Singer- songwriter Casey McQuillen spoke to David Hennessy about her forthcoming tours with Anastacia and Eurovision- winning Loreen, her anti- bullying work in schools and her latest single about being happily single rather than settling with someone that isn’t right.
Singer-songwriter Casey McQuillen has just released her latest single, Better.
The track came ahead of two prestigious tours that will see her touring Europe with 2000s hit songstress Anastaic and Sweden’s double Eurovision- winning Loreen.
Casey McQuillen grew up in Boston and later made her home in New York but feels it is in London, where she is now semi- based, that she and her music are fully seen.
That is evident in the opportunities that have come her way.
Casey has supported incredible acts like James Morrison, Beverley Knight, Marti Pellow, Newton Faulkner, Will Young, Eric Hutchinson, Stephen Kellogg, Kate Voegele, Tyler Hilton, Clark Beckham, David Ryan Harris, and Nick Howard.
The artist has also campaigned for anti-bullying with the ‘You Matter’ tour, an initiative that provided an anti-bullying concert series at over two hundred schools for over 50,000 students across the US, the UK, and Ireland.
These even recognised by the UN Foundation and recently featured on The Kelly Clarkson Show.
Like Kelly Clarkson, Casey first came to prominence on American Idol when she was a finalist back in 2014.
Better is a song about choosing independence and the power of self-love.
Casey is currently touring Europe with Loreen but our chat took place before she went out on the road.
With the single Better and the tours you have coming up, you must be really pleased with things at the moment..
“Oh my goodness, I am.
“It’s so exciting.
“I feel like this industry is like waves of on time and then waves of reset.
“And we are certainly in a wave of ‘on’ right now, there’s just a lot going on.
“It’s always so exciting to release new music around live dates because you can bring that to a crowd.
“I’m going to be playing it at 53 dates, opening for Loreen and Anastacia this spring so we are going to introduce that song to a lot of Europeans this spring.”
Tell me about that song. Where did Better come from?
It’s about not settling and being true to yourself really, isn’t it?
“I was doing a co- write down in Nashville with a married couple.
“I have some married friends, their standard for setting me up on a date with somebody is the man has to be breathing. And that is debatable. It is any man who walks into a room.
“They’re like, ‘Him’.
“You can feel their panic that you’re alone.
“They’re like, ‘Well, he’s alone, you’re alone’.
“Once they get a ring on their finger, all context for what makes someone compatible with somebody else flies out the window.
“I recently had a friend try to set me up with her cousin who was 10 years younger than me.
“I was like, ‘In what world?’
“I was like, ‘Does he need a babysitter? What are you talking about?’
“I’m not super old but a lot of my friends are married, a lot of my friends are in relationships.
“The misconception is I’m single by choice.
“It’s not like a competition amongst men and the best one gets to date me.
“Your competition isn’t other men, your competition is my life.
“If I want to date somebody, I’m going to go on one less trip a year with my girlfriends and I’m going to go on one less tour, and I’m going to go to one less workout class a week.
“I’m going to have to take things from my life- My life is 100% full- and I’m happy to do that for someone who makes my life better but you have to add to my life in other ways if I’m going to take things away from my life that I love.
“When I said that, they were like, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting concept for a song’.
“Usually you write choruses first but the beginning of the song is, ‘My friends all tell me do it for the plot. I’d rather not spend the night just because you’re hot’.
“And my friends are always out here telling me to date this guy or make out with this guy because their lives are boring and they’re married and they want to live vicariously through me.
“But I’m like, ‘No, this is actually my life and I have grown past that phase in my life and I’m just looking for peace at this point’.”
How have you enjoyed the reactions to it? It’s almost an anti- love song, isn’t it?
“And it’s coming out two weeks before Valentine’s Day: Hilarious.
“I feel like I’ve de-centred romantic love in my life.
“And don’t get me wrong. You think you’re a good match for me: My DMs are open on Instagram. You hit me up.
“I think that’s the point of the song.
“I’m not closed off to love.
“It is just not my number one priority in my life.
“I think that a lot of people, and women specifically, can relate to that.
“This is kind of the first generation where you are not a social pariah if you don’t have a partner and a baby by 30.
“I think that’s what’s really great, the people who are choosing that it is a choice.
“They wanted this. They’re going for it and they’re going to be better partners and better parents because they actively chose it.
“And then the people who that’s not the right fit or it’s not the right time or they haven’t found the right person in their life right now, they’re not forced to do it with the wrong person.
“I think what you’re going to end up seeing is a lot of happier marriages in the marriages that do happen, a lot of happier single people in the people who are just taking their time to find the right person, and eventually a happier set of children whose parents actually, genuinely want to be together.
“I think it’s genuinely a healthy reset for society, that people have the ability to take a little bit more time to find the right person if that’s needed.”
Was it always going to be music for you?
“I always loved music but I was a very academically inclined kid as well.
“I was big dork.
“I loved studying.
“I still do.
“I’m the person who whips out 18 facts a day and my friends are like, ‘How do you know that?’
“I was really academically inclined.
“I was always making music.
“I would study 5pm till midnight and then I would write songs from midnight till two in the morning.
“When I was applying to college, I applied to all these really prestigious academic institutions.
“And then I also applied to Berklee College of Music which is a famous music school in America.
“And I truly think that the moment I knew I was going to be a professional singer was when I toured Berklee, because I saw it and it was the first time I was around other musicians like that.
“I went to a Mexican restaurant with my parents afterwards and I literally was hyperventilating.
“Going to be a lawyer would have been, in a sense, the easier choice.
“It would have been a lot of work, of course, but I’m very good at that kind of work, so I think the riskier and more exciting choice was this.
“With being a lawyer, it’s like if you study this and you learn this and you pass the bar and you do this, you know where you’re going to end up.
“But what’s terrifying but exciting about this industry is I can do everything right and it cannot work.
“I can try, try, try and that’s not enough.
“It’s not a set of steps to follow and then you pop out where you want to be.
“It’s much riskier than that and I think that’s the thing.
“When there’s an up, that is what is so exciting for me.
“Right now I’m going on 53 arena dates with Eurovision winner Loreen and pop iconic Anastacia. That is wild.
“I’m just me from Boston, and there’s a lot of girls who wanted to be on these tours and I get to go. They picked me and that comes from all this hard work I have done over the years and it’s so meaningful to me because it wasn’t guaranteed.
“I could have worked just as hard and not gotten these tours.
“I think that’s why I’m addicted to this career and love it so much.”
Tell me about growing up in Boston because I’ve often heard about the strong Irish community that there is there.
“I’m 100% Irish American so my whole extended family is recently emigrated from Ireland.
“I’ll tell you this. This is how Irish Boston and my upbringing is.
“I was about 12 years old and I was in my history class in school and my male teacher handed me back a test and I said to him, ‘What’s wrong with your ring?’
“And he was like, ‘What do you mean?’
“He had just a gold band.
“And I was like, ‘Where are the hands? Why does your ring look odd?’
“And he was like, ‘You mean a Claddagh Ring? That’s just Irish people, Casey’.
“And I was like, ‘It is?’
“All the men in my life had claddagh rings. I didn’t question it.
“That is a small example of how much Irish culture is really prevalent in Boston.
“My grandfather emigrated to America from Donegal.
“I grew up in the big Irish community in Boston.
“I think it was really healthy for me to grow up in a community that I felt so represented by.
“The Irish have done very well for themselves in Boston, and it was a great, great place to play grow up as Casey McQuillen, let me tell you.”
You mentioned you grandfather from Donegal and wasn’t the other side of the family from Antrim?
“Yes, the McQuillen name is very strongly correlated with Antrim and my grandpa’s side, my mum’s side is McLaughlin, which is obviously very strongly originated from Donegal.
“Carndonagh, Donegal specifically.
“I was very close with my grandfather.
“I loved him very, very much. We were very close. He was a great guy. He was a really funny guy.
“He came over quite late in life and the classic tale of really not wanting to leave and feeling he had no economic choice.
“He came over with very little and worked a manual job and ended up putting all of his children through college.
“He lived a really great life and was able to go back to Carndonagh in his old age a couple times, once with my parents before I was born and then I actually had the opportunity to go back to Carndonagh with my grandfather when I was like 10.
“It was a very meaningful experience to me.”
It was at this point that Casey proudly showed us her Irish passport.
“I understand the running joke in Ireland about Americans who feel very connected to Ireland through their heritage.
“But I also think having grandparents who emigrated, not necessarily by choice, they emigrated out of what they felt was necessity, that Ireland was almost taken from my family.
“We didn’t want to go, we had to go.
“My grandfather was a singer.
“He would play in the pubs in Ireland.
“And he really felt that I was the only one who inherited any musical ability at all.
“I know he would just be overjoyed by any performance I did, any amount of joy that I had from music at all, but it being at big stages in Ireland feels personally very impactful to me.
“It feels like a full circle moment for my family.”
You have played in Ireland somewhat before, haven’t you?
“I played the 3 Arena with Marti Pellow last year which was great.
“That was very exciting.
“And I also do an anti-bullying programme in schools with kids.
“I have a lot of songs that I wrote when I was younger, and now, about bullying and self-confidence and body dysmorphia and all these different things.
“I have been going to schools in America for years bringing this anti-bullying programme.
“And when I had applied for my citizenship, I decided that I wanted to bring the programme to Ireland and so this fall I did a couple weeks in the UK and I did a week in the Dublin area.
“Very excitingly my citizenship came right before I went over and I got to go and immediately start volunteering in Ireland and bringing my skill set.
“There are lots of people, doctors and lawyers and much more useful people in the world than me, but the thing I can do is make art and perform it in a way that emotionally engages people.
“Bringing it to schools was really fun.
“I loved playing in Ireland.”
You’ve done a lot to combat bullying, where does that come from? Were your own high school days not pleasant?
“Middle School was challenging.
“I always say I was bullied in a really stereotypical way.
“I was very loud and I always knew the right answer.
“And I also would stick up a lot for kids who couldn’t really stick up for themselves.
“I kind of created a lot of negative attention on myself and that’s part of my programme.
“I talk about that experience and how this affected me as an adult.
“But I also had a family member who was really, really bullied in his childhood. It was much more severe.
“It’s funny to talk about what happened to me.
“It’s not funny what happened to my family member.
“That was really the catalyst of it.
“I have a song that’s quite specifically about his experience being bullied and I still think to this day that is the most impactful part of the programme that I do.
“And I’ve heard from schools that there’s actually a genuine downtick in kids being horrible to each other after I come because kids have this very visceral mental image of my family member in their mind.
“It’s a lot of hard work but I keep doing it because it seems to be working.”
I bet you are prouder of that work than anything else, say any stage you could play..
“Anything.
“I’ll tell you a story.
“One time I was having a really hard day and I had gone to a school the week before.
“I got this message from a girl and she was like, ‘Hi Casey. Thank you so much for coming to my school. I loved it so much. I have cancer and all the kids refused to sit with me at lunch because they didn’t want to ‘catch the cancer’ but after you came and talked about how that happened to your family member, everyone asked me to sit with them at lunch so it’s better’.
“And I’m bawling.
“And I’ve gotten dozens of messages like that over the years and it’s the reason that I keep doing it.
“It’s really hard to be a kid.
“It’s freaking brutal out there.
“It’s very challenging.
“It’s meaningful to me that I could have any positive impact on those kids.”
You are semi-based in London, how do you like it so far?
“I love London.
“I really love London.
“I think London is kind of the city where I felt musically appreciated for the first time.
“It was the first time I was really validated.
“I was touring a lot in the US but I was touring smaller venues, like 300 capacity venues.
“And then James Morrison brought me on tour with him throughout the UK and I jumped from 300 to 3,000 person venues overnight.
“That changed my whole career.
“The James Morrison tour is the reason that I now am semi-based in London, that my whole career is over there.
“Then I opened for Beverly Knight, and then I opened for Marti Pellow. Now I’m opening for Loreen and Anastacia.
“Momentum has been building.
“So London was the city that I first felt like musically that I was given the opportunities to rise to the level that I felt like I was ready for, and I was able to execute on that.
“I feel really invigorated by London.
“London, I feel, sees a part of me that I haven’t been able to showcase in America.
“I feel very excited every time I’m in London because it feels like opportunity.”
Has Ireland always felt like home?
“Truly, to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out in 500 years that there’s actually some physical thing happening.
“I feel so calm and I feel very connected to my grandfather, every old person sounds just like him.
“My whole life there’s been this message of ‘going home’ and how beautiful Ireland is and almost how sacred it is to the Irish American community.
“I absolutely love being there.”
Better is out now.
Casey tours Europe with Loreen in February/ March.
Casey McQuillen tours Europe with Anastacia March/ April/ May.
For more information, click here.