Charlene Kaye on Tiger Daughter, Taylor Swift, and Guns N’ Hoses

According to the Chinese zodiac, it’s the year of the dragon; but by judging musician, comedian, and actor Charlene Kaye’s blisteringly hot 2024 so far, she could easily declare it the year of the tiger (daughter).

We recently chatted over Zoom with Kaye, who was at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland performing in two productions: her new solo show and a work-in-progress concert for Drop Dead Gorgeous: A New Musical. Our free-flowing conversation touched on a number of subjects, including her breakthrough Instagram Reels, her music (which includes the ability to shred every guitar solo on Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction), a late-blooming foray into acting…and her mother.

Kaye’s tumultuous relationship with her mom Lily serves as the focal point of her Fringe solo show, Tiger Daughter or: How I Brought My Immigrant Mother Ultimate Shame. The show’s title riffs on Amy Chua’s 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which defined the strict parenting style in which kids are pushed to high levels of (over)achievement. “My mom certainly had those rigorous standards set for my sister and I at a very young age,” Kaye says. “We were put in classical music lessons from the time we could walk. We always had tutors. It was very important to them that we had good grades.”

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But Lily, who grew up in poverty in Singapore in the 1960s, isn’t exactly a textbook tiger mom either. “Even though she was intense in some ways, she’s a walking, talking paradox,” Kaye explains. “She also had dreams of being a musician when she was younger, and therein lies the root of a lot of our conflict and a lot of our competition because she’s an outsized, flamboyant, outrageous character. I could not have made up any of the details about who she is because she’s just that unique.”

Kaye clarifies further: “My mother gets six-foot tall nude portraits of herself commissioned that she hangs around the house. My mom makes me Photoshop her face onto pictures of supermodels and pop stars.”

With a bank of stories about Lily in a Google Doc, Kaye wasn’t sure if they’d have a life outside of the computer. But like many of us, she found herself with extra time on her hands during the COVID-19 pandemic: “I took acting classes for the very first time when I was 34. Why not take an online Zoom class? That seemed like the lowest barrier to entry.”

Kaye trained under Jennifer Monaco at William Esper Studio in New York City, and the two ended up collaborating and developing the stories about life with Lily. “She really helped me give my stories a structure and a soul,” Kaye says of Monaco, who now directs Tiger Daughter. The show evolved from a loose collection of tales into a story about a daughter’s quest for her mother’s approval, aided by comedy, music, and even a PowerPoint presentation.

“I never would’ve imagined that I’d be touring the world with a show about my relationship with my mom, but it feels like a story that wanted to be told,” she says. “You don’t need to be Asian to understand the show. You just have to have a mother or a parent that you’ve disappointed at some point.”

Despite disappointing her mom, Kaye’s resume makes the rest of us look like slackers. In addition to being a classically trained pianist, she studied English at the University of Michigan, where she met friend and future collaborator Darren Criss (Glee). She toured nationally with Criss’s Team StarKid musical theater troupe, is the former lead vocalist for the band San Fermin, and now releases her own music under the moniker Kaye.

Oh, and in her mid-20s, she performed as a slutty Slash in an all-girl Guns N’ Roses cover band—Guns N’ Hoses—with their slogan “Welcome to the Vajungle!” She proudly explains, “I’d never played a single guitar solo in my entire life. And now I’m 37, and I can play every single solo on Appetite for Destruction. I am a monster shredder.”

That combination of comedy and music packed a one-two punch on her Instagram earlier this year when Kaye released a video that broke down the musical stylings of “every Taylor Swift song.” It opens with Kaye on keyboard singing, “This is a verse that I’m singing in a major key / it’s gonna move to the minor six eventually.” She also demonstrates Swift’s penchant for breathy pre-chorus vocals and fast singing that’s “the closest thing I can get to rapping.”

“I feel like my world has exploded this year. In April, before I made that Taylor Swift thing, I had 16,000 [Instagram] followers. Now I have a 100,000, and it’s all because of these reels,” she says. At first, Kaye was hesitant about posting the reel because she was afraid of the Swifties and their wrath. But at her friends’ encouragement, Kaye released it. The internet—including the Swifties—found it funny and on point.

Since then, she’s released videos taking on the music of Lana del Rey, Chappell Roan, Dua Lipa, Charlie XCX, and our personal favorite, Vampire Weekend. In her breakdown, she focuses on the band’s tendencies to name drop famous people (aka Peter Gabriel) and their alma mater Columbia, as well as their affinity for the word “balaclava.”

“Comedy has been so refreshing and so liberating,” she says. “I’m in a place now where I have a container for all these observational things that I’ve noticed my whole life. And especially with Tiger Daughter, I have this beautiful show that’s a tribute to my mom, and I’ve been able to sort of heal my relationship with her as well.”

Catch Tiger Daughter at Joe’s Pub in New York City on Oct. 25 (handpicked by Margaret Cho to open her Vanguard Artist-in-Residence series at the venue) and at Dynasty Typewriter in L.A. on Nov. 22.

Christine N. Ziemba is a Los Angeles-based freelance pop culture writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow her on Instagram and Threads at @christineziemba.