I saw Asher White play the Black Cat stage in the cold, sharp winter air of Washington, D.C. nearly a year ago — playing songs straight off of her new album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. Song to song, it got better and better, so when she dropped her project, Love Aggregates, I knew I wanted to talk to her about everything from her old music to her inspirations to D.C. music venues. Without further ado, here it is (and you should also watch on YouTube using this link).
WVAU: You released your debut EP in 2016 and I just wanted to learn about how do you consistently grow and develop as an artist despite having been making music for over 10 years?
AW: Never listen back. You can never listen back to anything you have made. Don’t even listen back to a take, finish a take, put it on SoundCloud. Put it on BandCamp. Put it on YouTube. Don’t ever listen back, turn the gain up all the way, put a distortion filter on there, throw maybe a little autotune on there, and that would be called hyperpop if you’re doing that. Do a little reverb on there and don’t look back. Most of the stuff I’ve made really quickly in high school and still now really quickly and I’m not so good at discerning what’s good and what’s bad so it all goes to the same place.
WVAU: Yeah, I really find the progression of your art really interesting from album to album because there’s so many different sounds that you experimented with and I think the progression from 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living to Love Aggregates is so interesting because when I first listened to Love Aggregates I was honestly kind of surprised how like lo-fi it sounded, almost. How soft it was. I was expecting more of a rock sound and honestly it was really cool to see that progression. How would you describe that progression? Did you expect to go into a softer sound or was it spontaneous?
AW: That’s a really good question and in regards to your first question — I don’t mean to be so tongue and cheek about it. Ultimately, the thing of thinking about a trajectory over your body of work or so to speak, it’s really just about listening to a bunch of different types of music and I feel like since I’ve been 14 or 15 or 16, I’ve gone through phases, as one does as a listener, like “oh, I’m really liking industrial metal right now.” Like, “oh, I’m really liking ambient music. I’m really liking folk music. I’m really liking 80s dance pop, Janet Jackson.” I think that more than anything else, changing tastes as a listener are what influences what I’m doing from album to album and I think the best way to make music is to think about what you’re excited about as a listener first, beyond thinking of yourself as a creator, but just thinking about yourself as the audience, as a civilian in the world, being inundated with music. So yeah, I don’t know if I set out with a manifesto for each album, I don’t think there is any dogma in terms of what I’m trying to make, but you could look at the records on my turntable for the eight months that I’m recording a record and that will generally influence what the overall sound or aesthetic parameters of the album are. Specifically with 8 Tips [for Full Catastrophe Living] and Love Agg[regates], I felt 8 Tips was a little bit all-over-the-place. I was just interested in making something more melodic and toned-down. I tend to sort of, album to album, toggle between wanting to do something more agro, more abrasive and something sweeter and fruitier and I felt like Love Agg I was like “I want a bit of a warm hug after the gnarled doom of 8 Tips”.
WVAU: You spoke a little bit about your inspirations — what was the process of covering that Jessica Pratt album and getting to release it out onto Spotify?
AW: I just really love that album. I love that original Jessica Pratt album so much. I had taught myself some of the songs from it, for live shows I was covering some of those songs. I also just taught myself some of those songs because a really good way to teach yourself songwriting is to get surgical about someone else’s beautiful, exquisite, and seemingly inevitable songs — [the ones you] can’t imagine them being written; they just seem to exist. And so I was really obsessed with “what is going on here?” and I like recording, I like turning on the microphones, I like the activity of recording a lot and I had run out of my own songs to record and felt that it’d be fun. I knew these Jessica Pratt songs so well that I figured I could just try my hand at recording some of these. Then I lied to my recording label and told them I had finished the project and that it was ready to be released and it was not true at all. I was like, on wine. I was off the wine. At the dinner. When you’re at the dinner and you’re off the wine you’ll say anything to get your manager’s approval. And this was in Greenpoint, like holy moly, it was at a wine bar. I was like “I made a Jessica Pratt cover album and it’s done” and then I was like I guess I gotta take adderall and get this done.
WVAU: Speaking of just overall musical inspirations, is there anybody else you get a lot of inspiration from when you’re making music?
AW: Oh my god, I don’t even know where to begin. You gotta give me a genre or something.
WVAU: When you are making a rock sound, who are you looking at?
AW: You can’t go wrong with MC5, Detroit. I love American music. I am a patriot at my core and I love Bo Diddley and I love Chuck Berry and I love American music. Specifically southern and midwestern music, so Detroit rockers — MC5, Iggy Pop. There’s some later stuff, a lot of noise rock bands from the early 2000s that are very important to me. Sightings, Six Finger Satellite. There’s a label called Load Records that I suggest digging into, really fucked up music. Really blown out, messed up stuff, but extremely electric. High voltage.
WVAU: It’s so interesting that you say Chuck Berry because I never would’ve thought about Chuck Berry when listening to your music, but I look back and you can kinda hear it in the low-down jazzy moments.
AW: “I bet she loves Berry!”
WVAU: Yeah! I also just wanna say, did you ever expect your music to be received so well, especially critically? I know I’ve been seeing you on Pitchfork, it’s awesome to see.
AW: No, I mean like I would’ve dreamed of it, I was a Pitchfork reader in my youth and have always yearned for glory as any other good American patriot would. I want my 15 minutes, so to speak, but no. I do it, the music I’m making, because I think it’s, because it makes me laugh. The music I’m making is a result of me being like “what would be funny and fun to happen here in this song?” and when I’m stuck on a particular song I’m like “what would be a funny thing to happen next or like, what would be cool?”, it’s very sort of like dumb, naive, child-like. I’m not very smart about the whole thing, it’s very impulsive. The idea that it a very literate music critic listening to it and getting something from it is totally fortuitous. I’m very thrilled by it, but it’s not the… you know, I think I will say that I guess it is poised I suppose to interest music writers just in the way that music writers are hopefully big listeners and I’m a big listener and in some ways I can kind of anticipate the idea that from a critical point of view people would be like “okay, here’s someone that really likes the motown records, here’s someone that really likes Harry Nilsson,” so I could foresee being recognized by other people who are really into music. It’s for people who love music, so it’s nice when it’s heard by those people.
WVAU: What do you think resonates most with your listeners about your art and what do you think keeps them listening to your stuff?
AW: I don’t know. I suppose it’s different for different things. Sometimes, I’m not like a very experienced tourer, but on this last tour at the all ages shows there were often like a 17 year old transgender individual who would be like “this was meaningful to me on the basis of being transgender alone”, like that’s great. That’s extremely moving. Sometimes their just like “that’s just some tranny, that’s cool” and that’s nice. Sometimes I think people who are annoying music nerds are moved by the sort of referentiality, are moved by the obsessive qualities of the music. I don’t know, it’s not for me to say, it’s probably my bod. My body. People like my hot body mostly. People are probably just like “that’s a really hot body!”
WVAU: I love how you put that like music really, you listen to music because it makes you feel something and because you resonate with it and because you can relate to it. I think that’s a beautiful way of putting it. When you are making the project do you know what sound you’re going for or is it just like you start recording and you’re like “wherever this may go this is the record I am going to make”?
AW: Well there are some ways that if you were gonna bet on Kalshi, there are definitely things you could look towards to predict what it’s gonna sound like. And I would cop to that. You could look at what I’ve been scrobbling, what’s been on the rotation recently, that would point to the direction. But I don’t know if I’m ever like, “now I’m gonna make a song that does this and says this,” but like I guess I am sometimes like that. I guess it depends, sometimes I’ll sit down like “I know what this is gonna sound like,” but I usually fall short. I almost always fall short. I feel like the songs that really are good and people seem to really relate to almost always miss the mark of what I initially intended, like I just fucked it up and didn’t do a good job or did what I wanted to be done and it becomes its own little weird thing in the process of failure. Shoot for the moon and land in the stars.
WVAU: How did you go about picking singles for this album, what’s the process behind that?
AW: I send the album around and usually people are like, they don’t saying about the album because they don’t like it that much, except for their like “oh that song’s cool,” whatever one that people say “that one’s cool,” I’ll be like “okay that one is the single.” I knew that 8 Tips since it was so much gnarlier, I knew I wanted the singles to be super melodic and joyful or exuberant, so the singles on this one were pretty easy to choose. The label was also like “here are the clear standout tracks, these are gonna stream better than the other ones.”
WVAU: You keep mentioning the rotation, so I’m really just curious, what’s spinning on the turntables these days?
AW: I’m in my room right now, can I show you?
WVAU: I would love that.
Asher goes to retrieve her records being spun currently, returns back with a few.
AW: Okay, here’s what’s going on. It’s a rainy autumn, so we’re looking at Fugazi.
WVAU: D.C.! D.C. band!
AW: That’s right! Okay, WVAU, let’s go D.C. punk! We love D.C. and we love Bad Brains and the extended punk universe. Long live DC9 and Black Cat and 9:30. Love D.C. punk, love Takoma.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy and the Bitchin’ Bajas, this is an ambient record, really beautiful stuff. Chicago’s drag city, sort of like this ambient folk.
Maria Bethania, a live record of a Brazilian artist I really like. She’s got a really low voice and her band’s really good. It’s like early 70s, probably, so good. It’s like a Brazilian classic. You know like how tropicalia and bossa nova there’s only like five types of songs? They play like different versions of the same five songs and it’s perfect. It’s like Motown in that way.
James P. Johnson, one of the early jazz pianists, like ragtime jazz, the sort of non-binary zone between ragtime Joplin-esque stride piano and proper jazz, so it’s like you see this idea of bop or post-bop will become. It’s so, speaking of American, this is the best shit in the world, it’s like elemental, it’s perfect.
This Hair Police album, Constantly Terrified, really upsetting noise record.
Oh and then U.S. Maple, Long Hair In Three Stages by U.S. Maple. Drag city band, another Chicago band.
Take from that what you will about the next Asher White record, it’s gonna be very American with a Brazilian flair I suppose. Titties out Brazilian flair to an otherwise rootsy Americana vibe.
WVAU: Do you know when you want to drop this next record or is it just going to come out when it comes out, when it’s ready to?
AW: I feel like everyone is getting sick of me so I’m gonna wait a while. I also want to make sure it’s good and I don’t wanna inundate people. There’s some diminishing returns of emailing people like “listen to my new record” and people don’t listen to new Guided by Voices records because there’s like three a year. Also I bet if Robert Pollard spent two years working on one record, I bet it’d be really really good. So there’s a lot to learn about that sort of thing, so yeah. Probably 2027 or 2028, I mean definitely because that’s literally in three months. Probably the later half of 2027.
WVAU: Awesome. I saw you’re going on tour, what’s the processing of going on tour? What are you preparing for and stuff like that? I might have to make a trip up to Baltimore.
AW: I’ll [come to D.C.] and play for you Carter. I would perform at WVAU. I once did freelance for AU and it changed everything for me so I love AU.
WVAU: Really? That’s awesome.
AW: You’re totally catching me off guard, I don’t have anything prepared. I have nothing prepared, it’s scary. I guess I should bring something or make something. Maybe I’ll make a baked good. I made an apple pancake this morning that I was eating before the interview.
WVAU: It sounds amazing.
AW: It was really good, can you tell from the way that I’m talking that it was satisfying?
WVAU: I just know that I’d kill for an apple pancake right about now.
AW: Carter, I will make you an apple pancake — book me at WVAU and I will make you an apple pancake. But yeah, I don’t know. The band is just my best friends Betsy and Martin, I love them. They’re my band because they’re really good, but also because I can’t imagine touring and traveling around the country with anyone else. They’re just amazing, they’re my best mates. And so, we are going to have fun. The shows will be fun, the music can be kinda monastic and obsessive and annoying and lonely, but the live shows are about drinking beers and going cuckoo-crazy, so I’m excited. We’re doing six or seven East Coast dates so it’s gonna be easy, easy-peasy, right down the Eastern seaboard — Boston to Baltimore. It’s gonna be really really fun and intimate, I think these shows are gonna be small, they’re all pretty small venues so it’s gonna be nice.
WVAU: I saw you did Rhizome in D.C., I’m so upset I wasn’t there! I think I wasn’t there yet.
AW: I love Rhizome so much, I wanna play there again […] Rhizome is like the only good thing we have left in the world.
WVAU: Finally, I just wanna ask you — if you could tell everyone listening to go check out one of your songs, what song would that be?
AW: That’s such a good question, I need to do a deep cut. “Temple Run Utopia” from 2023’s Architecture Exuberant! This is not on a label, this was released independently when I was 22. […] I think it’s better than a lot of the music I’ve made since.
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Photo credits — Anya Good