Quinn Christopherson is an Alaska musician who gained nationwide recognition by winning NPR’s Tiny Desk contest in 2019.
He just returned from a tour with Portugal. The Man and performed at Juneau’s climate fair on a rainy day to a small group there.
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Audio PlayerThis transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Quinn Christopherson: I’m Quinn Christopherson. I’m a musician born, raised and based in Anchorage, Alaska. Ahtna and Inupiaq, and I am excited to play Juneau.
Oh my gosh, nothing is too small for me in Alaska. This is, like, everything I want to play. You know, I’m Alaskan forever.
And, yeah, I just came back from a huge tour, like playing like places, like Red Rocks and like, you know, really special places. But there’s never anything better than coming back to my home state and playing like a tiny event, like, to me, that’s so much more important and impactful than going out and playing, I don’t know — it’s crazy to say — for 1000s of people, but like, it’s way more intimate.
And I think any artist will tell you, big or small, like, will tell you that it’s harder to play for 10 people than it is to play for like 5000 because it is so much more vulnerable.
I started playing music, you know, when I got a guitar. I guess when I was 21. It was kind of late.
But I always feel like I started writing my stories in middle school, like with poems and just kind of getting my feelings out, and the guitar was just the gateway to turn those into songs.
I think there’s like a fine line between poetry and song, and yeah, I feel like some of my songs are poems, just barely a song. I just feel like whatever way I can tell the story, that’s what I’m gonna do, whether it’s like just saying it or speaking it, or, you know, singing it, I don’t know it still feels like a poem sometimes.
