At 36, and just past two major turning points in her life (move and marriage), Swift doesn't much miss the frenetic pace of the Western music business, but she remembers when her first disavowal of the music scene bit the dust. Newly arrived in China – as a student of the language and in a carefree academic milieu – the joys of her youthful, early career days returned. Because of course she was asked to perform, at places like Lush, Club 13 and the old Yugong Yishan. And she did, with all the spontaneity her art afforded her before her passion had become a business, "It was kind of fun to do what I did as a young musician, playing by myself, before I had a band. I felt liberated, relaxed and happy," she admits. Choosing to come to China, she thought was tantamount to turning her back on music for a while.

For fully two years she went back and forth between Canada and China, much to the frustration of her musical colleagues back home. She met and befriended other musicians in China, including Guo Jian, leader of a reggae band. With her teaching experience giving workshops in songwriting and the music business at Canada's Ryerson University and Humber College, and institutions in the Northeast US, Swift was awarded contracts to teach songwriting and contemporary piano at the MIDI School of Music in Beijing and Canadian culture at Tsinghua University. During this early China phase, she was asked to join the University of Rhode Island Colloqium series about art and social justice, as both an artist and a performer, and continued to do shows in other parts of Canada and the US. At that time, China was still the destination and Canada was still her home.

The fire-wind-water creature finally picked up her fourth element in China, coming to earth in late 2008 when she moved to Beijing, then marrying long time boyfriend Guo Jian the next year. It was clear from the beginning that she had and would fail, completely, to stay out of the music business while in China. Even her failures work; this one amounted to breaking new ground as the only foreign female singing in both Chinese and English in China, another unlikelihood that distinguishes her art. Ember's face lights up when she explains why she's back on stage, writing and recording, even in a sense back into the music business she fled. From December 2009 to January 2010 Swift was on tour in Australia. This year things have come full circle; she is once again stepping into the business end of music, by raising funds for her next recording project.

"China's music scene is growing here like it was in the West 30 years ago. It's such an interesting time because so many new styles are emerging." This will be her 11th album since 1996 and the first to include her Beijing band. But don't ask about career plans – it doesn't work like that for her right now. She does what she's moved to do, equally enthused about learning Tai Chi, transforming her large sixth floor balcony into a hanging garden of organic vegetables, or participating in the cultural rituals of her Chinese husband and in-laws. Her last album got nominated in the World Music category of the 2010 Toronto Independent Music Awards, but this feels more like something that is just part of her life and not the next leg of the career path.

It's not that there aren't challenges or that she doesn't think about them. However stimulating China's music industry, she points out that because China's development is not complete, it lacks an infrastructure for calculating, collecting and paying royalty rights – for anyone except the really big stars. The process of vetting artists and songs for music festivals is lengthy, and recently world-scale events such as the Shanghai Expo, and before that, the 60th Anniversary of the People's Republic, and before that the Olympic Games, meant cultural and administrative priorities were elsewhere. Musicians have been largely confined to the club circuit these last three years, and about this they voice complaints about the insufficient venues for musical acts in Beijing. "Toronto has five million people and countless venues with proper sound systems. Beijing has 18 million people and I can count the suitable stages and clubs on my fingers," Swift points out.

But in China, one person's complaint is another person's business niche. It's clear to Swift that this city is still the place to be if you are an artist of any kind in China. The innovation and creativity is happening in Beijing, at the intersection of cultures. So the couple accepts personal stresses too: tours separate her from her husband (her fall 2010 tour sent her leapfrogging through the Northeastern US and Central Canada), and the situation may not improve, what with Guo Jian's own band Long Shen Dao releasing its first album January 2011.

Swift now thinks of progress in terms of exploration of her art, and this is happening in tandem with a deepening of feeling for her adopted country. Her band regulars are Zac Courtney, an Australian, on drums, and Paplus Ntahombaye from Barundi on bass, but she wants more regular involvement from erhu player Wang Yaqi; the album Lentic relied on another traditional Chinese instrument, the guzheng with extraordinary results. She continues to study Chinese; in fact she and her husband communicate in Chinese, and as she was not a proficient enough speaker when they first met, they did it through music.

She's got fans everywhere and she's making friends, but without these human bridges, the experience in China can be tough she confesses – one of isolation, and yet "a good lesson for a whitey," says Swift with a grin. As for cultural lessons, she was willing to address how good the fit was between her profile as an activist and China's current development:

More specifically, on the irony of booming car sales in traffic-choked Beijing vs China's leading position in implementing green technology, Swift repeats that the world is full of contradictions, but that, "There's another layer of awareness that comes from being out in the world, away from 'home'. I used to define activism through the lens of politics, especially US politics in the Bush years." Marching and picketing aren't the only ways to be seen and heard, the music-maker feels; living with integrity, walking your talk, looking at others with compassion are also forms of activism. "I feel have no right to speak with authority about a culture I am not really a part of; my judgments would be coming out of the bias of being brought up in a democratic society. It's so common for us to have opinions about other countries without ever looking at our own problems – or looking at issues from within the relative safety of our own systems. I have a sense of fluidity about these matters now – culture is a living thing, it's always moving."

Other musical transplants, the Kentucky Bluegrass band the Redbucks are certainly active types too, and as they are technically not professional musicians, they benefit even more from being based in Beijing. Their leader, Chris "Bonedaddy" Boehner, got busy in the early part of the last decade in Sanlitun's old bar district. He still likes small clubs and live gigs. From their perspective and at this stage of the Rebucks' ambitions, there are few problems with the music scene. "It is so well connected; you always know what's going on through blogs like Beijing Daze." The music scene just gets better and better in Beijing for amateur bands like the Redbucks, and one of the reasons for that Boehner says is that "it does not take much money to live for music here – just flexibility and ingenuity." All the Redbucks have "day jobs" but not jobs that take up a lot of their time. This means there are always a few hours a day to play or practice, and as "Bonedaddy" points out, "It's hard to get those circumstances in an international city."