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Great songwriting is often setup like a trap: luring you in one direction, often with sweet coy sounds, then suddenly a wire brush over skin feeling hits you when the lyrics spring. On "hate fuck," especially, and in her work generally, the LA based-via-NJ songstress quinnie snares the listener again & again, using juxtaposition, raw honesty, and sticky melodies that make you feel perplexed, then ponderous – a treat to endure. With a sound that's both retro and novel, quinnie doesn’t stick to any trends or conventions, instead relying on earnest talent and storytelling to pull the listener in, and always to great affect. We had the kind privilege of having quinnie in our small interview nook to dive into her sound, weirdness, generally, and her upcoming album:

OnesToWatch: Quinnie, why are you an artist?

Quinnie: I've always been an artist, since I was a kid. My parents claim they didn't raise my sister and I to be artists for our career, but I think they did. They put all sorts of arts and crafts in our hands and encouraged us to do whatever sort of creative endeavor we were interested in. I was mostly a visual artist throughout my childhood. My mom's an incredible artist. She was in fashion when I was a kid. I grew up just drawing a ton. And I started writing songs when I was really little. Loved it, got to high school, started recording them. I don't know. It just feels like a natural state to me. I don't know what else I would do to be honest. 

I love that question because it always unpacks so much. So you were biologically engineered to become an artist? 


I think so. 

Why the subterfuge? 

You know, it would be cool to say that it's a rebellion, but my parents have never been anything but completely supportive and loving. My sister's also an incredible artist. She's a tattooer, but she also does like stunning visual art. 

Has she done any of yours? 


She has, there's a lot on my body from her. 

You mentioned visuals and then kind of migrating to music. 
Was there a reason for it? Was it that music felt more expressive or fun… what was it? 

I'm a pretty good mimic as it comes to visual art, but I don't feel like I'm able to convey emotion through visual art. I love drawing and I'm pretty good at it, but it just doesn't feel the same. I love the opportunity to explain myself through songs. 

You were AI art before that became a thing? 

Sort of. There was a time where I felt original, but drawing for me is less of a flow state process. It's pretty painful and grueling. I was just working on cover art for the last week straight and it's Sisophician to me. I'm just kind of sitting there like, why am I doing this? When I'm writing, it just kind of falls out of me. 


I like that, because I do think creative endeavors are an act of pushing a boulder up a hill just for it to come back. And if you’re not happy with that, then maybe it’s not for you. 

It's fun to think about doing it and then you're doing it and you're like, why do I exist? Why am I choosing to put myself through this? 
The torture is part of the fun. 

Hence the myth of it, yeah. Was there any moment in time where you wanted to double down on visuals over music? 

I thought when I was, probably 15, 16, that I would go to true blue art school. And then something just sort of switched in me and it sort of changed up. I had always written songs and I just really, really fell in love with it. 
Then, I went to a year of music school to pursue that and then left. 


You say writing songs has been natural for you, tell me about that. 

Yeah, it's probably the reason I decided to go the music route, as I just feel the best songs I write fall out of me. I'm not one of those people who writes every day. I admire people who can do that. 
I don't really have that kind of stamina. I have to really have the need to extract something from myself. But it feels hard to even talk about process sometimes, because I feel like I black out. 

So your process is just blank, it just comes out. 


Yes. I used to write lyrics first, and then I would find chords and melody. 
And then I, in the last couple years, started playing around a lot with melodic stuff and open-tunings on guitars. Then, words would sort of emerge out of it, but I've had different approaches to it in the past. 

Is there one way that you prefer? 


I've honestly preferred recently, to find a melody that feels good to sing and seeing what words emerge from it. I think it's resulted in me having more complex melodies and I’ve found a signature sound for myself in doing that. I'm not super technically trained as it comes to music, so I do a lot of things on the guitar and with harmonies and stuff that you're technically not supposed to do, but I like it that way. I’ll make these voicings on guitar and my friends who are actually good will be like, what are you doing?

Well, clearly it’s working, so. I do find your music has a fantastical quality to it, a little surrealist, a little dream state. Is that the natural flow of your narrative voice, or is that a deliberate perspective? 

I loved fantasy stuff as a child. I wanted more than anything to be a mermaid or fairy. It would keep me up at night to know I'm never going to be a mermaid, you know? So there's that part of me. 
I also love being dramatic. I think I come off as a lot more theatrical through my art, when in reality, I'm a really jaded, kind of cut and dry person. But it gives me space. My art is my space to do that without shame and there's something childlike about it.

That sounds like a healthy balance.
Why would you describe yourself as jaded? 

I came out of the womb like that. My mom said I was born, and I was already kind of looking at the world, suspicious of everything, you know? I have an opinion on everything. 

That's not a bad thing. 

Including the sadness of not being a mermaid, I have big opinions on that. Strong ones. 

I mean, it's too topical to not delve into a little bit. Do you believe in mermaids? 


I want to believe. The feeling is strong enough in me to indicate something like that exists. But I've also come to the conclusion that there are magical things in the world, maybe more special or greater than that. That's been my compromise with myself. 


I could talk about mermaids and sirens all day, but we’ll save it for a follow-up. 
Going back to your process, are there differences when you write now, versus when you were younger and just starting out? Are you more comfortable experimenting with writing now?

It's almost the opposite. When I was in high school and I was recording music, I was doing it all on my own. I was producing for myself. And I had literally no idea what was going on or how to do it. 
I was just listening to music that I loved and trying to figure out what was there that I wanted to emulate. And a lot of the time, I think what I miss about it is that there's an element to being a first timer that you're not really questioning if what you're doing is correct. You're just doing it. Any outcome is really beautiful, and that's a really true form of expression. I don't think I really cared much at the time about song structure or choruses or any of that. 
That kind of shows in my first record, a lot of the songs are either shorter or have a strange structure. I've gotten a bit more anal about those sorts of things, but there's an element to it to me that still just thinks, okay, I have something to say, and I want people to hear it. 
And there is a science to songwriting that makes people really want to hear what you're going to say. I still wouldn't call my music straightforward pop music, but it's pop structure. But that to me is like my compromise of writing what I want to write and still getting people to listen to it. 

I love it… it’s sentimental propaganda, slipping it in in the process. Pivoting a bit away from the process and more to your current work. We obviously love “baja bird,” but it sounds like you have an upcoming album. Can you tease anything from the album? 

I can tell you it's really long. It's 15 songs. Which isn't long for a country artist, but I'm not a country artist, you know, so it's pretty long. It's like an hour. I don't know why. 

Why didn't you keep going? 
Make it a double album?

You know, I should have, but it's been two and a half years. I was like, we gotta stop somewhere. 


How do you edit an album? It sounds like you had a lot of songs to pick from. Is that true? 

No, basically, everything that comes out is what makes the album. Maybe per album, there’s one or two songs that don't see the light of day, but I kind of just write until I feel like I'm done. I don't make songs and throw them away, typically. But, there's definitely a lot of songs in the past that have never come out. I have this pop project with my best friend, Jake, called Critter, and we have so many unreleased songs from that, but that was more of like a pop experiment. So we were always trying stuff and making new ideas and fragments of songs and all that. But for my solo project, basically everything I write comes out, more or less. 

So what sort of bookmarks the beginning and end of that process for you? Is it just that you're exhausted and done and that is what it is? 

I think it's just a feeling. It's crazy how slow things move, but I started the first song to this record literally a month or two after the first single to my last record came out. Which is wild, because obviously that record was fully done, and I was just waiting to put out more music for it. So we had started it literally two and a half years ago. I didn’t go into this intending to make a record that is 15 songs long and called this or whatever, but I kind of just wrote until I felt like pieces of the puzzle were laid out. It just feels like something. 

Are the songs all talking to each other in some ways? 


In a lot of ways, yeah. They don't all reference the same thing, but I don't feel the need to look for a true thesis of the album, because I think the place that I'm writing from over the course of a couple of years usually ties everything together in itself. 

Does this album, for instance, anticipate something in the future, or is it sort of just a representation of that time and place? 


I think it's now. I finished writing for this album in the fall. 
And then it was mixed and mastered and all that, amongst random art stuff I do for each album cycle. But I’ve slowly started writing new things for what might be the future of my project. And even that, to me, feels different, now that we’re closing the door on the creation of this album. 

But it’s a weird thing for me to balance. When you roll out an album, you’re having to portray yourself as you were years ago, which is something I struggle with. It’s strange, you’re revisiting your former self. Even the styling, you write all these songs that are in a past realm, and you sort of have to dress the part of the person who created them. 

I think you are known in some regards for your art direction. 
You have a very specific style. How do you go about revisiting and tapping into the style of your past perspective? I think a lot of artists struggle with that, I'm always curious about it. 

I think that I just have to really hold in mind what was driving me to write what I wrote. 
And I haven't actually listened to my new record in probably a month now, because I've had such tired ears on it, but occasionally I have to check in with it and be like, okay, this is what I'm doing. I take like a scroll through the notes app and remind myself what I’m getting at, and what it would look like to represent that meaning. But I truly have a lot of fun doing that stuff. I think part of the reason I chose to do music is because I love every creative aspect of it and in being a musician, I get to do all of it. It makes my life harder, but it also makes my life easier, that I don't have to hire people to be making my cover art and styling me and all of that stuff. 


You do literally everything? 

I don't film and direct my videos.
I write my video concepts, and in the past, did a lot of videos with my best friend Jake, who’s incredible. But recently, I’ve been making music videos with my dear friend Allie Demers, who is also amazing. She directed and filmed and edited my most recent video, but I work mostly with friends in general. I've tried hiring random people, but I do my best when I'm comfortable. 

I was going to ask you about collaboration. It seems like you need to have an established personal connection to unlock creativity.

It’s just a comfort thing for me. I'm lucky because I do think my friends are so astoundingly talented. I have wonderful friends.
I love them a lot. I mean, the people who produce my records, too, are some of my favorite people in the world. I think something better comes out of me when it's a more familiar experience, but even beyond that, there's no one else I would want to work with. 

I'm really blessed.
I don't know why, but I've ended up with a lot of people in my circle who really believe in what I'm doing from a really genuine place and put in so much work on my behalf. I don't know if it comes from a love for me or from a love for my work, but I am really lucky just to have that situation. And I it took me a while to get to that point, but I think about it a lot nowadays, because it takes a lot of patience to ride this journey out with someone, and I’m very grateful. My producers, Jake and Gabe, have put in immense amounts of work on my projects, hundreds of hours, and I have these moments where I'm like, why are you doing this? 

Where do you want to be? 


It's a hard question. It depends on the day. It's hard because there's an angle at which I already have a lot more than I thought I would get. I think when I was a teenager, all of my musical legends – at least in the indie sphere – culture wasn't really allowing them to be really massive artists. Now, they can be. That's sort of altered my perspective on things. I, for some reason, thought I would be playing church basements for the rest of my life and then some other stuff happened for me and I was like… oh, cool, this is awesome. But I try not to make super set goals for myself only because I do love being surprised. It's way better to be like, “Wow, I didn't even want this and I got it.” 

Are there any songs or albums that really changed your life?

Something that really made me feel like I want to pursue artistry was Sufjan Stevens – I went through a multi-year phase when I was 14 or 16 where I was really sad and in a childish way, music was the only thing that comforted me. It was sacred. Sad music can make you more sad, but it can also comfort you at your lowest. I remember listening to Sufjan Stevens and feeling like someone finally heard and understood the thoughts in my head. I also love Joni Mitchell so much, I have since I was a little girl. We all know the excellence in her. Also, when I was 17, I fell in love with this band called The Innocence Mission, which was pretty formative for me. There’s just something really magical in that music. It doesn't sound like anything else. I love music. 

If you could perform anyone, anywhere, anytime – what the dream performance? 

There were a lot of folk festivals that were happening in the 60s, 70s that I wish I could have played at, but also I would’ve just wanted to be there.
There was one in Big Sur, I think in 1969, and obviously, all the Newport Folk festivals. Woodstock’s our really easy answer. I honestly wish I could have seen any concert 20 years ago or more. I believe it was the 65 or 66 Newport Folk Festival, it popped up on my YouTube and the difference was so shocking – you know what it was? First of all, the musicians sit behind the performer, which I always thought was super cool, but then it panned to the audience and something was glaringly different… it’s that there were no phones. People were just paying attention. I would love to see that. 

I can’t imagine. That sounds so special. I’d love to know, if you have a bunch of friends come over after some sort of weary day, how do you comfort them? 

Something my friends and I have been doing lately is dancing in my living room. So probably putting on some really loud music and dancing. 

Is there a type of dance or music you prefer? 


Sometimes it's true blue club music. Sometimes it's old music you can move your hips to. I prefer the latter.

Last couple of questions. If everything works out and life continues to spoil you with fate, where do you end up? 
How do you see yourself? 

Oh, man. I just want to keep making records, and I want them to resonate with people the way that I intend. I can't put a number on how many people I want to hear it, I just want the amount of care and work that goes into each record to hit people in the correct way. And I just want to do that for the rest of my life. And live off of it ideally as well. 


Last question, at OnesToWatch, we love when artists put us on to their favorite artists. So, who have you been listening to that we should be listening to? 

I'm gonna name drop a lot of friends. My best friend Jake’s project is called Jake's Big Day. He's gonna put out more music soon. He's incredibly talented. 
My other best friend, Celia, is incredible.... My friend Olivia has an artist project named Opperelli and she's so special. I have another friend named Olivia who releases music under the name Olivia Kaplan. She's an incredible songwriter. A friend of mine named Micah Priete, he's so good and he played a lot of guitar on my record.

That's amazing.
Do you have a lyric or a quote you'd like to wrap up with? 

I do not. Goodbye.