Hey, Asher.

Hi.

How's it going?

Oh, so good.

Where are you?

I'm in the.

In the recreation room of a luxury condo in the West Village where I have been working part time for a woman who lives here as her media assistant, which is a.

The sort of in between job that a very well to do rising emerging indie rock star would have.

After being a barista for a long time, working in service jobs, bakeries, etc.

I've really risen to the tops.

I'm now on Adobe Premiere most of the day.

I'm fresh to premiere.

I am so bad at it.

I'm also very bad at it.

And I don't deserve to be in this position by any means.

But I figure that I should be transparent about where I am geographically.

It's a weird place to be.

It's not a place that I often am for any other reason than my very temporary profession requires me to be.

Right.

And where do you live?

I live in Brooklyn.

All right.

In Bushwick, which is if for those who know what I look like or watching, you know, the live stream of this, which I think is airing right at espn.

This is probably super bowl follow up.

It's super bowl follow up.

It doesn't air on the.

On ESPN until Wednesday, I think.

But it's primetime Wednesday.

Totally.

And they're doing it on Turning Point too.

I think they're showing us on Turning.

Point, which is controversial, trying to get in there.

Let's, you know, cross your fingers.

Anyone who has a visual knows that I sort of look like the type of person who might live in Bushwick, you know, in a sort of embarrassing way.

Speaking of the Turning Point halftime show, I guess we will have to talk about football.

Why did you turn that down?

I didn't.

The Turning Point halftime show.

Yeah, I, the.

I wanted the guitar tone to be a little bit cleaner and I found the guitar tone that was used in the actual show to be a little dirty, which I did not.

Which didn't allow align at the time with what I thought.

I thought it was a form and function thing because my Christian.

Because my music is so.

I think of it as so pure in its Christian.

Me too.

The sort of beams that emanate.

I want to be blinding and I don't want to be filtered by a distortion pedal, which I think sort of tampers with the message.

So.

I see.

Yeah, they wanted me to use a stomp box and I thought that was unholy.

I couldn't have a. Oh, isn't there something called a holy grail you could have used or, I don't know, you could have came to some conclusion, you know, some.

You could have solved that problem.

I wish next year maybe.

I don't want to compromise my vision.

Joe and I just turning.

I just felt like they were.

They were veering me towards something grotesque and crass, something vulgar.

Did you grow up in New York City?

No, I grew up in Chicago, actually.

Yes.

The Midwest.

I grew up in the Midwest.

I grew up as a.

As a city slicker, sort of right outside of Chicago on the.

On the.

On the sort of true non binary zone where the residential.

More residential suburbs meet Chicago, but soundly.

Not a suburb, which I feel is important to put on the record.

I. I do know that you are a visual artist and I was perusing your paintings today.

I really like the T Mobile window one.

Thank you.

It's really.

It like, made me laugh and I was like, oh, it's beautiful.

Yeah.

And so.

I know, I know, you know, you have.

You come from a visual perspective as well as you have piles of wonderfully produced music since you were young.

From what I understand.

What.

What was your proximity to music growing up?

Why did you get into it so quickly and vastly.

It was by early, rather.

Yeah, my.

And early in.

I feel like I caught music right when it was just starting.

Like, I feel like I caught music early in its rise as a course.

What is this?

It's music, right?

Oh, I'm gonna.

Yeah, I'm gonna take.

And people didn't get it at the time, you know, I was like, you guys just have to listen.

And they're like, what is that?

Is this you.

You know, is it.

It's like people talking.

I was like, no, it's like people singing and they're like, people doing what?

Yeah, but it paid off, you know, And I started with Gregorian chanting and we went up to there and Raleigh and stuff.

No, I. I grew up just with parents who are in the sort of valley of being Luddite or being technologically savvy.

So they.

They're like in their mid-60s, so they didn't know to.

They weren't afraid of the Internet, nor were they totally aware of the perils of allowing your child, like, unfettered access to it.

I was 11 in 2011 and looking at a lot of, like, music forums and YouTube stuff and like, very dark, morbid things and getting into sort of teaching myself the DIY and experimental music history just by fascination through Wikipedia and stuff and rate your music.

When I was very young and it was Like, I would go on my dad's computer after school, on the family computer.

My parents are middle class educated people.

My dad worked in theater, nonprofit administration, and my mom's a nonfiction children's book editor.

So they both have sort of like arts adjacent careers that valued, you know, the arts, but weren't that.

Neither of them were able to offer me any nepotism in any way in their respective careers.

But they still, I think, reaped the benefits, like spiritually and psychically of being like the arts is important to pursue.

And then when I was in middle school and high school, I got really involved in what was then and I think actually still is now and has been just kind of always the very vibrant Chicago noise and experimental music scene, which has kind of never had a.

As far as I know, has had a moment of rest.

It seems like it's sort of indefinitely been popping off.

Yes.

Which is not true for many other cities in this country.

Right.

And I moved to Providence.

I got obsessed with noise music and experimental music in Chicago.

And you went to the other noise city?

Well, I went to the other one with this sort of legend of like the early 2000s.

And then I discovered.

And I went there in 2018 for college and I was like, oh, it's actually not.

It's not.

Things have changed.

The world has shifted since Lightning Bolt isn't walking around on the streets.

Well, they actually are, but they're not.

They're not like, they're not 22 anymore.

Right.

They're pushing strollers.

Just kidding.

That's my one.

You've oriented me towards my one true name drop, which is that Chippendale and I are, I would say, safely describe us as good homies.

All right.

Yeah.

Back to your.

I. I like this idea of the family computer.

I always have.

Where was the family computer?

What did it look like?

It was a big.

In the living room.

Well, my mom, for.

For.

For proofreading PDFs, she had a large iMac, like a big 2008 iMac with like the rounded half dome base and like.

Oh, yeah, little.

And like a rounded big screen.

And it had photo booth on it.

And this was in 2008, probably.

And it was very exciting.

And my dad, I think, had like a really shitty laptop that was always like, well, behind what my mom was using.

Like, she always had like a sort of respectable, contemporary piece of technology.

And he had like a hissing and heaving old, like, plastic.

You know, like when the Mac, I think well into my adolescence, he was using a MacBook that was made of plastic.

Like they started making them out of metal in like 2012.

But yeah, there's ones with like white plastic.

I had a white one.

Yeah, that was my first one, I think.

Was it in the kitchen?

In the living room?

Nice.

Yep.

I just like that idea.

No one does that anymore.

No one does it anymore.

It's.

If we're all going to use them, let's make it communal.

Yeah, totally.

I think it's crucial, actually.

It's the closest thing that we had to the sort of post war gathering around the TV thing is watching YouTube videos in the living room together on the screens.

That's fun.

Okay.

And from the living room, the family computer.

You've made a bunch of records on GarageBand.

On GarageBand.

Like GarageBand.

My first experiences making music were like garage band Garage Number seven.

And I was amazing.

Christmas was amazing.

And I was.

It's gotten worse.

They've made it worse because they've made.

She has followed you from.

They've made it less rigid and sort of.

Where dark water and fortune run Sound.

Like a real old head but when.

Your sails come back together she will follow you wherever you go.

But even.

Hardwing to roads that you ride on through Way back.

But still rivers run I'm running water running so slow Had a picture of my mother.

It doesn't matter.

I think that the other thing is.

I don't think people say that.

I think people make.

Just because I'm myself right now.

But it's just.

It's just a good record is what I want to say, you know, and aside from the backstory and.

And I want to hear sort of your inspiration behind just doing it and.

And why you decided to do it.

But first, why was Jessica's first record so important to you?

It's literally just that it's so.

It's just good.

It's just good as fuck.

And like, it is good without a lot of the.

It's the.

It's the clearest distillation to me of her songs.

Not even her songs having their own aura, discreet from any aesthetic signifiers.

Like the next one after that and then on youn Own Love Again and the one since I feel like people caught on and she started to be considered in this pantheon of retro loner folk people that felt very projected onto her.

Like there's like the tape hiss is like more aestheticized in those records or something.

Or there's like a little more reverb or like a little more style about them.

And what I really love about this first record is that it's like utterly devoid of style and it's like often imperfectly played.

A lot of the takes are not like she fucks up.

There's flubbed notes in the guitar playing and stuff.

It's really unpretentious and just simply elementally beautiful.

The songs are just very, very good.

And like, the.

The power of the songs, like, ontologically as songs like beyond their performance or beyond their production is so clear to me.

So much so that the takes don't need to be good or that the recording doesn't need to be good.

Yeah, they just like, are.

It's like raw or it's like the.

The core thing.

And there are even my favorite records ever records that I like, even maybe more than that record is not true for, like, that's a.

That's a unique quality to the record.

I think that, like, is.

Yeah, it's pretty rare.

So I've always been interested in that record.

It's just.

It's one.

It's.

There are a few records that I have considered covering in full just because they're records that like, I hum along to like, other melodies or like, I know so well that I just like, am like riffing on them, you know, like scatting, like alongside the performer, doing sort of like just absent minded, like.

Yeah, this is a thing that I've seen theater kids do that I really find actually pretty abhorrent when it's done publicly, but like harmonizing with music that's being played.

Yeah, gotcha.

I find that to be sort of unacceptable if you're not alone.

But there are a few records that I find myself doing that to just because I'm so excited, I think, by the melodic possibilities that are in there.

And the other thing about this record is I think because it's so elemental, it leaves an enormous amount.

There's so much open space and so much harmonic suggestion to me that's in that record.

And so I was like, oh, it'd be so fun to just like explore it.

Like actually just like get in there and see and like put down the arrangements that I'm hearing or like the chord progressions that are played only on like two or three notes there, but like, you know, have.

Have some other implications to them.

And you.

And you've done it so clearly.

Like, after you say that, I'm thinking I can really see your perspective on it because they are.

You change them and again, sort of expose something about her music.

You know, there are things I think it's easy this is gonna sound sort of pretentious.

And I don't mean for it to, but I think it's easy for people to not hear when music is guitar and voice.

Especially this happens when it's guitar and female voice.

People, I think, can dismiss the tonal and thematic variations between songs.

And I think people can tend to think of an album that's guitar and voice as, like, this is sad folk music that's intimate.

And that record, to me, has some songs for which that's true.

But there are a lot of songs on that record that I find to be impossibly heavy, like, in their original forms, are, like, crushing or, like, jubilant.

And there's a lot of.

To me, there's actually an enormous variation on what these songs are and what they're getting at and the era that they take place in and the setting and the light and the color palette.

Like, I actually think there's a great deal of variation.

More than I think is giving credit to that album.

I think, if you Especially because they're all around the same tempo and they're, like, on the same key and they're all, like, recorded with mic.

So I think if you listen to that album and once or twice, you're like, okay, she's doing sort of the same sort of thing 12 times, or whatever.

But they're all really distinct and weird.

And so I thought it would be fun to put each one in the costume that it sort of tries on, but really do the caricature of each song.

Nightfaces is going to be a psych pop, Harper's Bazaar sort of thing.

And Hollywood has this minimalist music thing going on.

Yeah.

And it seems to me like it must have been a feat.

I'm not a multi instrumentalist like yourself, but that's not where you are.

We.

I guess maybe I am.

Thanks.

But I.

Again, I'm.

I'm making covers record.

A lot of people that I've asked to be involved that have turned me down, people that I'm close to just said, I. I'm kind of nervous about covering this song.

Were you nervous at all?

You know, and if you were, why'd you.

Why'd you take it on?

I well, I, I.

It's something that I've, like, thought about doing or, like, thought would be fun to do and began in a very embryonic form many years ago and then abandoned.

And then I just said at a dinner that I did it at a dinner with my label.

I, like, was like, yeah, I did this, and I finished it and it's ready to go.

And I was like, like, just, like, lying through my teeth.

But I really wanted them to think that they hadn't.

That they had chosen a good client for their label.

Like, I wanted them to think that I was, like, more industrious than I am.

And they were like, do you have a single that we can put out in the winter?

And I was like, a single?

I got a full album, baby.

And they're like, really?

I was like, yep.

Mouth full of lobster.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like swigging champagne.

Obviously, this was at Eataly.

Then I was like, well, I guess I'm doing this now.

And they seemed tickled by the idea of it.

I was like, okay.

And also, my.

My publicist, who was there at the time was like, oh, I know.

Jessica Pratt's partner.

And I think that they would.

I think that both him and Jessica would like, like this.

I think they would.

They would be tickled by this and approve of it.

And so I was like, say no more.

Right?

You don't.

You need.

That is all the permission I need.

I'm gonna go and hold up in a few three or four day sessions and knock it out.

And then I, like.

It was easy to do because I know those songs, you know, I mean, I had to, like, learn some of the guitar parts, but I had ideas about, like.

I knew pretty much immediately how I wanted each song to be.

Like, I knew that Mountain or Lower would be like a.

Like a funny, like, hoedown.

Yeah, like.

Like a.

Like blues.

But I was trying to do a ZZ Top thing.

I was listening to that on my way to the studio today, and I was over a bridge over a muddy river.

And I was like, perfect.

Rio Grande Mud.

Great record.

Well, I'd like to play Bushel Hyde.

Yeah.

Is that cool?

Yeah.

All right.

I am calling out to you.

From another.

Place.

Words mean more than they did before in that.

Place.

In the time before us.

There was.

A time before us in the time between us.

As you leave here.

I better know.

Which.

Way you had better go.

Because.

You know which way that the spirit go.

Time was longer than when we were.

Wills were harder than ever.

In the time above us drum wise it's kind of a disco groove, but it's, you know, it's not at a disco.

Bpm, but totally.

I love that.

Still dance to it.

I'll admit that I was.

I was nervous about your appraisal because you're a drummer.

I sort of think that a lot of my records to be very indulgent are sort of drum.

Drum records.

Like, it's.

It's the last instrument I tend to track because it's the one that I.

Feel that I can.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

It's the one that I feel I can play with the most acuity.

It's the one that I feel like I can play the most expressively and the most intentionally.

I feel like the other instruments, I tend to have to just get down so that I have them there, and then I can, like, do a good performance Every.

All the other instruments are like a bunch of takes pasted together.

Okay.

And drums are pretty typically.

Like, it's one take where it's like the performance that.

And I feel good about it.

And there's some.

I will say there's some.

There's some drumming on this.

The.

The Big Mother River.

There's some pretty cool drumming on that.

This record.

I was like, this is a drummer's record, right?

Big Mother river is the.

The one with the crazy guitar and drums at the beginning.

Yeah.

There's like, cowbell cuts.

Yeah, that is.

I. I can't figure that drum beat out.

I tried.

Yeah, the fast part.

The fast part.

Yeah.

I was feeling pretty.

I was like, you know, for the.

For the.

For the drum heads, for the Joe Strummer heads in the listener fence, they're going to be like, this is pretty cool.

But, yeah, the bushel head beat is that, like.

There's an Evelyn Champagne King song that's taken from.

Okay, well.

Yeah.

And I guess let's stay on drum for one second.

Now that I know you typically do drums last on Night Faces, which is a song I keep going back, too, a lot on the record.

Yeah.

The drums add this, like, kind of west coast breeze to it, and that's it.

And it's interesting to me that if you did do those last, I would just think, oh, you put this kind of smooth, breezy beat over, and then you can layer on it, but you do it last.

And that's the magic.

Yeah.

I might have done a scratch take to play, too, but definitely that take that is in there is the last thing.

When I hear those.

The fills, I'm like, oh, I definitely do those.

That's something that I was fussy about, probably.

In order to get stuff done, I tend to the first things that I record in any song.

I try to do basically as sloppily and quickly as possible and then wait to be painstaking towards the end.

And I know that I'll be just more sensitive to my own drumming.

That's the thing that I'll hear and be responding to in a negative way.

So that's the thing that I feel is worth laboring over.

And you have.

It seems like you might have, like, three vocal ranges that you use.

The high stuff is so beautiful.

Oh, thanks.

I feel like I've unlocked it recently.

I started estrogen last year.

I don't actually think.

I was thinking that this would.

When trans guys transition, you know, it, like, pretty dramatically affects your vocal range.

And yeah, I thought that this was true for trans women too, because I was like, oh, cool.

Like, I'll start taking estrogen, my voice will raise.

And I actually learned that it's entirely not true.

And, like, physiologically, your voice actually does not change at all.

And a lot of trans women like voice train, but I haven't been doing that.

But I have been in the past year for maybe just in a placebo way, I've just been like, yeah, my falsetto has gotten better.

Like, my C4 to C5 is a little shinier than it.

And I'm kind of understanding how you put together the songs, except.

What do you typically start with?

Do you start with guitar?

Is that your.

Yeah, I try to do.

I try to do guitar.

Whatever.

The most structural.

Like.

It's actually an interesting question with.

That is particularly relevant to this project because usually a song starts with a field recording or like.

Or like a piano improv thing that I did, or like a synth sound or something.

Like, usually it actually doesn't start from structure, but because I'm not working off of chord sheets or I'm not working off of, like.

I'm like, working sort of blindly or, like, more intuitively about what the song will be and then kind of eventually coerce it into, like, being a better form or a more structured form.

Whereas these.

With this.

Because these songs already existed as songs.

It's like, there's a verse, there's a chorus.

I like, sort of have an idea about what about the architecture of it before I've put anything down.

So with these, I was like, starting, I think, with whatever the main structural beam was.

Like with Bushel Hyde, it's the arpeggiated piano that's the first thing for that.

Night Faces was the just guitar.

Acoustic guitar.

Yeah.

With, like, most of them, I think it was probably the guitar, if that's what they're written on.

But with the.

With like, Midnight Wheels, which is almost all midi, actually, that's, like, mostly on.

In Ableton, I think I just programmed the midi.

Like, the chords in MIDI and then sang over.

Right.

Did you study music?

Are you self taught?

No.

Totally.

You seem to have such a command over all these instruments.

Self taught.

But I. I don't really know like.

I don't know what like a minor seventh chord is.

So it's like taught.

You know, it would be.

It would be sort of self congratulatory to say that I've taught myself music.

I'm not conversant in any way.

Like, I didn't teach myself music like jazz musicians have taught themselves music.

The other thing that really sticks out for me as well is your.

Your command of noise and ambience.

Thanks.

And where it pokes out, especially on these songs, it's again, as you were saying, it's like your process is probably a little bit different because these songs are already written.

Yeah.

Your choice of noise and ambience is.

Is.

Yeah.

But where you.

Where it pokes out in these songs, it's.

It's always like surprising.

It's like, you know, a.

A pretty part, quote, unquote, pretty part.

And then comes up something kind of yucky and in the best way and.

And thorny and sort of.

Yeah, I'll say that.

It's also like, it was very nice.

It's very easy to do that.

Like, that's a much less impressive feat, I think, when this, when you trust the songs.

I feel like, I think probably like you, you know, very interested in where pop music meets noise music and difficult music meets, you know, generous music.

And in doing that, in making that, it's like really hard to figure out.

It's like.

It's like nearly impossible to figure out how to do that yourself.

Like the, the like thing that is the.

I would say probably the like governing, difficult challenge that I have in songs is like knowing, trusting either that the song is good enough to allow for noise or, or being precious about the song and wanting to pres.

You know, like, you write something and you're like, you know, you.

You write something that is in a rare way sort of good and you like, want to show it off because you're like it and then you don't want to fuck it up.

But then maybe it's not as good as you thought and so you should like cover it in noise or whatever.

It's like very nice to have songs that you don't have to worry about being good.

You just know that they are.

And you also don't have to worry about them.

You don't have to worry about obscuring or obfuscating them.

Because they exist in their plain form elsewhere.

So you kind of have these second drafts.

I think that was maybe one of the best, is also to answer, how do you have the megalomaniacal hubris to do a project like this?

And I actually feel that it's sort of the opposite where I'm like, this actually is way safer to do because the songs already exist.

Like, I'm not fucking anything up, and I'm not.

Obviously, these aren't going to overshadow the originals.

And also, unlike putting out an album of my own songs, it's like, these are by definition afterthought or like an asterisk.

So, like, it.

Actually, the stakes are much lower to me.

But, yeah, so, like, the original copies already exist.

I'm not going to step on the brilliance of the original.

The most I could do is, like, you know, put some clutter out into the world that I think is pretty easily filed away.

So I. I think I allowed myself a little more lenience with being noisy or a little more, like, a wider margin of error or was able to focus my eyes a little more squarely on the process of doing weirder sounds and, you know, kind of stretching my legs out in that realm, because I really trust the integrity of the songs and the power of the songs.

Right.

Do you find that adding a bed, a noise bed, let's say sometimes, is the glue?

Yeah.

Have you ever done it?

You know, you've put together the song, you're like, oh, I need something totally.

I love that magic.

It's a magic trick, and I love it.

Totally.

Totally.

And with these, particularly, because, like, with other songs, sometimes I'll make some noise and I'll have a sort of amorphous abstract thing, and then I'll try to pull shape, like, pull songs out of that or, like, pull shapes from that.

Yeah, that was, like.

A lot of the album that I put out before this, called Eight Tips, is, like, has that as a method.

And this is the opposite where it's like, okay, I've built the song.

Like, I've.

I've recreated the song in the way that I want, but, like, now I get to, like, drape it in stuff.

Or, like, now I get to, like, really, like, salt, put some, you know, put in the.

Put in the moisture, put in the sauce.

So that was.

That was very fun.

You should be very proud of this record.

Thank you.

So good.

I'm so.

I really.

It's, like, legitimately very meaningful that you like it.

Like, it's.

I. I don't take it for granted.

And I.

You know, I listen to a lot of records and I listen in my car a lot.

I'm just like, second time around.

I'm like, fuck.

This record is good.

So good.

Thank you.

What about performing these tunes live?

You got any plans to do that?

I don't.

We're going on tour on the west coast for the first time.

We're coming to Seattle.

Oh, great.

Where are you playing?

Sunset Tavern.

Is that in Seattle?

Oh, that's a great place.

We're playing at the Sunset Tavern in Seattle.

My grandmother lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

That's where she retired.

My grandparents were tired.

Have you been there much?

Yeah, it's.

Well, not a ton, but a few times in my life.

It's very beautiful.

It is.

I was just there last year.

My grandfather passed away last year.

I was there.

Beautiful severe landscape with the.

Yeah.

With the land toppling into the sea and everything.

So we're gonna go on tour in May, and I haven't really figured out what we're gonna play.

I have.

I gotta teach the band.

The band is.

My friend Betsy and my friend Martin play bass and drums, so.

And we're kind of a noise rock.

We're like live.

It's not so.

Not so fruity.

It's like a little more.

A little more burly.

And there's moshing and stuff.

So I don't know.

I gotta figure out what the plan is.

There's another record coming out in August.

Like a real Asher White record.

Wow, you're pumping them out.

Great.

Keep doing it.

Thanks.

I'll try.

Again.

Congrats on this record.

Great to talk to you.

It's such a pleasure.

The record is out now on the wonderful Joyful Noise.

The venerated drum record on Joyful Noise.

I love those people.

And travel safe when you get out there.

Thanks so much.

Likewise.

All right.

Great to talk to you.

So she has followed you from.

Where dark water and fortune run.

When.

Your sails come back together she will follow you forever Go.

Bike.

Still rivers run and running water run so soon Had a picture of my mother but even doesn't know.

Crazy.

Has followed you down Neath starlight and.

Bitter tones.

Hard with star cling to roads that you ride on your way back home.

But still rivers run and running water runs so slow Had a picture of of my mother Even father doesn't know.

Where.

Big rivers flow and someday.

I'd.

Like to know.

Sa.