It’s been over six years since the inaugural Women’s March took over Washington, D.C., following the election of President Donald Trump. You probably remember seeing the scores of marchers decked out in pink “pussy hats,” holding mittened hands and wielding homemade signs. Their rallying cries and chants echoed across the National Mall, but so did a little-known song that emerged as the movement’s unofficial anthem: “Quiet.”
The stirring protest ballad, by L.A.-based musician MILCK (whose real name is Connie Lim), spread all over the world after her flash-mob performance at the march. Soon, Lim became a viral sensation, appearing on talk shows, earning praise from Oprah, and even scoring a major-label deal with Atlantic Records.
On the surface, it’s the kind of success story that independent artists dream of. But it wasn’t quite so easy, as illustrated in the new 30-minute documentary I Can’t Keep Quiet, which traces Lim’s musical journey leading up to her viral breakthrough and reveals the series of pitfalls that followed.
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“Quiet,” as we learn in the documentary, wasn’t designed to be a global hit. Quite the opposite, actually—the song began as a private act of revolution for Lim, who wrote it in 2015 to help her cope with having been sexually assaulted and abused when she was a teenager. In reflecting on their initial writing sessions in the doc, her co-writer Adrianne Gonzalez described how the song cracked Lim open in a totally unexpected way.
Reflecting on that sensation, Lim tells The Daily Beast, “There’s a phenomenon where survivors of abuse, especially sexual assault and domestic violence, when we don’t tell our story, tension actually builds in our bodies. It can be described as a lump in the throat, tightness in the chest, or just this sense of feeling really small and compressed by gravity. So when I finally articulated this song, it was like I broke out of one shell and I was able to expand into the next size, almost like Alice in Wonderland growing through the house and breaking through. I remember distinctly walking out of that studio and being like, I can breathe.”
Then came the 2016 presidential election. Channeling her anger and feeling compelled to share “Quiet”—which hinges on the lyric “I can’t keep quiet for anyone anymore”—more broadly, Lim got the idea to teach the song virtually to a cappella singers from around the country and then perform it together on the streets of D.C. at the Women’s March in January 2017. The plan worked, and within a couple days, a video of their mesmerizing performance had racked up millions of views online and was shared by everyone from actress Emma Watson to Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. Choirs and flash mobs around the world put their own spin on it, and Lim’s song—born from an intensely personal, micro experience—soon became, as Samantha Bee dubbed it, “a protest anthem for the ages.”
“I look back on that time with so much awe and gratitude. It’s kind of this unexplainable spiritual thing, because no one ever plans for that to happen,” Lim says now. “Like, even if the song gets big on the radio, you don’t know if it’s going to become this clarion call for an actual grassroots movement globally.”
Riding high off “Quiet’s” success, Lim got signed by Atlantic Records and soon got swept up in a major-label system that, she would come to find, didn’t really know what to do with her. In I Can’t Keep Quiet, Lim explains how she viewed “Quiet” as a song about being a woman, being a sexual assault survivor, and being Asian—and that third pillar was rarely amplified or taken seriously. “I had managers that said, ‘We don’t know how to break you here, we should bring you back to China,’” she recalls.
“There were some people who wanted me to be super edgy, super cool,” she tells The Daily Beast. “And, like, I went viral from an a cappella video on the streets of a Women’s March… it’s cool, but it’s not the industry cool that they were hoping I could fill in. I actually wrote a whole album about my family, and what hurt the most during the process was that one of the people that was listening to the album as a gatekeeper said that because I was Chinese, my family album was not universal enough. That really hurt and kind of F’d me up a bit.”
At the same time, Gonzalez was hurting in her own way. After signing to Atlantic, the label told Lim they wanted to make a newer, glossier version of “Quiet” with “a more renowned team” that could give the song a better shot at chart success. Lim agreed, and Gonzalez—who’d produced the original version—was told by her manager that the label didn’t want to involve a producer who’d never had a song on the radio. She and Lim, who had been collaborating for years up until that point, stopped speaking.
“It’s a system that had me question the integrity of what I had created with another woman of color,” Lim says in the documentary. “I wish I could tell you a different story, that I made all these right choices.”
“I just wasn’t ready,” she adds to The Daily Beast about her crash course in the major-label system. “Maybe if I had I landed there at a different time, and had really healed from the trauma of being abused and learned to be as I am now, I think I would have had a different trajectory. But I was just coming out with my story of being a survivor, and there was so much coming at me. Our industry talks about teen idols who have their shit together when they’re 16, 17. I was 30 when I signed, and I still wasn’t ready.”
As the doc lays out, Lim began to reassess her artistry in the wake of both the Black Lives Matter and the Stop AAPI Hate movements in 2020. Emboldened by the uprising of Asian American voices speaking out against racism, she decided to dedicate a new song, “I Belong,” to that experience, and started reflecting on her own shortcomings and how she could be a better artist and advocate.
“Noticing that gave me the ability to also notice what I did with ‘Quiet,’” she says. “I voluntarily allowed for this company to convince me that what I created was not right. The team that came on to create that whole new [version of “Quiet”] were wonderful people. They were also all white men. And I think the whole act of the industry separating me from [Adrienne] caused a lot of pain.”
So not only did Lim call Gonzalez to apologize, but in January 2021, she made the risky decision to leave Atlantic Records and go back to being an independent artist. She’s now running her own label, Gentle Rebel Records, and admits that while she’s “struggling” without the backing of a major label system, she’s proud to be making and releasing music on her own terms.
“I was signed with some of the top people in the industry and I was starting to realize, I’m actually slowly dying in this process,” she explains. “I was like, I don’t wanna feel like crap anymore and I want to remember why I like writing music. This thing that I love, that saved me, was becoming, ‘Go, go, write this thing.’ I was like, this is terrible.”
“I just thought, I can’t think about all the things I’m going to lose,” she adds. “I have to focus on what I’m going to gain, and it’s going to be stuff that I’m going to be really proud of when I’m 80 years old, looking back.”
In making the documentary, she’s also taken the opportunity to revisit and “reclaim” “Quiet” to prove that what she and Gonzalez did together back in 2015 “was enough.” To that end, I Can’t Keep Quiet culminates in a studio session in Los Angeles, where Lim, Gonzalez, and a group of vocalists and instrumentalists recorded a gorgeous, orchestral new version of the song. (Lim had to get permission from Atlantic Records to do so because of a clause in her original recording contract; the label generously agreed.) It’s a powerful climactic scene, and a reminder that the song still resonates all these years later—perhaps even more so after watching Lim’s story unfold in the doc.
When Lim spoke with The Daily Beast, she and the documentary’s director, Peabody Award winner Eurie Chung, had already debuted I Can’t Keep Quiet at the Vital Voices Global Headquarters Festival in Washington, D.C., where Hillary Clinton was in attendance. They were also getting ready for screenings at Geena Davis’ Bentonville Film Festival and the Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride, Colorado. In July, they’ll take the doc to Rwanda for the annual Women Deliver conference.
There’s often a resistance among artists against their first or biggest hit song because they don’t want to be pigeon-holed by it, but with I Can’t Keep Quiet, Lim is embracing the song fully and even letting it serve as a guiding light for new music. Last year, she responded to the overturning of Roe v. Wade with the protest song “We Won’t Go Back,” and the release of the new doc coincides with “Closer,” which urges listeners to trust their instincts and be true to themselves, a lesson Lim has certainly taken to heart.
“The song continues to kind of pull me through my life,” she says of the “Quiet” phenomenon. “When I think back on it, what I think is actually, our stories matter, our truths matter. If I tell my truth, the wind will carry it. Literally, that’s what happened: The winds, the internet, carried that all around the world. And I think it’s a gift that keeps on giving, because I get to use my life as this example and tell people, ‘Hey, if you tell your story, good things can happen. Beautiful things beyond your dreams can happen.’”
