“Family Puts Me Back In A Feeling Of Groundedness”: Eric Chou On Family, Fame And His Next Chapter

The first Eric Chou song I remember getting stuck on was “How Have You Been?”, like so many others at the time of its release. And like so many of his best songs, it had the rare ability to make human emotions feel communal. You could be alone in your room, on the train, walking home after a long day, and somehow there he was singing right into the part of your inner thoughts you didn’t have the words for.

There is a particular earnestness to Chou’s music that has always been hard to fake. He does not sing like someone trying to manufacture feeling for dramatic effect, but as someone who understands that life is rarely one emotion at a time. His songs have soundtracked breakups and almost-relationships, yes, but also first loves, reconciliations, quiet moments of gratitude, and the strange, hopeful experience of growing without ever fully having it together. There is sentimentality in his work, but never in a way that feels overworked.

That sense of emotional incisiveness is, in many ways, why Chou became one of Mandopop’s defining voices of his generation. Since his breakout, the Taiwanese singer-songwriter has built a career on turning vulnerability into melody, and melody into mass appeal. His hits are the sort that sneak up on you first, then follow you around for years: “Unbreakable Love”, “How Have You Been?”, “What’s Wrong”, and other songs in Chou’s discography have become a shared vocabulary for the emotionally fluent.

When we last met him four years ago, Chou was already no stranger to scale. He was successful, adored, and very clearly on an upward trajectory. Back then, his chapter was about a young artist whose music had carried him far beyond his beginnings. It was about momentum and ambition. Four years on and countless sold out arenas later, the frame has widened. Yet the man sitting in front of me feels more interested in talking about the very ordinary life that now keeps him tethered to earth.

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On the day of our shoot, Chou had flown in the night before. He is tired, understandably, as most human beings would be. After we wrapped, he is due to head straight to the concert venue to begin rehearsals for his Singapore shows. There is an entire machine moving around him: styling, grooming, production, management, the careful choreography that turns a person into a star.

Yet Chou arrives with a kind of suave nonchalance that resists reading as aloofness. He is relaxed, but not detached or icy, and it is when the conversation turns to his life as a family man that Chou lights up. The superstar setting slips away a little because suddenly, we are not talking about tour production, streaming algorithms or hit melodies; we are talking about wake-up times, school drop-offs, and the small domestic rituals that most parents know too well.

“Currently, I think my life is as normal as it can be,” he says with an honest smirk. “Three years ago, I would feel more like a celebrity. Now, having a family and being a father of two, my daily life is very normal, like anyone that’s raising a family... and I kind of like that. It puts me back in a feeling of groundedness.”

“Normal” is an interesting word when applied to Eric Chou. This is, after all, a man whose songs can turn arenas into mass karaoke therapy sessions. His latest world tour, “Odyssey Journey”, which brought him back to Singapore for two nights at the Singapore Indoor Stadium in April, belongs to spectacle, grand scale, and the big emotional architecture of pop stardom.

Yet when Chou speaks about where he is now, he does not begin from on high, but with family. His definition of success has changed too. Chou is not pretending to be indifferent to achievement, and thank goodness for that, because if we level for a minute, there is nothing more tedious than a successful person cosplaying as someone who does not care about success. Yes, Chou still wants to make great music and he still cares deeply about the work, but where success was once tied more closely to the idea of reaching the top, it is now measured through a different kind of responsibility.

“My definition of success is more what I can provide and build for the family now,” he says. “I think it’s more about the choices I make now, rather than trying to do everything.” And there it is: the new Eric Chou, no less ambitious and still more discerning. Time is no longer an abstract resource because today, it belongs to children, to music, to sleep if he can get it, to the occasional walk with his wife to their favourite breakfast spot. Fatherhood hasn’t made him smaller, but it has made his life more exacting. The stakes are more real.

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The Sound of Feeling

For an artist whose public identity is so deeply tied to emotion, Chou is surprisingly practical about his craft. He does not romanticise the writing process into some mysterious thunderbolt from the heavens, though he does allow that melody still arrives in flashes.

“Now, I try to find time to write songs. Sometimes I still have catchy melodies that will just show up, and I need to catch that quickly on my phone,” he ponders, before lightheartedly highlighting a reality many working dads can relate to. “But there are also moments where I’m ready to film a demo, my kid will be crying in the background, and I have to pause to take care of that first.”

It is a funny and sweet image: one of Mandopop’s most recognisable balladeers trying to put out a hit in between feeding times, but it also reveals something about the evolution of his artistry. Chou’s life has changed dramatically, but he does not frame his new music as a direct diary of fatherhood. He remains, at heart, a pop craftsman. He is still listening for the thing that cuts through.

“I wouldn’t call it magic ingredients,” he says, when asked if there is a secret formula to his music. “But when I have an idea, and I try to write it out, if I listen to it, I want to feel something. I want to feel, ‘Oh, this is a hit’. I can hear if it’s a hit melody or not. I feel like that’s one of my talents.”

Chou knows his instrument, and what it takes to shape a great song. That has always been the trick of great pop songwriting: too specific and the song becomes closed off; too vague, and it becomes wallpaper to be played in elevators. Chou has built his career in the nuanced space, where a personal feeling becomes large enough for strangers to inhabit.

The demands of music-making, however, have changed since Chou first broke through. The streaming era has altered how people discover songs, while TikTok has altered how quickly they decide whether to stay. For his upcoming album, expected at the end of 2026, Chou is thinking about pace. “With TikTok and [how] the pace is faster for this new generation, people have less time,” he says. He laughs when I suggest that it must be stressful writing for the TikTok generation. “Yeah, it is,” he admits. “But I feel like what I have now with a new album, I have some really catchy melodies that my fans really like. It leans closer towards R&B, but there are still ballads and it feels groovier.”

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A Different Kind of Stage

It is a revealing description, because Chou understands the emotional register his fans come to him for, but he is also not interested in simply remaking old songs with new titles. The new work, from what he hints, is more rhythmically alive. It is still Eric Chou, but with the pulse turned up. In conversation, Chou also mentions that acting has offered him a different kind of creative challenge. His new television project, Come On! Jinlaihao!, the Taiwanese adaptation of the hit Korean series Itaewon Class, marks another major chapter.

The series has been delayed for a while now, he lets on, but it is finally on its way to debuting. When he filmed it, he had just become a dad to his first-born daughter, then only four months old. Even then, the commitment was immense. “It was a four and a half month-long shoot,” he says. “I gave it my all, and I truly believe my fans will go crazy for it. The character is very full, and that’s what drew me in. My fans are used to just watching me sing, but with this project, it’s less ‘Eric Chou’ and more about myself inhabiting this character that people can relate to. I feel like they will really enjoy it.”

The experience was not easy. In fact, Chou’s first reaction after finishing the show was decisive. “When I finished the show, I told my manager, I don’t want to do any acting again,” he says, with a laugh. “Because that four and a half months took over my life. Every day and night was on set, and that’s not even counting the overtime shoots. But now I kind of miss how every day when you’re on the set, you want to improve yourself. You’re trying to chase something better in the next scene, or trying to do more, and that self-improvement is very addictive. In the TV show, the feeling of really syncing with that character, it felt freeing,” he says. “I was now this character, so it took a lot of stress off.”

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Finding Enough

Still, the centre of gravity in Chou’s life now is clearly his family, as our conversation rounds back here. Fatherhood has changed him in ways that are obvious, and in ways that he is still learning how to articulate. For starters, he sleeps less, which he notes is a universal experience. The day of our shoot, a sans-children Chou had an extra 30 minutes of sleep in the morning, which he jokingly calls a luxury.

“That’s my recent life,” he says. “Just taking care of my two children together with my wife as a team. It has matured me dramatically, because you need to be responsible for two human beings now, and then to also be a husband and a father… it’s everything all at once!”

There is no manual for this, of course. No amount of success prepares you for the strange and humbling labour of raising children. Fame is not much help at 6am when a child needs you. “It’s cute actually. My daughter knows that I sing for a living,” he muses. To millions, Eric Chou is a Mandopop megastar, but to his daughter, he is papa who sometimes leaves home to go on stage to perform.

Before marriage and children, Chou says he wanted to go “to the top”. Now, the top is still nice, but it is no longer the only measure. “Finding enough is important,” he says. “Chasing success is a never-ending path, so I think having the balance of family and also rest time is important. I try to live simply… I love walking with my wife to our favourite breakfast spot, sending my kids off to school, picking them up. It’s the regular run of daddy duties that makes me feel mentally healthy and happy because last year, at some point, I would do a concert every weekend, and I lost a sense of living.”

That line stays with me, and it is a startling admission from someone whose career, viewed from the outside, looks like the dream working exactly as intended. Yet the drone of constant performances can also detach a person from the very life that is supposed to feed the art. You can sing about feeling and slowly run out of time to feel anything properly. Perhaps that is why Chou is so committed to being present at home. He is aware of the old model of fatherhood, especially in many Asian households, where the father is cast primarily as provider, but he does not want provision to become an excuse for disappearance.

“I feel like it’s easy to just hide away from the kids,” he says, adding that he does not pretend to have instantly transformed into the fully enlightened modern father. He struggled, adjusted, and worked it out together with his wife.

That honesty matters because it makes the warmth of life feel earned. After all, stardom can lift a person very far from the ground, but for Chou, he has found a road to bring him back into real life. From this space, he now knows exactly what he is working for.

Editor-in-Chief: Kenneth Goh
Photography: Wee Khim
Creative direction: Windy Aulia
Additional styling: Gracia Phang
Grooming: Chen Anyan
Manicure: Rebecca Chuang/ Fluttery Tips
Photographer’s assistants: Alwin Oh

In collaboration with Chanel.