Charlie Couvillion hid behind masks for almost 10 years.
“My mom always said when I was little I liked to wear my Superman costume,” says Couvillion, 23. “And I would like to wear it if we went to the grocery store. I was a super shy kid.
“It was almost like I could put that mask on and be someone else and not be this shy kid.”
Couvillion also masked some of his own talents while he was producing projects for other people in his home recording studio. And his mother noticed. “So, when I started making my own music, she told me it was like I was taking off my mask or taking off my costume because I was finally putting myself first.”
On November 14th, Couvillion released his first EP, The End of the World, which features his own songs and, for the first time, Couvillion doing the singing.
Over the years, Instagram viewers traveled along with Couvillion while he featured songs and videos as well as his different hair expressions. “When I was a teenager, I bleached it. And went pink. And then I went blue. And then it was purple for a minute. As I got older, I bleached it again and did orange.”
Orange was for a song he released entitled “Sunrise.” “So I was, essentially, using myself as a billboard.”
But he didn’t sing.
Couvillion’s hair is now his natural auburn color. And his music career has a new focus: himself. “I regret focusing on other people so much. Not that I regret spending time on it, it’s just that I wish I would’ve been not scared to put myself first and put myself in the spotlight.”
A native Memphian, Couvillion was always creative. “I used to make little stop-motion videos with my Legos when I was probably 5 years old.”
His dad played guitar in a band, so musical instruments were always around. Couvillion played trumpet and tuba in his middle school band.
When he was 12, he set up his own music studio in his bedroom. “In the corner behind my bunk bed,” he says. “I’d gotten a laptop from a pawn shop. And my uncle had given me software to work with. And then [I had] these speakers that I found in my parents’ attic.”
Couvillion learned studio work from “just watching YouTube videos and looking things up on how to do stuff.”
He began working on music projects for other people. “It would just be my friends. My middle school friends from next door. Looking back, I think it was part of me trying to come through them, almost.”
He basically wrote their songs. “I’d have them write stuff, but I would tweak it and work on it and end up making the final product.”
But, he says, “I was featuring all these other people because I was scared to really be myself.
“I think a lot of that was, I hated my voice, but I still had things to say.”
He adds, “There was something about singing and just having my voice recorded. I just didn’t feel like I was good enough.”
When he got out of high school, Couvillion moved his recording studio to “the in-law suite that was right off the house.”
He produced “hundreds” of people over the years. “But those are the people that would come and pay for me to record them, essentially. I was pretty picky about who I would actually work with.”
Couvillion, who wrote pop or alternative music for himself, mainly worked on hip-hop for other people because that was so prevalent.
And he kept making videos after the Lego one. “So it was just kind of just me recording doing stuff with my friends.”
His subjects ranged from other people’s music to his day-to-day life. “I had written kind of a video essay and the concept was that I was trying to find the perfect sock, which I still haven’t found. I thought I did in that video and learned later on that I did not.”
He hung 10 different kinds of socks on a board as a backdrop. “It’s like after a certain amount of time, they kind of wear out and then it’s like, ‘Okay. Maybe this wasn’t a good one.’ Or maybe they don’t last long enough. That kind of thing. I’m just very particular with everything I do. Which ties back into the music and why it’s taken so long for this project to even come about.”
Couvillion made hundreds of videos, mostly music videos, for other people. But he eventually split his “passions of doing video and music. It’s like I picked the one I liked the most, which is music.”
And he decided to finally focus on himself. “I had so much time focusing on money. And after making good money doing what I was doing, I realized that I lost part of me in chasing money.”
He also decided to start singing for the first time. “When I first started producing, my beats weren’t good. I had to learn and get better at it. And I just thought, ‘You know, I could do the same thing with my voice.’ And that’s exactly what I did.
“When I really started making my own music and focusing on it, I would say it was just two years ago.”
Before that, he says, “It was almost like hiding from my own voice.”
“Starlight” was the first song Couvillion wrote where he “joined” his voice with the song. “It’s about finding yourself.”
Couvillion released the song April 5, 2024, on digital streaming platforms. “So that’s when I count my music career starting.”
It took him about a year to finish the alternative-pop EP. “I really look at it like it was a block of marble that I carved into for a year.”
“Kerosene,” one of the songs, has a “really hard-hitting electric guitar in it that gives a rock feel. But there’s still, you know, pop/hip-hop kind of drums across the project.”
He and cinematographer Andí Cunningham with assistance from Courtney Schweers and Rose Hensley did a video for his song, “Run,” in which he burns an old broken piano that’s on a curb.
Couvillion plays most of the music on the EP.
The songs are “thematically connected. And they literally connect. The songs fade into each other, so it all feels like one cohesive project, which was so hard to do. That took a lot because I also mixed and mastered it myself, and that’s not my strong suit.”
The EP is basically a short story, Couvillion says. “There’s a storyline and each song fits each chapter of the story, essentially. In short, it’s about a breakup. But it also plays in the themes of the end of the world. It’s almost like comparing the two. When you’re going through that breakup kind of thing, it’s like, ‘Oh. This is the end of the world.’”
Now that Couvillion is singing, is he ready to perform on stage, something he’s never done? “I haven’t even thought of it. To be honest, I probably do have stage fright. I haven’t done it. I definitely will. That is a dream of mine. It’s just that right now I’m so focused on creating the art itself; whereas, performing it is a whole different thing.”
And, Couvillion says, “For me, now having the internet, I’ll just share it there rather than sharing it on a stage.”
To view the video for “Run” and listen to the EP, go to linktr.ee/charliecouvillion.