Five wizard rock albums confirm it: every Harry Potter character is LGBTQ. On the final day of 2022, Totally Knuts completed this ambitious project!

I had the pleasure of meeting mastermind musician TK Lawrence (and their “spicy” cat) over Zoom to discuss their process in creating Transforming Your World, Bi Bi, Witch, Gay Days Ahead, Les Be In Love, and Queering Up  – as well as the easter eggs scattered throughout. You won’t want to miss this interview!

Lan: How does it feel to be done with your project?

TK: Oh my gosh. It feels so good! I knew it was going to be a big, huge, long ordeal – and I definitely could’ve gone on longer – but I’m really happy that I’m finally done! [Laughs.]

The first one was released February 1, 2022, so I guess it was less than a year! Is that right? That’s wild.

Lan: Wow, that’s awesome. Can you describe the project a little bit, and your motivations?

TK: The main motivation was JKR being on Twitter, and being TERF-y and awful. I’ve been writing inclusive wizard rock for a while anyway, and when she came out with all of that I thought, you know, spite is a pretty good motivator and inspiration for writing some music!

I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if I queered every single character in her book? And so I re-read the entire series and any character that was capitalized I wrote down. I have this giant Google sheet.

My thought was that if I put the characters into categories, I can do songs specifically for those categories. Like, Death Eaters are all in one song. Magical creatures are all in one song. And ghosts – I was surprised at how few named ghosts there were! [Nine.]

I made life harder for myself because before I read through the books, I looked up lists of chocolate frog cards and it gave me like a billion names. I was like, I don’t remember all these names in the books! And sure enough, it’s like ahhh these are from the video games and from the movies and from Pottermore!

Lan: So did you limit it to just the books?

TK: Yeah, so I was trying to limit it to just the original source material and the chocolate frogs got me tripped up. I was thinking, I’ll just Google. Somebody has to have a list of every named character in the series! But they had way more than that. And I was like, whatever, I’ve already written these down so I might as well include them! That ended up being perfect for the Hardware Store parody by Weird Al [Chocolate Frogs], so it ended up working out.

Lan: Yeah, I loved it. How did you come up with that parody?

TK: Thank you. I had a lot of help from Bradley of Draco and the Malfoys because he also loves Weird Al. He was awesome in doing the instrumentals and the backing vocals for it. Super helpful because that song took me the longest. I think it took me a couple months. I was like, these names are so hard, and trying to do them in time is just so difficult – and so I ended up just recording them at half-speed.

Bradley was like, “I’m going to tweak it and it’s going to sound weird, but it’s OK – it’s going to be great!” [Laughs.] So it definitely sounds pretty funky, but who cares? It’s wizard rock.

Lan: I think it sounds awesome. What an accomplishment! Do you know how many characters you managed to include in the project?

TK: Yes and no. The answer is around 750. I say “around” because some characters were the same character. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Granger have the aliases of Monica and Wendell Wilkins. I included both sets of the names just to cover the bases.

Then there was one named character that I purposely left out because it was the name of a real person – a kid who died early in their life. I didn’t want to do that to a real person because that’s not very respectful.

Lan: You had to really get in the weeds.

TK: Yeah, I tried to make sure the characters we paired together – that their ages were good. And not just that they aren’t 20 years apart. But, more, that characters in the 1800s aren’t with characters in the nineties. So I did have to do a fair amount of research on that.

Lan: That’s so cool how much had to go into creating these headcanons. Did you have any favorites – any characters whose queer story you were most compelled by?

TK: I really liked doing Ogg’s Boogie because it’s the old gamekeeper that’s mentioned exactly once in the entire series – and he’s just got his own thing. It’s kind of like how Hagrid’s the mom to everybody. Ogg owns this pub that’s like a queer club.

I knew I wanted to do a song for Orla Quirke [In the Mirror]. My friend Brenna Doe, who has done all the artwork for the albums, sang it.

In Gay Days Ahead, I really liked the first song [Dance With Me]. Yule Ball songs are my favorite.

In the second album [Bi Bi, Witch], I was extremely proud of myself for the title House of BIack because the “Bl” in BIack is actually “BI” with an uppercase “i.”

Lan: Oh my god!

TK: Absolutely zero people are going to notice it, but I am very proud of myself! [Laughs.]

Also, the foresight that I had to name every album a letter and release them backwards to spell “LGBT.”

Lan: The albums give the feeling that there are pride flags draped all over Hogwarts. And I love the queer worldbuilding of using magic for gender affirmation, like in Respectable Spectacles.

TK: I’m glad that you brought up the respectable spectacles because literally – I kid you not – I had a dream that JK Rowling came out with a thing on Pottermore like “These are the magical spectacles that, if you put them on, you can tell what’s in a person’s pants” or something stupid like that. Like, their gender assigned at birth.

And I woke up thinking, that’s fucking stupid! Then I thought about it some more and I was like, but what if…? [Laughs.] What if – instead of that bullshit – we do something else with it!

So I literally took that idea and turned it around. Here’s some glasses that tell you what people’s pronouns are. Wouldn’t that be super helpful? I would love that! Then you don’t have to assume.

Lan: What a nightmare, but I’m glad it was good inspiration.

TK: Yes! To go along with that, Rewriting Your Story is basically saying there are so many of us who are queer that were so influenced by your work. And now you’re doing this bullshit and it’s awful and it’s pointless. So we are going to take this and please let the door hit you on the way out.

I was definitely inspired to do that song because my all-time favorite wizard rock song – which is saying a lot because there’s a lot of wizard rock and there’s a lot of it I really like – It’s Intersectional by Abby Ritter is my absolute favorite. I was lucky enough that I got to go to several New Years Eve parties at the Draco and the Malfoys house in Rhode Island and she would play that song. We’d all be so hype about it and when JK started coming out with all the anti-trans stuff we were even more hyped about it. So we would all scream our lungs out during Abby’s sets and just be like, “YOU REALLY FUCKING SUCK!” [Laughs.] It was – you could feel it in the core of your being. It was very powerful.

I was like, I want to take that energy and run with it. One of my favorite lines from that song is, “We took your world into our hands where it will always stay.” I really love that idea that it’s ours now. And, no matter what you say, you can’t take that away from us. You can never take the community we’ve built away from us.

Lan: Wizard rock is such medicine.

TK: It really is.

Lan: That’s another thing I noticed throughout the albums – wizard rock inspirations. In Magical Musicians, “wrock” is even in the lyrics.

TK: I’m sure there’s a ton of inspiration and we don’t even realize it. I remember way early on in my career I was talking to Brian of Draco and the Malfoys and he was like, “I really like how in The Petrified Ghost it sounds like Save Ginny Weasley.” And I was like, woah, I didn’t even realize I did that! [Laughs.] You’re so right.

In these albums, there’s Bag-gender. I love Ludo Bagman and the Trash. I love them so much. We need to have a whole song about that. Romance at the Quidditch World Cup also references “Ludo Bagman’s trash, wink, wink.” [Laughs.] And I feel like there’s probably more.

I was so happy that Bradley from Draco and the Malfoys was part of my last album because not only did he help me with Chocolate Frogs, but he also helped me with Floors of the Ministry. And it was really cool because I remember saying I wanted a song inspired by The Last Saskatchewan Pirate. There was no way I could do the instrumentals unless I took a billion years and Bradley is a drum machine. I sent him the song I wanted the vibe of and he was like, “Here you go!” It was exactly what I asked for, and it was amazing.

Lan: Bradley is the best. And it was so exciting to hear you stray from strict ukulele to other sounds.

TK: I definitely branched out for this project. One of my favorite things to use is royalty-free music from silvermansound.com. I was also like, hey, I can play my keyboard that I never use. I did a fair amount of keyboard songs. I was never a piano major or anything at that level and so I’m really pleased with how my piano songs came out. I was like, this is really cute – I wrote that! So, yeah, piano was definitely fun. And then there were a couple of tracks, like the rapping ones, that I was just messing around in my Studio One DAW.

Lan: I have one more question. I noticed different art for Painted Rainbow. What’s the story there?

TK: I was going around on Tumblr or something and I found this cool website where you can design your own medieval painting. I was like, wouldn’t it be cute if I made a little art with this program for Sir Cadogan’s horse? [Laughs.]

Lan: It’s so great! Is there anything else you’d like to tell the Wizrocklopedia-faring masses?

TK: I’m just happy I’m done! [Laughs.] That was such a project and I cannot believe I did it in under a year. I mean, I can because it’s very on-brand for me, but also that was a lot of work.

I’m low-key almost wanting someone at some point to be like, “Actually, you never mentioned this character specifically!” Because I do have a couple songs where I name a family line rather than each character in it. So if someone does that, I’ll say “so true bestie” and write a song just for that person. [Laughs.]

 

There you have it! Now, what are you waiting for? Go listen to everything Totally Knuts!

And may your 2023 be queering up for much transformation, love, and gay days ahead. Bi bi!