Quinn Christopherson

Today, Alaska native Quinn Christopherson shares his newest soul-bearing single “Celine,” out on Play It Again Sam / PIAS. The new track follows the release of the intimate and transfixing “Thanks” and Quinn joining The Wild Hearts Tour supporting indie greats Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen and Julien Baker on a national run of shows. All dates are listed below including the previously announced dates with Courtney Barnett and Lucy Dacus as part of Barnett’s Here And There Festival.

To know Quinn Christopherson is to know the deepest corners of your own mind and heart. Cut from the same cloth as artists like Joni Mitchell or The Mountain Goats, Quinn writes with an unparalleled precision— his exacting details giving the songs a depth and believability that’s relatable, though your own circumstances will no doubt be different.
 
The anthemic “Celine” is Quinn’s most pop-sounding offering to date— earnest vocals glide atop dreamy synths as Quinn shares a heart-warming story about his mom and her shining karaoke moment. Says Quinn, “The smallest moments can be as important as you perceive them to be. When my mom came back from karaoke saying they told her she sounded just like Celine, it was everything to her - she believed it with her whole heart. Her truth was as important in that moment as anything else in the world.”
 
The official video is just as heart-warming as the track and features Christopherson’s real mom owning the stage and singing her heart out at their local karaoke bar— just like Celine. It’s a powerful representation of freeing oneself from their own shackles.
 
Previously released songs include “Evelene,” “2005,” and “Bubblegum,” off Quinn’s highly anticipated, Bullion produced debut album Write Your Name in Pink (September 16th), show why the Alaskan artist is one of the most exciting new songwriters to emerge on the scene in recent years and has been backed by notable champions like NPR’s Bob Boilen.

Write Your Name In Pink is released digitally on September 16^th. The album is also available to pre-order on coloured LP and CD with an exclusive coloured LP available directly via Quinn Christopherson’s online store, and will be released later this year in November.

More on Write Your Name In Pink…
 
Let’s get straight to the reductive bits, shall we? Quinn Christopherson is a singer-songwriter from Anchorage, Alaska, the youngest of four children born there to Native parents—his mother is Ahtna Athabascan, from the state’s interior; his father is Iñupiat, from the Northwest Arctic. Quinn is also trans, a man who first endured a lifetime of strangers trying to reduce him to this gender or that. To summarize: Quinn Christopherson is a trans Native singer-songwriter from the largest city in the 49th state. Fascinating but that can’t be it, right? As with anyone else in the world, Quinn is more than the sum of some othering demographics.
 
To wit, Quinn’s electrifying and important debut, Write Your Name in Pink, squares up to this quandary again and again: How do you own the parts of your identity that make you who you are while also acknowledging that they are all mutable and that you are ever-new, always in flux? Each of these dozen arcing and engrossing pop wonderlands reveals another facet of who Quinn has been, is now, or might still be—a daughter, a son, a kid, an uncle, a spouse, a bandleader, a singer in search of songs that remind we are all capable of evolving in fundamental ways. Maybe that’s his mom, Tawny, becoming Celine Dion for a night down at the local karaoke joint during (what else?) “Celine.” And, of course, it’s Quinn himself becoming enough of an adult to long for the relative innocence of his difficult teenager years, as he does during the guileless “2005.” All these songs are wrought from assorted pains of the past, notes on hardships given to ecstatic melody; together, they point to the possibility of what’s to come.
 
Quinn came to storytelling long before music, per se. As a kid, family gatherings were extended story swaps as much as anything else, his relatives exuberantly sharing their experiences; storytelling is a core component of Quinn’s culture, a way for one generation to impart values and history to the next. He began funneling his own tales into poems, a practice he pursued contentedly until his father, Glenn, gifted him a guitar when he was 20. Local dive bars and open mics offered entrée into a scene and, better still, a longtime partnership with fellow songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Carpenter, who remains his closest collaborator and bandmate. (A new classic in the pantheon of touring anthems, “Take Your Time” is actually Quinn’s loving ode to Carpenter, as they eat oats and crack jokes during late-night, long-distance hauls.)
 
Perhaps that slow arrival explains the effortless sweep of Write Your Name in Pink, where songs so entwined with deeply intimate experiences bloom into communal anthems. During “Evelene,” Quinn empathizes with the growing pains of a childhood neighbor giving herself to suspect older men, noting he’s had those same empty feelings. “You don’t need a man to have a good night/I watch your hair blend in with the sky,” he sings in a chorus that launches itself like a rocket into danceable heights. “True Friend” begins as a somber piano reflection on the dangers of fleeing your childhood home, from postage-stamp-apartment landlords to those “nice” dudes who turn dangerous. But the hook is a thankful celebration of solidarity, of the transformative magic of showing up for one another. Write Your Name in Pink puts Quinn in league with Perfume Genius and Majical Cloudz, songwriters who have also used intricate and absorbing pop to explore tangles of identity and experience. Quinn, though, is more bright-eyed, the benefit of always turning toward the horizon. You can hear it when he talks, and you can feel it when he sings.
 
Opener “Thanks” is Quinn’s winning love letter to his partner, Emma, so specific he confesses to arachnophobia and bouts of crippling self-doubt above sequenced synths that blossom like love itself. “Simple” is a heartfelt ballad of hoping to provide for someone who once did their best to provide for you—in Quinn’s case, his mother; he puts you in a motel room with her, down on her cash and luck but still trying to match anklets to toe rings above “those nice jeans.” You pull for her, for them. You pull for her, for them. There’s the sweetly winning “Kids,” a wishlist for future progeny that includes cooking, rollerblading, forgiveness, and gratitude. You’ll recognize bits of your life here, because Quinn is so candid about his.
 
Quinn first emerged in the national spotlight in 2019, when he won NPR’s coveted Tiny Desk Contest with “Erase Me,” the glorious culmination of Write Your Name in Pink. It is a song about his transition, sure, but it is also a frank examination of the complications of identities, of the privilege that can simply come through new pronouns. For Quinn, though, they are somewhat arbitrary, anyway; now that he’s seen as “he,” he is more comfortable with his femininity, into the dawning feeling that men can write their names in pink, too. These 11 new songs bear out a deeper premise of “Erase Me”—that is, we’re never done becoming who we are going to be, even when the world wants to reduce us into who it thinks we already are, like a trans Native songwriter from Alaska. “I don’t know who I am,” Quinn sings guiltlessly during the weightless chorus of “Bubblegum,” a life-so-far chronicle of errors, obsessions, and achievements. Doesn’t it feel good to admit that none of us know that, either, let alone what we might become?