Runyu Qian Is Collecting Memories in Three-Minute Time Capsules
Written by Komal Gupta | For Runyu Qian, a song can hold a childhood afternoon, a grandmother’s voice, a lonely year in New York or an entire fictional life. At Music Matters Live, the singer-songwriter and pipa player lets MIXTAPE 317 inside a few of them.
Runyu Qian has had two hours of sleep.
This is important information because I am about to get an unusually unfiltered version of her.
“Whatever I’m telling you, it’s like the dead truth.”
Fair enough.
What follows includes a childhood encounter with some deeply unwanted apple paste, a musical career that began partly because someone forgot to register her for a different instrument, an imaginary car she cannot legally drive, Rick and Morty, and a surprisingly existential discussion about what music can preserve.
Somehow, it all makes sense together. Because talking to Runyu about music means talking about memory.
The First One
At Music Matters Live in Singapore, Runyu is performing five songs, including music from her upcoming album. Ask her which one she particularly wants a new audience to hear, though, and she lands on “Core Memory”.
Its story begins with one of the earliest moments she can remember.
“My very first memory is my grandmother pushing me in a stroller to the park,” she says. “I remember it being a very sunny, peaceful day, and having no care in the world. I was just enjoying being me.”
Years later, when Runyu began thinking about the earliest thing she could remember, that particular moment surfaced. What she discovered there wasn't simply nostalgia. It was relief.
“There’s no anxiety, there’s no doubt about being loved and being taken care of,” she says.
As adults, Runyu thinks we spend considerable time trying to recover a kind of unconditional security we once possessed without even knowing it.
“That love that we try so hard to regain—we had it before we could even remember it.”
“Core Memory” carries another piece of that childhood with it: “Xiao Yan Zi” (小燕子), or “Little Swallow,” a Chinese children’s song her grandmother used to sing to her.
“This is the sound of my childhood.”
The memory is striking in its specificity. Not some hazy impression of childhood, but a park, a stroller, a sunny day and her grandmother's voice.
And, unfortunately for young Runyu, apples.
An apple, some noodles and a pipa
Later, I give Runyu a very simple challenge inspired by “Core Memory”: I name something, and she tells me the first memory it unlocks.
A smell? — “Apples.”
Not because she loves them.
When Runyu was little, her grandmother used to feed her apple paste. Runyu's assessment of it today is succinct: “very disgusting.”
“I remember hiding behind the curtain so she wouldn’t find me,” she says.
It did not work.
“She always found me and put that into my mouth.”
A food takes her home to Beijing and zhajiangmian, a noodle dish that every family makes differently.
“I only love the zhajiangmian that my father makes.”
A place brings her back to the park her grandmother used to take her to, where she remembers roller-skating with friends in the summers while older people danced nearby.
And a sound? That one is easy.
“Pipa.”
“It really grew up with me,” she says. “It’s the sound that I know. And I think that’s the most me.”
The phrasing is revealing. Runyu doesn't simply say she grew up playing the pipa, a traditional Chinese string instrument. It grew up with her.
And yet, the relationship that would eventually become so central to her music began entirely by chance.
The happy accident
Runyu started playing pipa at the age of seven, but there was no grand musical plan behind it.
“I’m such an ADHD kid,” she says, recalling her mother's search for something that could keep her occupied for 30 minutes.
Runyu was originally supposed to learn another instrument through her primary school. There was just one problem. Her dad forgot to register her.
By the time her mother returned from a business trip and realised what had happened, the original opportunity was gone. But another student had recently moved away, leaving behind a place in the pipa class.
Runyu took it. She even bought the other student's instrument.
“So yeah,” she says. “It was just a happy accident.”
Two decades later, the instrument she ended up with because of a forgotten registration has become one of the clearest signatures of her music.
When I ask what she would want someone who discovered her through “Drive” to find next, she doesn't hesitate.
“Pipa, I would say.”
She loves the moment when someone unfamiliar with the instrument asks what they're hearing.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, okay. Do you have 30 minutes?’”
That curiosity is precisely what she wants. Writing in English while placing a Chinese traditional instrument inside the music can become an invitation: hear something unfamiliar, ask what it is, and perhaps leave wanting to know more about the instrument and the culture surrounding it.
“If people would be curious about the instrument, about the song, about the culture, I would be very, very happy.”
Taking Reality for a Ride
Then there is “Drive.”
Runyu wrote the song during a much less comfortable period of her life. After a three-year gap, she returned to the United States to finish school in Boston while living alone in New York, travelling between the two cities for classes.
It was, she says, the first time she had been “truly, truly alone.”
No family. No friends nearby. A lot of insecurity.
And somehow, out of that isolation came something closer to permission.
“The world is actually just a playground,” she remembers realising. “Nobody gives a shit. Just be you and take the wheel and be okay with being ambitious and be okay with being you.”
That's the spirit of “Drive”: go for it.
There is only one minor problem.
“I don’t even drive,” Runyu says. “I don’t even have a licence.”
So where does “Drive” take her now?
“To my awesome future,” she replies.
A beat.
“With my imaginary car.”
Perhaps this is where Runyu's relationship with reality becomes most apparent. One lyric in the song, “take reality for a ride,” was partly inspired by Rick and Morty, a show she loves.
“I’m so done with trying to understand it,” she says of the world. “Just live it.”
Her rules for existence are similarly economical: try not to die. Beyond that, reality is more flexible than we sometimes imagine.
“A lot of things will change within once your mind changes,” she says. “And your reality will change.”
Maybe you don't need a licence for that particular drive.
Three minutes, forever
Runyu has been writing songs since she was 18. Her first came during a summer programme at Berklee, largely because she had time to kill and received an email looking for demos from students who wanted to perform.
She wanted to do the shows, so she wrote something.
“They really liked it,” she remembers. “That’s my first experience of kind of realising that, okay, I can maybe write songs that don’t suck.”
Ten years later, the waiting has changed.
When she was starting out, Runyu remembers “scratching my head,” waiting for inspiration and for the light bulb to switch on. Experience has given her ways of accessing that creative space more deliberately now.
“I can sort of just turn it on and off.”
What hasn't changed is where she looks: her own memories. Feelings. Books. Movies. Other people's stories.
“I try to keep it real still.”
Sometimes, those other people's stories are fictional ones.
When the team behind the popular open-world action role-playing game Wuthering Waves approached Runyu, they had discovered her through “Core Memory.” The use of “Xiao Yan Zi”—a melody familiar to generations of Chinese listeners—was part of what caught their attention.
Then they handed her a character's story.
“They gave me her whole script,” Runyu says. “They gave me her whole life.”
She approached it almost like acting.
“It’s like stepping into her foot and imagining being her and going through the stuff that she went through.”
Writing for a character is different from writing about herself, but Runyu sees something connecting the two.
“Music is, like, an art of time,” she says.
“A whole life’s experience or a whole story in three minutes. And you’ll have that three minutes forever.”
Then she finds the description:
“It’s like a time capsule or a memory capsule.”
Not the songs that sound the coolest
That philosophy also shapes what Runyu chooses to perform.
Part of the wider All That Matters conference, Music Matters Live brings emerging artists from around the world to Singapore, connecting music discovery with the region’s broader entertainment industry. For an artist like Runyu, that means a festival set can also be an introduction. A handful of songs might have to introduce an entire artistic world. But Runyu isn't necessarily looking for the tracks that make the biggest immediate impression.
“I try to mix my old songs and my new songs,” she says. “They’re all my personal favourites, to be honest.”
There is “Core Memory,” carrying the sound of her childhood. There is “Stray”, written about burying a stray cat she found on the street. Each comes with something Runyu wants the audience to take away beyond the song itself.
“Every song has a backstory that I want people to know,” she says.
Performing outside China adds another consideration. Runyu wants the music she brings with her to carry parts of Chinese tradition and culture to audiences who may be encountering them for the first time. That means choosing a set isn't simply about what will sound best onstage.
“It’s not the songs that sound the coolest,” she says. “It’s the songs that are meaningful.”
Perhaps that is the simplest way to understand the choices Runyu makes as an artist. A song isn't just something to listen to for three minutes. It can hold a story, preserve a feeling, or introduce someone to something they didn't know before.
And at a festival like Music Matters Live, where an artist may only have a handful of songs to introduce themselves to someone new, that matters.
Runyu only has five. But as she has spent our conversation showing me, five songs can carry a lot.
CORE MEMORY: RAPID FIRE
Runyu has a song called “Core Memory,” so we gave her a few things and asked for the first memory that came to mind. Important, random or somewhere in between.
A smell: Apples—specifically, the apple paste her grandmother used to make her eat.
A food: Her father's zhajiangmian.
A sound: pipa. “It’s the sound that I know.”
A place: The park near her childhood home, roller-skating with friends while older people danced.
Something she loved as a kid: Barbie dolls—which became associated with hospital visits because her mother would buy her one after her check-ups.
One last thing from Runyu
“Love y’all. Hope I’ll see you guys—actually, like, see you, see you.”
For Runyu, that distinction matters. She loves performing live, meeting people and watching music physically move an audience. At a moment when AI is becoming increasingly present in music, she finds that human encounter increasingly valuable.
“Music is supposed to be about connecting people and seeing people, seeing their faces and seeing how music will move their bodies. So I hope to see you.”
Runyu Qian
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