Block Club Chicago: South Sider Gayun Cannon’s Emotional ‘Fallen Angels’ Mixtape Blends Genres, Cultural Influences

NEAR WEST SIDE — Gayun Cannon was born into the world of music.

Her father is the popular Chicago blues guitarist Toronzo Cannon, and her Chinese mother introduced her to Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese music and enrolled her in classical piano lessons when she was younger.

Born in Bronzeville and raised in the Bridgeport and Chinatown area, Gayun Cannon began experimenting with the bass and drums around age 10, she said. She picked up the flute in high school at Whitney Young and then began teaching herself guitar “because my dad was always on tour,” she said.

While studying music business at DePaul University, Cannon took the leap and released her 2021 debut album, “Brown Sugar Baby,” a hodgepodge of genres bouncing from indie to R&B and beyond.

Now 23, Cannon said she’s still on her journey of learning to play instruments she’s interested in as she continues to develop her sound — in the process releasing her latest mixtape, “Fallen Angels,” in May.

Cannon will perform 8 p.m. Thursday at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland Ave., opening for local indie artist Tala Silva.

“I feel like I get the soulfulness of my music from my father because his music is very soulful. Within recent years, he has started to rock-ify his blues a little more with heavier drums and fuzz and distortion on his guitar, which I think I subconsciously followed too,” Cannon said. “My mother traveled a lot to different parts of Asia, like Taiwan and Japan, so I grew up listening to a lot of Taiwanese and Japanese music as well, which all ties into my musical inspirations.”

Like her debut album, Cannon’s five-song “Fallen Angels” is fueled by emotion and relationships and blends musical genres and cultural influences, she said. The cover image is based on the 1995 movie, “Fallen Angels,” set in pre-Handover Hong Kong.

“Every song relates back to a feeling of loneliness and longing, especially with romance, but asserts that in the end, everything is going to be OK,” Cannon said. “That theme is presented throughout the whole movie, too. I wrote the project at a time where I started to accept forms of isolation and being OK with being alone.”

The five songs were written at different points of Cannon’s life, dating back to her “Brown Sugar Baby” debut. Songwriting for Cannon comes most naturally when she’s emotional, she said.

“When I’m going through it, I will drop anything to write a song, and I feel that’s when my best music [comes],” she said.

Cannon wrote “prelude: 我依然爱你,” the first song on “Fallen Angels,” in 2021.

“One of my best friends [said,] ‘You have to release this, you have to release this.’ I’d recorded it a bunch of times, and there was even a different ending, but I didn’t feel ready to release it,” she said.

Another song, “Not Used To Being Loved,” is sonically inspired by Erykah Badu and “Lose Control” by Amaria, and explores Cannon’s journey through relationships and understanding how it feels to be truly loved by a partner.

It’s followed by the jazz-rap fusion track “Can’t Stay Away From You,” featuring Kaicrewsade and Drew The Kiiid. Cannon was inspired by how jazz has been infused into the rap genre, and she wanted to pull features from Chicago rappers for this track, she said.

“Believe It’s So” ventures into the indie-rock vein, a genre Cannon has loved since her high school and college days. Inspired by London-based singer beabadoobee, Cannon worked with local band MilkSwarm to produce a beat for the track she would later lay the vocals over.

“It’s such a new thing that I have never done. I have never played with a live band or sung with a live backtrack, so that’s my favorite song,” Cannon said.

Cannon said she was most nervous about producing the final song on the mixtape, “postlude: Play About Mines,” as it is vulnerable and pulls away from her extensive use of instruments in her previous songs.

“The postlude was mostly harmonies, and that one was the most emotional song for me, just what I was saying and the growth from relationships and how I have grown from that,” Cannon said.

Cannon is now working toward a full-length album release and plans to take as much time as it did to curate “Fallen Angels.”

“I want people to take away [from Fallen Angels] … that this girl can produce, this girl is making music that people can relate [to],” Cannon said. “A lot of my music is more on sad topics, but I’m proud to be the sad girl of Chicago.”

Doors open 5 p.m. at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland Ave., for Cannon’s Thursday performance. Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door. Learn more and buy tickets here.