Hong Kong Indie Artist cehryl Faces Her Fears

Hong Kong-based artist cehryl (Cheryl Chow B.M. ’17) specializes in making lush, ethereal earworms. Her indie-pop songs can evoke nostalgia for a place you've never lived, with R&B-tinged melodies blooming slowly, bar after bar, like time passing, like memories fading.

Since 2016, cehryl has self-produced two albums, a slew of singles, and her recent, excellent, time machine EP—all of which have earned her hundreds of thousands of monthly Spotify streams. She's also done commercial and cinematic film scoring work, including for Natalie A. Chao's short documentary To Know Her, an official 2021 Sundance selection.

We caught up with cehryl to talk about her approach production, her path from Hong Kong to Berklee and back, and the relationship between art and fear, which she explores in her zine, common fears of the artist.

Listen to cehryl's "philadelphia" from the time machine EP:

Stacking Vocals into Harmony

At the center of every cehryl song is a voice—many rich, harmonic layers of it. She says this approach—"stacking vocals"—began as a way to make her voice sound stronger in the mix, and from there grew into a part of her musical identity.

"I love chords and harmony," she says, "so if no one stops me (and no one does), I just sit in front of Ableton and keep adding new tracks to double myself and improvise harmonizing with myself. It's just fun. Now it feels like me, musically."

It's no surprise, then, that cehryl's voice is often the starting place for new music. "I've found that the songs I like the most are the ones that come to me initially as melodies (in the shower or on a walk or just humming)," she says.

But as an accomplished producer—she studied music production and engineering (MP&E) at Berklee—the melody-first approach is just one tool in cehryl's belt. "When I'm not super inspired with words and melodies, then I'll write a loop either with a beat or with a chord progression, then I try to write something over it, which feels like skipping rope."

From Hong Kong to Berklee (and Back)

As a kid in Hong Kong, cehryl says that her interest in music was "a really, really private thing." But when she came to Berklee, she found a community of musicians and friends who drew those interests into the open, expanded them, and helped her grow "as a musician and as a person."

"It wasn't until Berklee that listening and dissecting music together became a communal joy," cehryl says.

She found professors who understood her musical perspective—the late MP&E professor Mike Denneen and her guitar instructor Thaddeus Hogarth. And as a burgeoning producer, cehryl particularly enjoyed her classes with MP&E professor Prince Charles Alexander. "He's always looking for new sounds and new ideas in production, which I really appreciated."

After graduating, cehryl moved to L.A. and worked as an engineer while producing what would become her 2019 album, Slow Motion, which earned her a Best New Artist of the Month nod from Complex.

She has since returned to Hong Kong, where the arts community is "smaller and more tight-knit" than in the US, though at times there cehryl says she finds it harder to stay focused and disciplined in her music-making. Perhaps this explains, at least partly, why she made a zine about artistic fear. . .

Common Fears of the Artist

The handmade booklet, titled common fears of the artist, reads like a guided tour through the web of doubts and second guesses that can ensnare creators. It's a list that anyone who's ever tried to create anything will recognize:

1. THAT ART WAS NEVER YOUR CALLING AFTER ALL
2. THAT YOU'LL NEVER BE AS GOOD AS THE ARTISTS YOU LOOK UP TO
. . .
8. OF TRYING TOO HARD
9. OF NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH
. . .

For cehryl, making the zine was also a way to escape that web of fear by mapping it out.

"I suppose I just navigate my fears and doubts by precisely cataloging them," she says. "When I read them back, I realize how silly or hypocritical some of them are."

And when it comes time to return to whatever song she's trying to finish, cehryl thinks of these words from Maya Angelou: "I think it’s dangerous to concern oneself too damned much with 'being an artist.' It’s more important to get the work done. You don’t have to concern yourself with it, just get it done.'"

As it turns out, cehryl has nearly wrapped work on a new album. "I'm almost done except for one song, actually," she says. But it's clear she knows how to get it done.

Listen to cehryl's "angels (emily)," coproduced by Andrew Sarlo ’11: