Start Listening To: Asher White
Queer, trans, and thrifty: Asher White talks music, identity, and amplifiers.
Asher White is a queer and transgender musician who has released over a dozen albums since 2015. Her most recent single, “Mare,” was written as an elegy to having fun in real-time and is a love song that explores the nice coincidences that occur when individual lives briefly align for powerful communion. In this Q&A, Asher discusses her upcoming album, "New Excellent Woman," and how her identity as a transgender artist has influenced her music. White also delves into their songwriting process and how she incorporates thrift store amplifiers and scavenged keyboards into her music.
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind your new single “Mare”?
“Mare” was written this summer after a particularly splendid weekend trip to New York — it’s sort of an elegy for having fun in real-time, an acknowledgement that the experience of being young and mobile and romantic is fleeting and conditional… I guess it’s technically a love song, but it’s moreso a song about love, and the nice coincidences that happen when individual lives line up momentarily for powerful communion.
How does “Mare” fit into the overall theme of your upcoming album, New Excellent Woman?
The record is a very frazzled attempt to situate my own tiny little life and body in the places I find it (i.e. Rhode Island, America, an alleyway, a backyard, etc). It’s this maneuver of projecting some very acute, specific, personal juncture in my life onto the unfathomably huge canvas of wherever I happen to be. With Mare, the setting is New York and the circumstance is something of a missed connection. The album’s about traipsing around densely historical places in the northeast; this is the mission statement and sweetest, most tender track.
How has your own identity as a queer and transgender artist influenced your songwriting?
To put it very crudely, I’m more interested in how it doesn’t̛. I think at this point we’re still mostly accustomed to seeing transgender artists tell necessarily transgender stories—it’s hard (but not impossible!) for me to think of a well-known transgender artist for whom their identity is not a core part of their work. This was especially true when I was growing up, and it gave me the impression as a young trans girl that the transgender experience of love or history or heartbreak or art in general must be fundamentally very different than everyone else’s. I try to write firstly about the things I am thinking about and doing on a day-to-day basis: sometimes that includes thoughts about my sexuality or identity, and often it doesn’t. I think being trans encourages me to approach head-on the materiality of the work I’m making. Does it make me feel good? Does it adequately represent my idea? My music is queer less in thematic or direct references and more in form: I try to keep it dynamic, elastic, and unfixed (like all of our gender identities!)
You’ve released over a dozen albums since 2015. How has your approach to creating music evolved over time?
Hopefully it hasn’t much! The original joy of musicmaking is naive ambition and obsessive experimentation… anytime I find myself settling into a refined methodology I know it’s time for me to stir things up. I (would like to) think I’ve become more discerning about what I release to the public and what I decide needs more work—when I was in high school I would send out whatever I had made in an afternoon into the public eye. So I think the craft has been more cultivated on the external end. Also maybe I’m better at the drums?
How do you incorporate thrift store amplifiers and scavenged keyboards into your music?
Recklessly! Each song is a collage, and everything is arranged by texture, color, vibrance, weight… if I’ve discovered an object and brought it into my studio, I chose it on instinct alone and hold a sincere interest in it, so it is my prerogative to find a way to lovingly integrate it into my songwriting.
Can you walk us through your songwriting process?
It starts with just writing, no song: I take a lot of non-poetic notes on things I am reading or will vent unselfconsciously into a journal. From this I’ll get a sense of what I happen to be worried or excited about at the moment and can try to extract more evocative images or turns of phrase from these notes. Then: gibberish melodies into the voice memos app on the phone. Like just wordless vocal sounds. I try to get a full melody stuck in my head and then I can walk around coming up with alternate lines that fit the rhythm—it’s like writing a parody to a song that doesn’t exist. I’ll start pulling from the “idea bank” I’ve generated and try to find a satisfying structure to the song, one with tension, resolution, etc.
How do you balance intimacy and anxiety in your music?
I learned kind of recently that you’re allowed to be funny in your art. Being funny is the Venn diagram between intimacy and anxiety, it’s a great way to convert the latter into the former. But it’s also a good neutralizer for both. If anything is feeling either too trite and tender or too oppressively anxious, I’ll try to figure out some bit that will bring levity and gesture away from the more cloying tendency.
How do you hope your music will connect with listeners?
Soundtracking a walk home! Very twee answer of me. But it’s true. The marriage of music and memory is the reason to discovery music so I would absolutely want that for my own!
Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s important?
Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is one of the first albums I had on vinyl and I listened to it obsessively when I was 12 or 13. It has a terrifying and often frustratingly enormous scope, crams all this sickly sweetness and all this thunderous pain into a single LP. It also feels torturously American, very preoccupied with mythology and ghosts. I didn’t know much about the band at the time but I think that record etched something very tender and secret into me.
What do you hate right now?
All that space between how good we could be and how good we’re actually being.
What do you love right now?
Vitamin gummies. and 2 beers.
What do you want listeners to take away from your music?
At best I think my music could be like a syllabus, a list of other songs and ideas not by me but that I love and feel should be shared. I would like for people to take walks while listening to my music and for their surroundings to be momentarily more clear to them.
Who are some of your biggest musical influences?
Talk Talk is huge and beyond everything. It’s not even music to me. Timbaland is my favorite producer, and the hand drums in Mare are a direct rip from him. Judee Sill of course, those are the greatest songs ever written.
How do you navigate the music industry as a queer and transgender artist?
I sincerely don’t know! I don’t feel like I’ve begun navigating the music industry yet. But I will keep you posted as soon as I do!
What advice would you give to aspiring musicians?
Listen to music that is very unlike the music you know! Then connect the dots! And try your best to source wisdom from something beyond the first 5 inspirations that come into your head. It will reveal to you the constant variable in everything you consume: your own ears and eyes.
What’s one thing about you that most people don’t know?
I am 5’6” but I seem much shorter! I feel it is really important for me to get out ahead of this because it seems people have been very confused about my height. I register in person as very tiny, and I’m not sure why.
