“What is lord of your life?” asks Yoga Lin. “Confusion, fear, perfection or hate? Don’t let those rule your life. Love is lord.” The Taiwan-based singer’s cooly elegant sixth studio album Love, Lord is a meditation on the power of love that traces an awakening understanding of what’s truly important. “This lord exists in everyone’s heart,” Lin tells Apple Music. “The thing you care about most may become lord of your life.” The love that Lin finds on the album takes many forms, from the street soundtrack turned tender lullaby “Garbage Baby” to the classic Mandopop sound of “A Family of Love”—the artist has a knack for subverting expectations. “Lots of people don’t realise that ‘Wordless Groans’ is a love song, because the musical quality doesn’t quite fit what’s normal for a Mandopop ballad,” he says. “But ‘Who Doesn’t Wanna’ most definitely is.” He describes “Punishment”—which pairs with closer “To Forgive” to bookend his journey of love—as an offbeat take on a quintessential rock ballad: “In my understanding of Mandopop, it’s alternative and a little extreme. It’s got thunder, lightning and screams, after all. But I do think the melody is pretty emotional, just not all that sentimental.” “To the best of my ability, I hope the music on this record can touch all people who speak and understand Chinese—and can have a positive effect in our lives,” Lin says. Below, he shares with Apple Music some stories behind the production of the album. Lin on love “The songs on this album represent some of what I’ve learned about love—but this album doesn’t cover everything,” Lin says. The song “But I Wanna Be With You” approaches love by way of death. “If you’ve had the experience of losing friends or family, then what it boils down to is that we’re all just individuals and have no way to understand or comprehend everything. But in the face of death, I still believe that love endures,” he says. With its subject matter concerning the dearly departed, the song uses a player piano for an additional otherworldly quality. “Imagine this song in the studio, and then a piano performing without anyone playing it. Add that to the theme, and I feel it’s pretty apt,” he says, adding: “I believe that love transcends death. Love is everlasting.” Lin on pianos The player piano is just one Lin’s keyboard experiments on the album. “We took a piano tour all over the place—and even visited a Taipei collector who had an entire floor filled with all kinds of pianos, from the commonplace to the extraordinary. It really felt like visiting a musical instrument museum,” Lin says. “When it came time to lay down the songs, we used two pianos. One was played by a real keyboardist and the other was the player piano—it was recorded live, but the piano played automatically. Only one song on the album uses a software piano; it had an old tone with the warmth of a vintage memory, so we used it on the song I did with Yen-j, ‘A Family of Love’.” Lin on vocals “It’s probably been over a decade since I’ve recorded vocals at HIM International Music,” Lin says. “In the past I always had the notion that I wanted to move beyond HIM’s production and strike out on my own.” Having difficulty achieving the ASMR-like delivery of a line on “Night of Weeping”, a producer jokingly challenged him to record his vocals without any pitch correction. He tried various studios but eventually found that a small room at HIM expressly intended for vocal tracks gave him the environment he needed. “All of the songs—except for ‘Otomen’—were recorded in that room using the same microphone,” Lin says. Did he conquer the challenge? “There really are some songs on the album that don’t have any tuning,” he admits. “And most of these came near the end of production. When Elisa Lin, who produced ‘Marry Him’, went to edit after I finished laying down my vocals, she let me hear the rough version. I said, ‘Wow! That’s brilliant editing! You make me sound so natural!’ She said, ‘I didn’t tune a single note.’” Lin on “Otomen” “Otomen”, a sweet love song with a chillwave vibe, appears on the album in two versions: the previously released single and “The Blueprint of Otomen”, which has the raw feel of a demo. “I did a making-of video about the arrangement and production of ‘Otomen’ but kept one thing a secret—the vocal,” Lin says. “People say the vocal sounds like it’s coming through a phone, right? I couldn’t seem to get the effect I wanted singing through a large-diaphragm mic—it turned into a different song with a different vibe. So what did I end up using? My iPhone’s earbuds. And what was my studio? A wardrobe in my uncle’s kid’s room. It was really hot, hiding in there like Doraemon.” Lin on mixing and mastering The cool elegance that Lin had in mind for the album matched the feeling he got listening to Mac Miller’s posthumous 2020 full-length Circles. Impressed by the grooves and ambience, he was inspired to seek out members of that album’s production team, specifically mixing engineer Greg Kollor and mastering engineer Patricia Sullivan. “I looked into their other work and discovered that lots of the music I loved had a sound that combined the two of them,” Lin says. “So when I think of the sound on this album, it really has that Mac Miller ambience, made Chinese. I don’t think Greg Kollor had worked on Chinese songs before. There’s a different sensitivity in English and Chinese to dental consonants—z, c, s and such. I won’t lie to you: When the first version of ‘Wordless Groans’ came back, my heart sank. The Chinese feel was gone. But all my partners said they thought it was really well done, since he had made the music sound wonderful. Later, my producer Leticia Wong—who’s also a mixing engineer—gave feedback on that level and when the second version came back, it was in the right state.” Lin on serendipity Daryl Yao, a lyricist that Lin worked with as far back as “Freedom” from the 2011 album Perfect Life, penned the reflective track “Who Doesn’t Wanna”. “I discussed the content of the song with [Yao] and when he showed up, it was really a case of perfect timing,” Lin says. “We already had the track order in place, so he told me the song should go right after ‘Good Night Marie’ [a Cantonese duet with Terence Lam] and before ‘Daily Prayer’. Without knowing either song, Yao had ended his lyrics with the lines, ‘Who doesn’t want to have their loneliness shared/Who doesn’t want to be open about their difficulties’, which dovetails exactly with the sharing and speaking in ‘Daily Prayer’. That was really, really lucky!”