Run River North’s Alex Hwang
Half a Decade and Half a Band Later, Run River North Finds a New Space: An Interview with Frontman Alex Hwang
Alex Hwang
Sitting across from me in an empty classroom of a Korean Methodist church and preschool in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Alex Hwang is trying to walk me through his career, but he continually struggles to place when events happened. He even forgets how old he is. It makes sense given all he’s been through. Later when he talks about his process in the studio, he cuts himself off and explains, “My personality is to get inspired and feel alive in tragedy, tension, awkward[ness], [and] sorrow. But then I know if I’m there [in those feelings] for too long, it’s not good for me.”
Today, Hwang isn’t in a dark place. Earlier this morning, he was smiling and greeting everybody he passed in the halls of the church. However, as we sit down for this interview, he speaks with the smooth and comforting voice of somebody who has felt loss before, somebody who can yell “‘Good luck’ is what they tell you / ‘Get fucked!’ is what they mean” on stage in front of hundreds of people and then carry a perfectly pleasant conversation right after. And he casually mentions emotionally intense topics with ease and an even-keel disposition. This balance of light and dark, of anger and optimism, loss and rebirth, is a defining characteristic of Run River North.
With their debut as a three-piece group, Run River North have, musically and personally, shifted and become a new band. The band did lose members, but it also gained some new abilities. The band took the lineup change as an opportunity to explore each of the remaining members’ skillsets. Through this, a new sound emerged. As Run River North stated after they became a three-piece, “DAS SAD BUT NOT SAD”. [Note: SAD is an acronym the band have been using because the band lineup consists of Sally Kang on keys and vocals, Alex Hwang on guitar and vocals, and Daniel Chae on Guitar.] It’s rather apt considering all the change that the band has endured.
Left to right: Daniel Chae (guitar), Sally Kang (keys and vocals), Alex Hwang (vocals and guitar)
Hwang’s early experiences with music were rather wholesome. His earliest memories of music are of singing in church. In 5th grade, he wrote a musical about the anti-drug advocacy group D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). Hwang was the lead in 2 musicals at his high school, which he feels, “changed my life in terms of, like, ‘Oh, I feel like I have an identity in music and performance.’” In his senior year, a foundation was considering giving him a full tuition scholarship for college. Hwang decided to sing an original song in the interview, and believes that is what earned him the scholarship. “[After that], I figured I owed it to the scholarship to keep going [with music]. But [before then] music was more just, like, I played it at church and it helped me, you know, talk to girls I guess.”
For a few years after he graduated college, Hwang worked as the assistant to a music touring agent at Creative Artists Agency, the dominant representation agency in the entertainment and sports industries. It was 2011 when he realized he didn’t want to do that job forever. He had been writing some songs and had saved up enough money that he could afford to spend a year unemployed. So, at age 26, he quit his job and set out to see if he could assemble a band and make it work.
Run River North were founded as a six-piece indie-folk/rock group called Monsters Calling Home. The lineup consisted of the three current members of the band as well as John Chong on drums, Joe Chun on bass, and Jennifer Rim on violin. The group came together around the song “Monsters Calling Home”. The song was about Hwang’s parents’ experience immigrating to America from Korea and raising American children. Every member of the band was also the child of Korean-American immigrants.
The band’s first year was extraordinary: Monsters Calling Home got signed to a record label, released their self-titled debut EP, performed at South by Southwest Music Festival, and were featured on Jimmy Kimmel and in a Honda commercial. The group was worried about being compared to another indie-folk/rock band - the more well-known Of Monsters and Men. So at the beginning of 2013, Monsters Calling Home changed names to Run River North. By February 2014, Run River North released their self-titled debut album.
Left to Right: Alex Hwang (vocals and guitar), Sally Kang (keys and vocals), Daniel Chae (guitar), Joe Chun (bass), Jennifer Rim (violin), John Chong (drums)
On the surface, it seemed that everything was perfect and they had everything they could want, but tension was already brewing as they embarked on their first headlining national tour. “Because we weren’t hitting higher than Jimmy Kimmel, some of the younger people in the band were [feeling] like, ‘Oh, this sucks.’ “We just needed to show up and continue to work instead of having something handed to us. So there was a lot of tension in the group about what could we do to work besides just show up and play songs.”
In December 2014, the band finished this tour, and tensions were coming to a breaking point. Hwang enjoyed touring but admits that “all I took away from the tour was Joe watching football on his phone during one of our shows and not wanting to be in the same band as Daniel.” Hwang confronted several members of the band in January 2015, and he discovered that everybody was frustrated with Daniel. Meanwhile Daniel thought everything was fine. The band called a meeting, where Hwang “simply stated that we [Daniel and Alex] weren’t really friends this past year and that I couldn’t see myself being able to write songs with someone who I wasn’t friends with.” This was Hwang’s way of indirectly kicking Daniel out of the band. But Daniel didn’t leave. The pair met with their pastor to talk about their frustrations.
The band made their second studio album, Drinking from a Salt Pond (2016), while simultaneously attempting to work out their personal and artistic tensions. The music created in this period had a darker tone. The band’s direction was directly impacted by the anger and hurt that the members were experiencing. Run River North came into their own. The music gained an aggression, edge, and tension that wasn’t there before. The album was named after a lyric from “Salt Pond”, a song that they released on their later Superstition EP. The band cite this song as a critical turning point, and it’s easy to understand that when hearing Hwang sing, “Drink from a salt pond / Laugh with our forked tongues / You're not the one I've known before / Don't wanna hear another word from you / Hold your breath, I'll hold mine too”.
The band healed, but the whirlwind of events after Drinking from a Salt Pond’s release was, to say the least, exhausting and straining. The band performed on Late Night with Seth Meyers after the release of the album. They gained some major attention within the indie rock scene, and they toured aggressively. As Hwang speaks about this period of time, he first says it was 2014. Then he pauses and corrects himself to say it was 2015. When I chime in to tell him that it was 2016, he remembers, “Yeah, because it was the same year that Trump got presidency, I got married, [and] my mom got cancer, so all of that [was in] 2016. I turned 30. So that was, like, a big year.” So even though things looked dark before releasing the album, life had certainly gotten darker after.
Left to right: Daniel Chae, Sally Kang (above), Alex Hwang
In early 2017, drummer John Chong left. Then in January 2018, bassist Joe Chun left, and violinist Jennifer Rim followed soon after. So in a very short period of time, Run River North became literally half of the band they used to be. “I think people were just finding it straining. And surprisingly, the two people I wanted to kick out first, Daniel and Sally, are the ones that stayed.” So Daniel, Sally, and Alex continued working together despite past and ongoing discomfort. The band had thrived in discomfort before, so maybe they could do it again. “It just shows that you can either decide to stop being in the same room - which is fine. We could’ve done that, I think it would’ve been fine - but what happens if you stay in for a little longer and you let the emotions get past and settle, and have a focus and a goal, and seeing things change?”
It wasn’t a decision to keep the band together so much as it was a process. After half of the band left, the three remaining members “ended up just writing songs, just trying to figure out if we can do this.” They continued working together, and over time it slowly became more clear that the band would keep going. When articulating what kept the band from dissolving, Hwang confesses, “To be honest [. . .] it’s been like a low glimmer. Like a low, dim light. And then sometimes something will spark, like some story of a fan or a song that we write, and all of the sudden we’re like, ‘Oh, I can see a little bit further with this song in the band.’ So I think just as we were writing songs, it’s like, ‘there’s still stuff that we can say that still feels good and that people still respond to.’ And there are people that are waiting for some stuff.” Run River North’s pulse kept going because of their openness with themselves and fans.
Vulnerability was vital for the band in learning to move forward and evolve. Losing members left the remaining band members literally more exposed, yet, from that they found a new power. “By the time all three of them [the former band members] left, we figured out what we needed and what we didn’t need and then what we could synthesize and what we could let go of and have some space. Because there was space, that’s when Sally’s voice grew, without all of the noise of three other people telling each other what to do.” Collaborating with other artists also allowed them to gain perspective. Collaboration helped them “hear their [other artists’] story and hear their struggle and realize we’re not alone in the struggles that we face. So that helped kinda keep the stove light on I guess.” This April, the band performed at South By Southwest Music Festival, where they hadn’t performed since the band just formed and were still Monsters Calling Home. Since they originally performed there, the band has released two EPs and two albums, half a decade has passed, and half the band has left. Returning to the festival was one of the band’s first performances as a three-piece, and Hwang says, “It felt like we were a new band. We were without a drummer, so it was like, ‘Can this even work out?’ And it was kinda just jumping off without a safety net”
Left to Right: Daniel Chae, Alex Hwang, Sally Kang
With new circumstances, they also had to develop new outlooks. All the conflict and pain the band had experienced were experiences for them to gain even more empathy. They changed the way they approach music because they didn’t want to write music in the same climate as they had for the second album. According to Hwang, the band felt that “We don’t wanna be angry, we don’t wanna be working in such inflexible tension, we wanna work in a little more elastic. And we wanna work in joy. We really want joy to resound in whatever we’re doing.” So then a new objective had emerged for how to work on this next project. Hwang gets passionate when I ask what he believes the band’s mission statement is for writing the Monsters Calling Home EP. He sits up as he explains that right now the mission statement is “not to be angry, not to let anger be the last emotional response to things. And the one [message] that we want to share with people is how do you find joy in the midst of legitimate injustice, legitimate reasons to be angry, to feel hopeless? How do you find hope in all of the situation?” Hwang asks these questions rhetorically, with the confidence of somebody who knows the answer. Making the music was the answer.
Art allowed them to tell their own story on their own terms. From the beginning, the band had been immediately slapped with the labels of being Asian-American, Christian, and the children of immigrants. Hwang’s speaks slowly and thoughtfully as he considers the band members’ complex relationships with being Asian-American. “I think yeah, sometimes be angry at the way someone is using the label, but then also why are you angry? Is it based on a prejudice that you feel on the other person? Is there no tru- I feel like there definitely is some truth to the label.” He then reasons that no matter how other people use these labels, “As artists, we have the great ability to create. So we can add to that label. As for maybe some other people, they don’t get that change to give another hyphenate or give a little more depth to what it means to be Asian-American [ . . . ] or whatever label they [other people] have.”
Left to right: Daniel Chae, Sally Kang, Alex Hwang
When I ask about what excites him right now, Hwang pauses for a moment. He thinks, and then says that yoga excites him as well as “seeing really talented non-White people do things has been really cool. Let me rephrase that - seeing non-White dudes do things that only White dudes were always [doing].” Hwang becomes animated, using hand gestures to emphasize his point, as he explains that a lot of the artists that inspired him early on were White men. “Why can’t I find someone that looks like me and that’s doing really well? So I’m just inspired that what I’m looking for is turning up in different places and in different ways. And not the Asian version of that [stuff that I’m looking for], but actually just in other forms. I love that I’m getting inspired by non-White dudes.” He smiles as he lists Donald Glover, Hiro Murai, Steven Yeun, Awkwafina, and David Chang as sources of inspiration.
Run River North’s work as a whole has a distinctive spirit. The band’s heart has always remained the same, no matter the personnel or genre or circumstance. Hwang says that this is not coincidental and that since the band started, there has been one goal. “The threadline is tell our story from our perspective and who we are, whether it’s as an Asian-American or as a musician with first-generation parents, as people that have a faith background, people that grew up in L.A. [. . .] To be honest about where we are and know that it changes all the time.”
At one point in the conversation, I ask Hwang how he draws the line between himself and his music, his personal and public lives, etc. He’s been so open today that I increasingly wondered where his boundary could be. He looks confused when I ask that question, and responds quickly as if it is evident, “I always wanna share more.” He begins to ponder the topic himself, thinking out loud, sometimes stopping to formulate an idea. A few shrugs punctuate his speech as he tries to identify where that line is. “If it seems like I’m doing it [sharing certain pieces of information] for likes or just for clickbait, then I’ll try to step back. And in a song, I’ll write pretty openly and then be like, ‘Is this gonna help? Is this a good song? Or is this just me, like, TMI?’ I don’t know . . . I don’t mind pushing the boundary.”
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