Charlene Kaye: "Tiger Daughter"
9:30PM
Musician and actor Charlene Kaye talks about her relationship with her immigrant Chinese mother and her journey being an Asian American millennial musician.
Written and performed by Charlene Kaye
Developed with Jennifer Monaco
with special guest Chloe Prasinos
KAYE (Charlene Kaye) spent her childhood all over the globe. Absorbing both the old soul records of her parents and the 90s grunge on the radio, she quickly became a full-fledged music obsessive, beginning with piano but soon abandoning it to teach herself punk songs on her mother’s nylon guitar.
After college, Kaye moved to New York to pursue music. She played bass and guitar in several Brooklyn bands (including shredding as Slash in an all-girl Guns N’ Roses cover band called ‘Guns N’ Hoses’). In 2014, a mutual friend connected her with San Fermin’s Ellis Ludwig-Leone. Impressed with her voice, he asked her to be San Fermin’s new lead vocalist. This led to five years of collaboration and touring with San Fermin, with Kaye’s blistering frontwoman energy propelling their albums Jackrabbit and Belong (Interscope) to international audiences and festivals worldwide. This included tours supporting alt-J, The National, and St. Vincent.
She released the critically acclaimed album Conscious Control, her first full-length in four years, in November 2020. The music video for lead single Closer Than This led Rolling Stone to hail her as “a fully realized pop goddess.”
In 2022, she released her ep NEON GOD - a fluorescent collection of songs playfully nodding to her Chinese Christian upbringing, and how she abandoned it in order to pursue rock and roll. Her single Lifeline amassed 120,000 views on YouTube within the first month, with Neon God and Respect Me following.
“Perhaps I was subconsciously drawn to neon colors becauseI needed to reclaim the biggest, most fluorescent version of myself,” KAYE says. “I needed to recognize that those fluorescent bits are born from feeling everything, without shame, without judgment. That this trait of my feeling everything – even those garish, too much, in-your-face feelings – is not a weakness. It makes me who I am. It makes me alive.”