[Interview] No rest for Chloe Flower, 'piano goddess'

Chloe Flower in her New York City apartment / Courtesy of Chloe Flower

By Jia H. Jung

On a winter afternoon, Korean American pianist, composer, producer and activist Chloe Flower arrives punctually at the Beaux-Arts Battery Maritime Building vaulted over Manhattan's East River. Cocooned in a black down puffer cloak, she seems no less potent than when unfurled at a piano in 3D couture with her hair volumized to its fullest extent.

Settling into a round-backed chair upstairs, she says filming for the launch of "Core Self," a podcast she's co-hosting with wellness influencer Mona Vand, ran long. Soon, she has to rehearse with rapper Lil Baby soon for NBC's "Saturday Night Live" (aired Jan. 28) and prepare for an interview with London radio at 4 a.m. ― but she can always make time for a Korean outlet.

"I love Korea," she declares, reciprocating the admiration of a country that has called her a "piano goddess." Her last visit was years ago. She dreams of returning to perform there. And after collaborating on "Runaway" with Girls' Generation gyopo alum Tiffany Young, she longs to produce with Korea-related creators even as her cup runneth over in America.

Four years have glissandoed by since Flower's eruptive performance with Cardi B in the 2019 Grammy Awards. Since then, she's signed with Sony Music Masterworks and released an eponymous debut album that she wrote, performed and produced herself during pandemic lockdowns. She's also backed Meek Mill in front of 20,000 people at a sold-out Madison Square Garden show in New York City.

Last year, Flower appeared back-to-back at Disney's annual winter holiday celebration and the 45th annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C. More quietly, she received The Last Girl Lifetime Cultural Change Award for years of anti-sex trafficking work. She took an interest in the cause back in 2007, after seeing child brothels firsthand while biking around in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in a haze after narrowly foregoing a flight that had later crashed with no survivors.

Chloe Flower, right, joins other social justice activists Kendall Alaimo, left, and Ruchira Gupta in a panel discussion at the presentation of The Last Girl Awards highlighting global grassroots activism to eradicate child sex trafficking at Asia Society in New York City, Oct. 10, 2022. Courtesy of Ellen Wallop

The year 2023 finds her still processing the 80th Golden Globe Awards in January, where she played live and promoted her newest single "Golden Hour."

Media outlets contacted her for weeks thereafter, not necessarily for the coverage she wanted. One of several actors at the event to mistake prerecorded play-off music for Flower's doing was the Best Actress of the night, a Malaysian icon. The press came fishing for a non-existent Asian-on-Asian conflict.

"It was a little bit triggering for me," Flower says of the oppositional dynamics that exist in regard to identity. She recalls a lifetime of being too Asian or not Asian enough in America, whether because of kids in her predominantly white hometown wrinkling their noses at radish kimchi and seaweed in her lunchbox or Korean internationals telling her she was too Americanized or too Western-looking to stay in their student interest club when she was studying in London.

The Stop Asian Hate movement in response to the surge of violent crimes targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. has helped her begin healing from this double-edged exclusion. "I'm so passionate about it because it's like the first time I really feel part of a community for being Asian," she confides.

Chloe Flower, right, meets with Monthanus Ratanapakdee (whose father's killing in 2021 catalyzed the Stop Asian Hate movement), left, and Rise Founder and CEO Amanda Nguyen at the Changemakers of the Year dinner in Washington, D.C. in February. Courtesy of Step

Feeling in between is familiar territory in more than one way for Flower, who continuously weighs whether she's "too pop for classical" or "too classical for pop."

Flower was born Chloe Jeanne Won in Pennsylvania to Korean immigrant parents. Possessing perfect pitch, she started on the piano at age two and quickly developed her own flair. When her teacher chastised her for acting like a certain someone, she looked up the name and discovered Władziu Valentino Liberace ― a child of immigrants and an early prodigy of traditional classical music who became a household name from the 1950s through the 1980s for his lavish showmanship. She loved him immediately.

She moved on to the Manhattan School of Music, The Juilliard School, and the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she laid bars of Johann Sebastian Bach onto Fat Joe's "Lean Back." It worked. She returned to the U.S., determined to fuse classical elements into the hip-hop and R&B that had shaped her growing up, even as she practiced classical piano 12 to 14 hours a day.

She landed an internship with Def Jam executive Russell Simmons and then a contract with producer Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds in 2010 in a convergence of vision, initiative, timing and relational serendipity. Flower spent the next decade in Los Angeles and then New York City, composing and producing for Celine Dion, Nas, 2 Chainz, Swae Lee, the TV and film industry and corporations like Levi's and Krug Champagne.

Chloe Flower plays live at the 80th Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., Jan. 10. Courtesy of Terry Beeman

During her breakout Grammy appearance in 2019 with Cardi B, viewers saw a diva out of the television screen while throwing down power chords and athletic arpeggios on Liberace's seven-foot-long, transparent-topped Baldwin grand studded with 34,000 round cut Austrian AB crystals. In actuality, facing the hovering cameraman was a first for Flower, whose training had taught her to look straight ahead while playing.

Millions of social media interactions and tens of thousands of fans later, Flower began posting videos from home on Liberace's nine-foot Baldwin SD-10 concert grand with mirrored glass tiles that look rolled on by a disco ball. The priceless artifact, gazing upon Manhattan from 63 stories up, was already on loan to her from the Liberace Foundation, of which she is currently the youngest board member.

Flower's eponymous debut album was operatically sectioned into acts of Innocence, Suffering and Hope, complete with a prelude and a finale called "POPSICAL," a portmanteau of pop and classical that is a medley of all her tracks. The collection, periodically graced by the voice of alternative medicine guru Dr. Deepak Chopra, reached the top 5 on the Billboard Crossover Classical chart upon its release in July 2021.

Flower wishes streams of her solo compositions were commensurate to her publicity and netizens' following of her feeds, where music clips, beauty and wellness tips and human rights alerts all somehow jive.

But, she says, "I always have to recenter myself. It's about music education. It's about getting kids to want to learn instruments, making instrumental music more popular."

Flower says she wouldn't be where she is without encouraging parents, music access in public school and the rare example of Liberace. She knows not every kid is so lucky, and wants to write a federal law that assures musical instruments funding for all of America's public schools in a system largely governed by state-level decisions. She's serious about closing the gap in arts education for millions of American students. Last fall, Flower was among 7 percent of applicants selected for Rise Justice Labs, an accelerated program empowering legislative action.

"I think she's going to change the world," Rise founder and CEO Amanda Nguyen says. One of the 2022 TIME Women of the Year and a 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee for passing the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act into U.S. law, Nguyen befriended Flower after the pianist reached out to synergize on common causes.

Chloe Flower, right, and Amanda Nguyen, fifth from left, pose with the Rise team and allies outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City after the General Assembly's passage of the Survivors' Rights Resolution in September, 2022. Courtesy of Andrew White

If Flower has free time in all this, she maximizes it to learn and innovate, whether by finding more scientific information proving that learning an instrument keeps the brain 20 years younger or by composing new works.

"I think that if Beethoven were alive, he would totally use 808s," she insists of one of her favorite classical composers, referencing the bass beat of the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer electronic drum machine from 1980 that changed music, especially hip-hop, forever. "I think he would experiment with all these different cultures that he didn't have access to."

In this spirit, Flower remains open to new ways of expressing musical authenticity. "Technology's amazing," she sighs, even if she still dislikes amplifying an acoustic piano.

A second instrument that the official Steinway artist has facing off with her mirrored Baldwin at home is a classic black Spirio | r, a high-resolution player piano with live performance capture and playback features useful for composition.

Chloe Flower works on her debut single, "Get What U Get," in 2020. Courtesy of Chloe Flower

Flower is also working on a full Christmas album and original singles in true "popsical" style. She has ambitions for a solo world tour, with Korea as the ultimate destination, of course.

She couldn't have moved at this clip before because of intense stage fright. She used to spend weeks before performances in anxiety, crying, missing meals and sometimes fantasizing about breaking a limb to avoid a gig. But something jogged loose during a booking last February. She realized that she had fulfilled her job for the client and had the choice to be present and enjoy herself.

"So I just went in there. I just played whatever I wanted. And I was looking at the audience, I was talking to them while I was playing. It felt like a piano bar vibe," Flower recalls. She never had stage fright again.

She is jettisoning other pressures, too, like the expectation of playing from memory ― something she blames on Franz Lizst. Ditching shame over using sheet music when needed has been liberating. An iPad of arrangements glowed unapologetically from the white Steinway grand at the Golden Globes. Nobody minded.

Lately, the artist skips right to her more enjoyable pre-show rituals of pumping Beyonce or reviewing Oksana Baiul's figure skating performances from the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

Flower is streamlining her energy for a future unlikely to involve much rest. She's here for it.

"That's why it's really important to me to love what I do, because it is hard," she says. "Nothing easy is really as validating as working hard for something, and that's a human condition."

Jia H. Jung is a multimedia journalist. She is an alumna of Columbia Journalism School in New York City and a post-graduate fellow of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She is also writing a book about her late father, a street child of the Korean War era. Contact her at portablejung@protonmail.com.