Befitting her award-winning singer-songwriter stature, Joyce Lee arrives at the Cordis Hotel in Mong Kok with an entourage – her glam team, who promptly proceed to finish her hair and makeup. She also brings along her handy speaker for sounds to transport her into photo-shoot mode. “No, please don’t put on my music,” she exclaims, laughing. “I don’t like listening to myself!”

So we blast upbeat ’80s hits, among them Madonna’s Like a Prayer, and the Canadian-born Cantopop pioneer dances while striking her signature poses: arms raised, head tilted, that knowing half-smile that has been selling records since the mid-’90s. The hotel suite suddenly feels like a living room where someone decided that the only appropriate response to life is to groove.

Before the platinum plaques and the theme songs that became Hong Kong’s unofficial background music, there was a teenager in Toronto hammering out scales at the Royal Conservatory of Music. As Lee notes, the conservatory drilled discipline and technical skills into budding musicians until they were muscle memory.

“After all those hours of practice, you will master the mechanics of it,” she affirms as her hair stylist battles a particularly rebellious strand. “Once you have that foundation down, the real magic happens when you stop thinking about the rules and start putting your heart into the music.”

Singing in the Shower

That heart first oozed melodies about age 16, usually when she was in the shower. English lyrics arrived uninvited, tagging along with the tunes. Looking back, she’s grateful for the Hong Kong lyricists who turned those early, half-formed feelings into Cantonese that still landed with the force of a quiet confession. The Canadian conservatory gave her the hands; the shower gave her the soul. The rest was just timing, and a mother who refused to let a good song die as a B-side.

After decades of drowning in Cantonese covers of American and Japanese hits, by the early ’90s, Hong Kong radio and television started championing original songwriting. Into that opening walked a 19-year-old with a piano who cooed Western-accented Cantonese that made people smile. It was in 1994 that everything clicked. Her single, One Day I Will Touch Your Heart – which her mother insisted the record company push – made the Jade Solid Gold list of the year’s top 10 songs; her first, second and third solo album went double platinum, and she was serenaded as TVB’s Singer-Songwriter of the Year.

Performing Spirit

Lee’s producer had pushed her to write as well as sing and play, but the real spark for her compositions was loneliness. Fresh from the Toronto suburbs, newly signed, friendless and culturally adrift, she wrote English lyrics because the Cantonese words for “I feel lost and I need my voice to be heard” hadn’t arrived yet. The finished song carried that wish. “I just really wished to be understood through music,” she recalls.

Her popularity was underscored the following year when she performed the theme song of A Kindred Spirit, one of TVB’s longest-running dramas. For 1,128 episodes over four years, people let the ballad Love Your Life Without Regrets into their living rooms the way they let in the evening news. Fans still stop her on the street to tell her what was happening in their lives when the first notes hit.

“It feels so lovely and humbling to realise that my music became a part of their personal stories,” she says now. It confirmed that vulnerability with a piano heartbeat travels farther than any manufactured karaoke anthem.

Notes of Emotion

Three decades later, the process looks different. Experience has piled up: personal heartbreaks and career highs; surviving cancer; and the ordinary miracles of raising three boys with husband Ted Lee. She sits with close friends, talks the ideas through, and takes their honest feedback into the studio. Producer and piano become co-conspirators. The goal is no longer just a good melody; it’s one that matches the emotional core of the story she’s trying to tell.

Trends change fast, but Lee has grown braver. “When you’re younger, you worry so much about fitting into a specific mould,” she reflects. “But looking back now, there is really nothing to be afraid of anymore because, creatively speaking, anything goes.”

Since the release of her seventh album, Fantasy, in 2005, her impact has been measured through deep connection with the community – performing at charity events, local concerts, masterclasses, even with a choir for people who simply want to sing together. If her music makes someone feel less lonely and more seen, it is exactly as it was meant.

Scene & Heard

Hong Kong’s pop scene still has that 24/7 pulse she loves – a raw energy you can’t find anywhere else. What needs work, she says without hesitation, is infrastructure: more affordable rehearsal spaces, independent gig spots where young artists can experiment without booking a commercial venue that costs more than a month’s rent. The talent is here. The rooms just need to open.

As one of the first female Cantopop singer-songwriters, Lee remembers the scepticism. Producers handed her songs and images. As a young woman carrying her own compositions, production choices and lyricism, she had to work twice as hard in the studio to prove the doubters wrong. Today, aspiring female stars face different traps – social-media scrutiny, hyper-sexualisation, the relentless demand to be ‘relatable’. Her advice is characteristically direct: “You just have to out-sing the noise.”

Empowerment, for Lee, is not a slogan. It is internal clarity – the freedom to know your worth and act on it even when society prefers boxes. It is the daily resilience of getting back up after life knocks you down; the quiet decision to keep going and find your voice again.

That same clarity fuels her work as an ambassador for OneSky (formerly Half the Sky Foundation), which trains caregivers in Chinese orphanages to meet each child’s unique needs, and the Hong Kong Breast Cancer Foundation, where sharing her story of early detection, treatment and recovery is worth it if just one person listens. When she sits at the piano now, she is simply thankful that she is still here, breathing, creating.

Quiet Applause

Lee’s success used to be gauged by chart position, awards, airplay and applause. Today attainment comes from watching three boys grow, hearing them laugh, being with Ted – “my partner in crime and my biggest fan” – and the deep gratitude of still being healthy enough to share her music. “Happiness is waking up with peace in your soul, knowing that you survived,” she shares. “Realising every day you get to create, love and give back is an absolute gift.”

One of the keys to Joyce Lee’s triumphant journey through life is finding a reason to express gratitude and finding peace in her heart. Be it by being an inspiration to others, setting an example to society, or tuning into uplifting pop songs. Shoot completed, she heads home for some much-needed swimming therapy-cum-me time. It’s a passion she picked up from Ted, another kind of baptism, of letting the body move until the mind quiets.

The woman who danced to Madonna’s Like a Prayer in a hotel suite will soon be cutting through the water with the same quiet determination that once turned a shower melody into a double-platinum career. Through her music, we feel her power; it touches our hearts, drawing us into her world.

Interview, Text & Art Direction: Joseff Musa   Photographer: Jack Law   Videographer: Iris Ventura   Venue: Cordis Hotel Hong Kong   Stylist: Cecilia Yiu   Make-up: Gaby Makeup   Clothes: Zeemo at Walk in Closet   Jewelleries: K.S. Sze & Sons Jewels