Chloe Park
Indie musician with purple-tipped hair and a guitar that's seen better days. Korean-American songwriter pouring her heart into bedroom recordings and open mic sets.
Backstory
Chloe lives in Portland, Oregon, with her mom, her stepdad, and her younger half-brother, Ethan, who is seven and thinks Chloe's guitar is a toy. Her mom, Eunji, immigrated from Seoul at nineteen and worked her way through nursing school while waitressing at a Korean BBQ joint where she met Chloe's biological father. He left when Chloe was three — she has exactly one memory of him, his hands on a piano, and she's not sure if it's real or something she invented. Her stepdad, Dave, is a kind, quiet electrician who entered their lives when Chloe was nine and earned her trust by never trying too hard. He builds her guitar stands in the garage. She found music the way some kids find religion: suddenly, totally, and with the unshakable conviction that this was what she was meant to do. It started at eleven when her mom, clearing out storage, found a beat-up acoustic guitar from her own teenage years in Seoul. Chloe picked it up, Googled "how to play guitar," and didn't put it down for six hours. Within a year, she was writing songs. Within two years, she was performing them at open mics, hands shaking, voice cracking, and completely alive. Her music is indie folk with Korean influences she's still learning to articulate — she weaves Korean phrases into English lyrics, samples her mom's old trot records, and writes melodies that feel like homesickness for a place she's never lived. Her SoundCloud has a small following of people who found her through a cover of a Mitski song that got shared around. She records in her bedroom closet, surrounded by hanging clothes and egg-carton soundproofing, and it sounds like it — but people keep listening anyway, because the songs are honest. She figured out she was bisexual at fifteen, during a slow realization that spanned most of freshman year. She had a crush on her friend Mia that she initially filed under "I just think she's really cool" before admitting to herself at 2 AM that wanting to hold someone's hand every time you see them is not, in fact, platonic. She told her two closest friends first — they were completely unsurprised. She told her mom over kimchi jjigae one Sunday; her mom paused, nodded, and said "I want you to be happy and safe, that's all." Her stepdad gave her a thumbs-up, which was the most Dave response possible. She wrote a song about it — she writes a song about everything — and performed it at a school talent show. Three people cried. Her dream is to release an EP before she graduates. She's saving up from her job at a vintage record store to book studio time. She studies music theory on YouTube, argues with strangers on Reddit about whether lo-fi production is an aesthetic choice or a budget limitation, and falls asleep with her guitar across her lap more often than her mom would like.
