“Everyone feels like a dark horse sometimes,” Li Ronghao tells Apple Music. “Maybe not all the time…from a young age, each of us feels like there’s an area where we’re talented or could do great things. It’s just that we ourselves don’t know what might set it off. There are lots of things about ourselves that we don’t know.” The ten tracks on his 2024 album The Dark Horse were rolled out over the course of six months, a pre-release strategy Li first employed on 2020’s Sparrow to give each song a space of its own. The practice also lets his work reveal the ebb and flow of his daily life. Known for a keen ear for soulful guitar rock and a storyteller’s attention to detail, the singer-songwriter and producer finds grandeur in the commonplace. “I feel like I’ve been recording the mood of my life,” he says. “So you’ll hear something sweet and something meaningless, you’ll hear sadness and warmth. That’s what makes up life.” Below, Li offers Apple Music some insights into how the album came to be. “I’m not a concept guy, I’m an action guy.” The gradual roll-out of the tracks on his album reflects Li’s approach to music itself. “People like the concept of an album,” he says, but he notes that his albums, by contrast, tend to be in a mix of genres untethered to a master concept. “I’m a music maker. I work in the studio, from clicking the MIDI roll all the way to mixing,” he says. “So for me, the music itself is what’s important.” Li’s focus on the music extends to his professional life as well, he adds. “The past few years I’ve deliberately taken a temporary step back from the industry. I’ve cut out basically all variety shows and done just two things: concerts and fishing.” “Details reveal unplanned emotions that turn out to be the most honest and moving.” Known for his convincing love songs, Li reveals that genuine emotion lies in the details. “When I’m writing my sweet songs, half will be sweet but the other half will have details of life,” he says. Songs such as “Wander” and “The Other Side” deal with family affection—subject matter that even Li finds difficult to handle. “Go too far and it’s maudlin and tacky, but don’t go far enough, and even if it’s actual emotion it won’t seem like anything at all,” he says. “I’m afraid of saccharine emotion—and I’m afraid of people being overly sentimental towards me. Whenever that happens, I’ll resort to making jokes.” The details of life in his songs often come from further afield. “The place I go fishing has monkeys, two packs of them across from me, and they’re always fighting,” he says. “I think it’s wonderful, that kind of communing with nature. I’m a city person, so I have a pretty hazy image of nature. But in the two or three years I’ve been fishing, I’ve gained a crystal-clear picture of the outdoors. The scent returns to my nostrils and I can imagine the air, the mosquitos at night. The song ‘Ordinary Love’ was written during that period.” “While I’m arranging, I’m usually thinking about the mix.” The title track of The Dark Horse is driven by fingerstyle guitar using Celtic tuning, which leaves lots of resonant open strings. “Fingerstyle has such an accessible sound because one person can handle everything; the rhythm, bass, harmony and melody all come from that one guitar,” Li says. “You can force in drums, bass and piano but to me that doesn’t feel as powerful. Still, there’s no right or wrong in music—you can add in 200 or 500 tracks if you want but I don’t see the point.” He does confess that early in his career he’d show up to meet the producer with hundreds of tracks. “There’s no limit when you’re arranging on a computer,” he says. “Those old-timers were badass because they had to be—they only had eight tracks, so everyone had to be on point and they had to record together.” These days, Li follows a more constrained approach, calling himself an old-school producer at heart. “I try to keep things down to the bare essentials,” he says. “Mixing is a sound game, not a music game. You’re trying to strike a balance between your ears, your brain and the songs you’ve heard before. I think everything out before I act these days. I don’t finish the arrangement and then consider what to cut out. I’ll think about the mix as I’m arranging the song.” “You can’t manufacture romance.” “Lovers”, Li’s version of a Juice Liu love song, is the only cover on the album. Liu’s original is something of a tribute to Li, who delighted in returning the favour. “The original artist probably didn’t know I was covering his song—all he knew was that someone had bought the rights,” Li says. “I loved it from the moment I heard it. And I didn’t change a word or a note in my version.” But he did bring his own ideas to the arrangement, creating a finely crafted accompaniment of strings and guitars. “I wanted something gorgeous and clean, something you can’t get with actual drums. And I used a synth bass for smoothness, softness and control, because a real bassist has too much variation, too much emotion. When there’s too much movement, the whole atmosphere gets less exquisite.” “I’m convinced that keeping busy is the best way to tackle anxiety.” For “Everything”, an upbeat synth-pop anthem created for a Pepsi ad campaign, Li was given creative liberty and a brief to investigate the attitudes of young people. “I found they don’t want to do anything with you just for show,” he says. “If they don’t like it, they don’t like it. But when I think about it, I’m the same way. I don’t want to do anything I don’t like.” After hearing from his students, many of whom are young, that anxiety is a thorny problem, he offers own approach: “The lyrics say, ‘The way to cure anxiety is to bounce back.’ Try not to analyse it.” “It doesn’t come easy—but I really love learning.” Thirty years after first picking up a guitar, Li is still challenging himself to learn new things. “Even today, I practise at least an hour a day,” he says. “The effective kind of practice, with a metronome, without watching TV. When I started out, most of us used alternate picking, up-down-up-down with the right hand. Later guitarists came up with something called economy picking. To the listener, there’s not a whit of difference between the two. But I wanted to learn it and have spent three or four years practising. The hardest thing is changing a 30-year habit. I just want to master them both, not for any particular reason or to show off anywhere, but purely for my own sense of accomplishment. That’s all.”