Q&A: Caroline Quinn Explores Grief and Video Games in ‘the end of may’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY LENA FINE ☆
Caroline Quinn, the Philadelphia-based indie-pop artist, began the year with 80 followers on Spotify and has rapidly surpassed that number by the thousands in a matter of months. Gaining virality on TikTok, her 5-track catalog proved that she had something new to bring to the table. After a meteoric rise, her debut EP, the end of may illustrates fresh star power in the constantly evolving world of pop.
Much of Quinn’s mission in music is to create an outlet that indulges in grief and complicated feelings while working through them. She is an advocate in finding your voice through your pain and allowing yourself the grace to figure things out. the end of may is a testament to these practices. Relatively new to songwriting, it is clear that Quinn’s vision of her project is strong and clear.
When it’s natural, it’s noticeable – and it is with Quinn herself. In listening to her debut EP and the tracks that came before, it is no surprise that audiences tapped in to Caroline Quinn quickly and enthusiastically. We sat down to discuss the end of may, video games, grief, and pop.
LUNA: The songs are very pop-forward but have clear roots in singer-songwriter. When you write, are you writing it as a pop song or does it move more in that direction in the production phase?
QUINN: Up until recently I’ve always been like, “I’m an indie/alternative singer-songwriter” and a lot of people have been like, “this is a pop vibe.” It kind of opened my mind a little bit, too. I feel like people can sometimes be like, “ugh, pop” but now I feel like pop is for the girlies and pop is queer and pop is fun. When I’m writing, it’s just me and my guitar and whatever I’m feeling at that moment. When I go to my producer, Ross, I feel like he has so many experimental ideas and he does a really good job of adding that drive to each of the songs that ends up production-wise having that pop vibe.
LUNA: I think it’s so true of pop, specifically, that once you accept and embrace that that is what you’re doing it becomes a playground. You allow yourself to indulge in the fun.
QUINN: Yeah, it’s strange. It’s a lot of pressure. Now that I’m writing music I’m like, “does it need to be a hit?” I don’t want to be put into a box. Writing is weird!
LUNA: Can you speak more to the writing of “Obituaries?” It has a sort of haunting message while indulging in this question that is really easy to ask ourselves.
QUINN: A lot of the time when I’m driving – and I think a lot of us do this – I’ll just think, what if I got in a horrible accident and died right now? And I spiral and think about things like that. If you’ve experienced death and loss you know all these weird logistics of death, like a funeral and the cost and all these weird things that have nothing to do with death, actually. Then I’ll snap out of it and I’m just driving and I’ll be like, “Oh my god, what am I doing? I’m alive!” I have this video of me just in my car asking, “what would you write about me if I was dying?” I think about that all the time. I had 2 friends pass away within the same year when I was 17 and I sang at both of their funerals and it left this lasting impact on me. Getting to see their friends and family and connecting with them and knowing them made me think even more about those things. That song did come out very easily and very casually because it’s just what I think about all the time. In a sense, it took a lot of weight off my shoulders because now when I’m driving and I spiral, I think about the song and it feels like there’s some humor to it. It is sad and it is scary but also it doesn’t matter because I will be dead. And that’s ok! I definitely like writing about darker things but I get nervous about how other people will perceive them.
LUNA: I think that’s also one of the luxuries of pop is that you can be writing dark and twisted things and disguise it under the veil of dance and movement and fun.
QUINN: I think that’s how we have to function, anyway. I think of all these super dark things and then I’m like, “Well I am okay and I will be ok. I’m just driving my car and there’s my house.”
LUNA: The EP is very cohesive – were all the songs born of the same time/subject or did they all happen to have threads of continuity once you were putting the pieces together for the project?
QUINN: It worked out really well. All of them except for “In the Garden” were written around the same time. “In the Garden” is one of the first songs I ever wrote and it was one of those things that I sat on and thought it was too dark and too weird. Then I changed a major chord to a minor chord and was like, “Wait, maybe there’s something here.” I knew I wanted to work on more music and at the time that I was going through that process I was having some mental health crisis things and I was going through treatment and writing while that was all happening. I feel like everything I was experiencing during that time – it was over the course of 5 months, maybe – ended up being cohesive because of how my brain was at that time. It was very unintentional and when it came together for the EP I realized it was actually cohesive. It was cool to bring something else in from my past, also, and make it more relevant to who I am now.
LUNA: It’s also nice that there is that piece from a while ago in there, also, because a lot of these songs were written during this incredibly challenging time. I would imagine it’s nice to have this proof that you’ve always been yourself and this thing that you went through is not defining the way you think about these things. There’s been the same brain the whole time.
QUINN: It’s cool, too, now being in such a different place and looking at the songs and releasing them. In “Lost for Words” I’m very much like, “I hope things get better and I hope things don’t stay the same.” And now looking at it a year later I’m like, “Yeah, dude, you did it!”
LUNA: It’s something to celebrate!
LUNA: You make a lot of allusions to mortality on the EP, was there a connection between love and death that you were exploring?
QUINN: That’s a good question. Yeah, I think so. I feel like death is something I feel very comfortable talking about and very casually talking about now. I think if you talk about it you become less afraid of it. I think when it comes to the way I talk about death and relating it back to love I think it has to do with unconditional love and how it has no expiration date. Feeling that with a comfort in myself in processing when I die. I honestly haven’t thought about it that much before, does it feel like there are a lot of those themes?
LUNA: There’s one sentiment in “In the Garden” about how it’s possible in a relationship to have a version of yourself die and hopefully be reborn.
QUINN: Yeah! That song I wrote thinking about a past relationship and certain people where you can be in such low places and they just don’t see that. They only see the version of you that they want you to be. In that song it was the process of lost love.
LUNA: There’s a really specific fantastical element in these songs, thinking specifically of the synths in “Who I’ve Been,” what was the influence for this?
QUINN: That song was a lot of fun to make. I had written it to be very acoustic at first and very not the way it ended up being. And I forgot about the song and then came in and my producer had a beat that he had put together for the song and I was like, “Oh, that song’s not good, why would we work on that?” And he was like, “No, no it’s fun!” And that was one we really built from the ground up together sound-wise. We were just playing around with things that were silly and fun and it started to feel like a lot of the indie video game soundtracks that I listen to. It reminded me so much of “Night in the Woods” – I don’t know if you’ve ever played or heard of it before but it’s so fun. When we started getting into that video game-synthy vibe it made me think of all these visual things and how that related to the song. That idea of being in a game and processing things and taking them as you go and moving forward and cycling through things I really loved.
