismissal of the youthful exuberance of songs like “Party Until Dawn”. Based in Taipei, the artist draws from across Taiwan in his search for creative sparks—from the landscape to the people. “For inspiration, the past few years I’ve been drawn to nature—the feel of the mountains in particular,” Huang says. “I love everything about the Pingxi Line, as well as Changbin, Miaoli, Changhua and Xizhou. There’s a feeling of escaping the city on this album.” Huang singles out a few of Taiwan’s artists whose music has particularly influenced him: “Cheer Chen’s writing, Ze Hwang’s colloquial lyrics, Summer Lei’s touches of intense sadness, 1976’s cities. In my mind, these are all Taiwan—anything happening or experienced in Taiwan resonates with its people.” The yearning of people working away from their families resonates in the moody track “想回家的時候” [“Wanting to Go Home”], which Huang says was in inspired by Balaz Lee of 88 Balaz: “He said, ‘People in Taipei have no homesickness,’ so my inspiration came from the people around me working in Taipei who are from other places.” The video for the song was completed with noted animation director Ping-An Huang. “She wrote me two or three years ago offering to work with me on a music video since she loved my songs,” the musician says. “Sure, I replied, but you might need to wait a while. Later, I fell in love with her picture book Rules of the Volcano—in that light style I could see an intense sadness. We had just one meeting in which she went logically through a completed script. I feel we’re quite similar in our ways of depicting loneliness or sadness—our work isn’t violent but shows the withered husk that remains once the violence is over.” Although his work is often classified as contemporary folk, Huang eschews localism or a specific rural identity. “I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know what’s meant by folk music,” he says. “My first impression was that it was a musical style that used simple instrumentation and simple lyrics but I later realised it wasn’t quite that simple… Later I felt that when your music represents where you come from, that’s folk music. It’s rare that I deliberately pursue local sentiment. It wasn’t a part of my background growing up and I’ve been in Taipei my whole adult life—it would be weird to force it into my songs.” In his thirties when he discovered his Hakka heritage, Huang sees it as a source of inspiration in his life even if it has yet to show up in his music. “I spent a wonderful, carefree time in Toufen and felt like I made a connection. I only learned later from my mother that my grandmother had lived there,” he says. “I’m at a stage now where I’m gradually studying the Hakka language and culture, not out of a sense of duty or with the intent of writing songs but simply because I feel I ought to know something about it. Taiwan’s a place of many languages, so naturally I write using the languages I’m used to. It’s not a deliberate choice.” Huang often augments his own distinctive folk style through collaborations with artists from a range of genres. A rap track with a chill, lo-fi vibe, ‘公館賈伯斯’ [‘Gongguan Jobs’] is a collaboration with PUZZLEMAN. “He’s an old friend,” Huang says. "When I asked for his help, I just gave him a pretty basic demo without making any particular requests. What I got from him was perfect on the first listen. I love the wonderful surprises I get when I open up files from my collaborators. I remember I messaged him saying, ‘This feels like Kyoto.’ PUZZLEMAN has a great aesthetic sensibility.” Wu Zhining, Huang’s bandmate in the indie rock group 929, appears on another collaboration, the bilingual guitar duet ‘西瓜甜不甜’ [‘Sweet Watermelon’]. “I love the Mandarin-Hokkien vocal interplay,” Huang says. “Don’t you think it’s romantic to have a dialogue between two different languages, both of which you understand? Oh, and I love the music as well. In all the years we’ve known each other, this was our first time writing a song together. It went fast and we just clicked—and once it was arranged, it unexpectedly had a European feel to it.” The track simmers with a bossa nova rhythm—but Huang isn’t satisfied: “I’ve always wanted to do real bossa nova. I only know a little bit. Real bossa nova is hard.” Huang produced the album with Blaire Ko, who took the lead on most of the tracks. “He had lots of ideas and a sense of the big picture. But he’s flexible—which worked well, because I’m flexible too,” Huang says. “We’d suddenly decide six hours before recording to add a new section with new lyrics. Or we’d be in the studio and ask a friend to come in and add shouts.” Ko added wind instruments, while Huang brought aDAN and Brandy in to sing harmonies. Moments of serendipity occasionally resulted in songs vastly different from their original intent. “After mastering was complete, Ko and I spoke on the phone,” Huang says. “It was a lovely conversation between two Aquarians—and we felt the album ended up a little different from our initial conception. It was a pleasant surprise with lots of unexpected developments. Adult and urban, warm and embracing, strong and relaxed.” Asked to single out a few tracks from the album for listeners, Huang says: “Hearing is believing so I won’t say too much—I’ll be as brief as possible.” In addition to “想回家的時候”, he recommends two additional tracks: “I never imagined ‘我的朋友都結婚了’ would turn out the way it did. It’s great—that shouting in the middle is wonderfully provocative. And ‘今天起’ [‘Starting Today’] was the final song completed for this album. Like I said earlier, every album is a break point. So this is mine—a break point set calmly in place.”