China Forbes musical career, in many ways, began at Harvard University, the venerable institution that has given the world such famous people as President George W. Bush and actress Natalie Portman and such cultural icons as The Simpsons and Facebook. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, China lived in Adams House, one of the university’s 12 housing quarters, which had a reputation as a haven for artists and produced such past luminaries as William Burroughs and Peter Sellars. As the ‘artsy’ of Harvard’s houses, Adams also had a reputation as the gay and lesbian house, with a tradition of an annual ‘Drag Night’ continuing to this day.

‘I have never done drag,’ China says of her own days at Harvard, though she names the Hasty Pudding, an annual all-male theatrical production more camp than a convention for nomadic people, among her favourite Harvard traditions.

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It was in Adams House, between camp and high tea, that China met classically trained pianist Thomas M Lauderdale. After her graduation from Harvard in 1992 and a stint as an off-Broadway actress in New York City, China moved to Portland, Oregon to front Lauderdale’s talented 12-piece ensemble, Pink Martini.

In the 14 years and 3 albums since China joined the group, Pink Martini has fused a range of genres, performed in a mix of languages and provided a perfect platform to showcase China’s voice, which lends itself as easily to airy French classics as it does to poppy Latin numbers. While Pink Martini has the sophistication and intellectual energy to match the voice of China Forbes, the woman, it is China’s solo effort, an album entitled ’78, that gives audiences a chance to experience the voice of China Forbes, the child.

As the album title suggests, on her recent solo album, China journeys back to the year 1978, when she was just another 8-year-old girl.

‘That was the year my family fell apart. I remember everything from that year and nothing from 1979,’ China explains of 1978.

While China would grow up to become the chic lead singer for one of the world’s savviest bands, the child of 1978, vulnerable and conflicted, remained buried beneath all the gin-and-vermouth class of Pink Martini. The symphonic and eclectic Pink Martini may have taken China around the world, but it is solo and subtly acoustic that China returns to her childhood home and the year her mother left her family.

‘Songwriting was a cathartic experience, a way to work through a lot of the repressed memories from that time,’ says China.

In songs, such as title track ’78 and closing track ‘Easter Sunday’, China enters the mind of herself as a child and tells the story of the moment her world crumbled. On ’78, China Forbes does what she has never done before. She undertakes the journey of an artist going back beyond an Ivy League degree and an accomplished career to the time when she was most vulnerable. And once there, China Forbes shares unabashedly the voice of a child that has become the legend of a woman.