The artist Queen Kwong, also known as Carré Kwong Callaway, just released her new album Couples Only on July 12th via Sonic Ritual. The expansive new collection shows some significant sound developments and an approach to darker themes surrounding relationships, all balanced out with a certain amount of dark humor that’s often couched in a questioning tone. For those unfamiliar, Queen Kwong composes her work improvisationally, allowing musical ideas and potential lyrical themes free rein, and she allows a lot of her life to influence her work.
This time around, she had experienced a major health crisis and a divorce between records, and those come to the fore in Couples Only, but some of the relatable topics that emerge are the relationship baggage that we all carry and the outrageous social pressures that are put on relationships on the whole. Like all her albums, this one is cathartic, but with its often fairly direct lyrics, it also prompts a conversation that could be quite liberating for audiences as well as for the artist. I spoke with Carré Kwong Callaway about her quite intense involvement in making recent videos for the songs on Couples Only, to what degree audiences seek out “honest art”, and the sounds and themes we find on the album, including an increase in guitars and synths in comparison to her previous albums.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Are you someone who likes to keep busy with making music and also making videos? You’ve made the live action video for “On The Run”, but also the lyric video for “I Know Who You Are” probably involved a fair amount of effort, too.
Carré Kwong Callaway: The lyric video, wasn’t something where I had to type the lyrics, but the video aspect of it was very intense experience, but it happened so quickly. We actually shot it in one take, so it wasn’t too time consuming, but it was energy consuming. We shot it all in one take aside from the intro section. The edit was really simple and didn’t take much time, either.
The other videos have been increasingly complex. “Without You, Whatever” was something I shot in England a couple months ago and I’ve been editing it all, so it’s a lot. I’m shooting one this weekend with three locations. I definitely tend to overwhelm myself all of the time, but I’ve come to realize that it’s just some kind of coping mechanism and I feel like I’m probably more uncomfortable when I’m not busy. So I constantly keep my plate very full. [Laughs] I tend to be in a state of overwhelm, panicking, and constantly in action. Downtime makes me nervous and I’m probably a workaholic in general.
HMS: I’m sure a lot of people can relate to that, myself included. I tend to pursue my own, other projects when I do manage to take vacations, which is rare. Are you a visually minded person so are drawn to video making?
CKC: I didn’t fully realize until recently that some other musicians aren’t as involved or controlling when it comes to videos. Some of them will just go to a director and the director will come up with concepts which they say “yes”, or “no” to. I have a bit of a type A personality, and I’m involved with everything all the time. I’m involved in the concept, even if I don’t come up with it myself, and with every step of the process, I take on more of the creative director role. I work with my friend Joe Cardamone, who I collaborate with a lot, and he’s the on-camera director who can direct me in real time when we’re shooting.
I don’t really look at myself as just as a musician. I approach music in a pretty loose way. I’m more of an artist, in general, than just a musician, so the visual aspects are important to me. I do visualize things a lot, usually in still images. For this record, specifically, half of the videos that I’m doing are kind of plays on other movies or pieces of art that I’ve been influenced by. I’ve never really gone down that route before. I’ve always focused on ideas from scratch before. These are homages to artwork that has inspired me, in a way, that also aligns with the themes of the song.
For instance, “On the Run” sounds like a love song, and has Doo-Wop influences, musically. The lyrics are a little self-aware and self-deprecating, so it’s not seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses, so I thought it would be funny to do something that tied back into “reality” shows and dating shows like The Bachelor and other shows that are about strangers getting engaged. It’s this insane pressure to take on a form of love that we have received, in a lot of ways, from Disney, as a romanticized version of what love ought to be. I think there’s a disconnect between true love, whatever that is, and what we see on television. That’s misconstrued as “true love”. We put pressure on ourselves to feel these huge, magical emotions. I thought that was a funny concept for a video.
HMS: I love how the sound of the song, which has these older elements, and softer elements, contrasts with the lyrics and the video.
CKW: I like the juxtaposition of those elements that, in some ways, contradict each other or don’t make much sense. But I think we’re all like that, as humans, in how we act. There’s always that inner conflict between the heart and the brain.
HMS: I also appreciated the humor in that video, albeit dark humor, and that encourages the audience to question the song as well and think about different perspectives.
CKC: I agree about the humor, and that was especially true following the video for “I Know Who You Are”, which was really intense and serious, as well as aggressive. It was an homage to a cult film called Possession where the movie itself was an allegory for divorce. The tunnel was very symbolic to me of all these emotions that we go through, feeling like we’re going crazy. It started off the way you might feel at the beginning of a relationship, then the tunnel is the downward spiral of going through all that you might feel when you realize that you’re losing a relationship.
With Possession, it doesn’t end well for any of the characters, but for me, I wanted a happier ending, so the video ends with me coming out of the tunnel at the other side. But people took the video really seriously, like horror, so after that I wanted to share some humor and balance things out. That was a conscious decision to balance things out.
I did that with the record, too. The record has a lot of intense, dark content, meaning, and themes. At the same time, there are songs like “Sad Man” that are more self-deprecating or tongue-in-cheek. There’s humor there, even if it’s dark, dry, or cynical. It pokes fun at myself, or culture, or society. “Sad Man” is a nice balance because it’s an ode to the music industry, shitty dudes in LA, and also being an entertainer and artist in this day and age and the bullshit that comes along with it. I didn’t want it to just be a depressing record. Sometimes when things get so dark, they almost start to be funny.
HMS: Yes, things start tipping over.
CKC: I really wanted to play with that. I wanted to be in that space of the tip-over. I wanted the record to live in that space.
HMS: I think the ambiguity of some of the lyrics allows for that, but sometimes the music itself also contributes to that possibility of humor. Many times, the sound leads emotions in different ways that allows for multiple interpretations.
CKC: I agree. On one hand, it can be an industry issue, when I’m asked “What genre do you belong to?” And I create all over the place. I embrace that, even though it can hinder things. It’s easier to fit into a box in some ways, but to me, that doesn’t benefit art or creativity at all. How I write and record, which is improvised, leads to creativity and the changes in tone and emotion that you see in the songs. They songs being played and recorded in the moment, as they come up, so they are very emotion-based. It lacks perfection, but it makes up for that in honesty. I value making honest art over perfection.
HMS: I think some fans appreciate that in a really specific way and that kind of approach is growing right now. We can all get oversaturated on glossy, over-Produced music that lacks the human connection.
CKC: I do see that and I hope that’s the case. I get down on myself sometimes because of the career paths I’ve chosen. On Spotify playlists, and on streaming, there is a lot that’s glossy. Sometimes even things that are described as “raw” are actually completely contrived.
HMS: [Laughs] Yes, that’s totally true. That’s a really cynical thing that’s happening, too.
CKC: I do think people are picking up on that more and more and are starting to miss something. People can tell when something is lacking, that honesty.
HMS: I hope that’s becoming more widespread.
CKC: I had someone talking at me the other day, commenting that they had a certain number of streams, but I seemed to get more press than them, and they found it confusing. It was as if they were equating worth or success with number of streams. Most musicians who I know mostly all struggle with the same shit, but this person was a different type of “musician” who makes music purely to get streams. It’s a whole different thing.
I didn’t want to be too reactionary, but I wanted to say, “It’s cool that you’re doing that, but you are not doing what I’m doing.” If the intention is to get streams, go and play a show in Berlin and see how many people show up. It makes me sad that these opposite types of musicians are now being treated as if they are in the same group. It makes me curious and a little bit nervous about the trajectory of music. Is there going to be a lost art that doesn’t have anything to do with creativity?
HMS: I could be wrong, but what I assume when I hear people speak that way, is that they’ve been taught to think and speak that way. And I wonder who taught them to do that, probably a marketing source or something similar.
CKC: It’s bizarre that we’re equating so much of that with artistic value or worth. So much of that is just background music. Is that song playing in H&M somehow more valuable? My music is literally created through blood, sweat, and tears. Not to mention the relentlessness of touring. That builds a fanbase and true followers. They actually show up to shows, buy my handmade merch, and have supported me. That’s the kind of listener I’m interested.
HMS: Weirdly enough, during the pandemic period, even without shows, that’s become even more important to fans, buying merch and interacting with artists online. I know you’ve always been pretty personal with your music. Did you know what topics you were going to allow for this record, or did you try not to consciously think about it beforehand?
CKC: I knew the things that were going to come up, because there were many things that were like a weight that I’d been carrying, that needed to be expelled out of me. I knew a lot of the stuff would make it onto the record, thematically speaking. I knew that the record would be a cathartic process for me, as it always is. I don’t think I expected a couple of the things that came out the way in which they did.
In the past, I’ve always found myself singing words and writing lyrics that were more obscure. I didn’t ever say things that were too blunt, but left room for interpretation. On this record, though, a lot of stuff just came out that was more a straight punch to the neck. After stewing about some of these things for so long, this was kind of like reclaiming my voice and setting the record straight. When it came to my divorce, and what goes on at the end of a marriage, there was no poetic way to say some of that stuff, and I don’t think I cared to. I was actually surprised at how straightforward I was. There was a lot of detail. It just came out in the moment. There was no flowery way of saying things.
HMS: Musically, were you surprised by anything that developed in this new batch of songs?
CKC: I usually play all the guitars, anyway, on a record, but I was surprised by how many guitars I played on this record. I think it’s just conditioning, just being in the music industry as long as I have from such a young age, I’ve always downplayed my own guitar-playing skills. I play several instruments, but the guitar seems like something that people have always questioned, particularly when it comes to women. Even if I play the guitar live, even if I play it on my record, somehow the men in my band, who might have nothing to do with it, are somehow credited with the guitar writing and playing.
I’ve had some resentment and bitterness about that, to be honest. There will be reviews where other people are credited. I think for this record, I really decided to take on all the guitars. There were some points, like the guitar part in “Sad Man”, where I was really surprised by how guitar-heavy the direction turned out to be. It just came out of me, and I thought, “Wow! I can do that. I’m tired of not really owning it.” For me, that really stood out, musically.
But as for musical surprises on this album, there were also a lot of programmed drums. We didn’t really have a drummer available to us. We had a friend of ours come and play some live drums over programmed drums, but the record was written with programmed drums. The album is also synth-heavy, which I usually don’t do, because I don’t want to have to play that live. I haven’t wanted to put too much synth stuff in my music before, but I just let it go with this one. There’s a ton of synth-stuff, almost every song, and I still don’t know how I’m going to do that live. But I just leaned into it, and I’m glad. Sonically speaking, it was a departure, and different from anything else I’ve done.
HMS: That’s part of what creates so many interesting layers on this album and creates such a strong mood.
CKC: That does make for some musical cohesion on the record. Musically, it’s one of the things that ties everything on this record together. Sonically, speaking, it brings an entirely different element. The hugeness of the synths on the record is fundamental to a lot of the songs.
