Artist Spotlight: Asher White – Our Culture

Asher White is a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, musician, and artist who has been releasing records since her teenage years. Beyond her 2025 tour dates, White’s website lists just the fact that she was voted “Most Artistic (Male)” in her middle school yearbook. She grew up going to noise shows in Chicago, a scene that galvanized her earliest attempts at songwriting as much as her ongoing fascination with pop music, leading her to make room for seemingly contradictory impulses. More than continuously toeing the line between styles, between coherence and abstraction, however, White’s music has evolved to prioritize confessional transparency over purity, complexity over wilful obfuscation. That may seem counterintuitive when talking about her latest album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living – her 16th overall and first for Joyful Noise – itself an unconventional and anxious reaction to a potential breakout moment, pushing her approach to its eruptive, feastful limits. More than just revealing, its recklessness opens the door to a fascinating place that’s bound to change shape with each subsequent release. If you’re dedicated enough to follow its twists and turns, you’ll want to come back for another look.

We caught up with Asher White for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about living in Providence, the gulf between conceptualizing and executing ideas, being unsparing, and more.

You mentioned in another interview that you make music while walking. I’m curious about how that manifests for you. Do you listen to demos, make notes, or just take in the world around you?

I don’t know if this is also true for you, but I’m just generally more receptive to information while I’m walking around. I feel like I’m more observant, more thoughtful, and maybe more intentional. There’s something about the meditative rhythm of a stride. And also, that’s when I listen to the most music – not my own, but other people’s music. The process of creating music for me is pretty closely tied to the process of listening to music. They feel kind of indistinguishable, and are symbiotic to me. But I think if I’m stuck, the forward momentum and constant stimuli of walking through a city, or walking through somewhere, inevitably brings forward the exact rhythmic or harmonic or conceptual content that I’m looking for — that missing piece. I’ve never struck out. I’ve never not had the song completed by the end of a walk.

You mean conceptually?

It’s really hard to imagine being able to invent and synthesize ideas cooped up in your room. Being cooped up, to me, is for execution of ideas. And I will coop myself up for extended periods of time, but usually just to doggedly complete the task I’ve conceptualized prior. I don’t conceptualize anything if I’m not regularly filling my brain with new images, music, neighborhoods, stuff like that. But it really does feel like synthesis. That’s where the raw material gets modulated and filtered. It’s just about plugging into the churn of the world. I think it’s really scary to be faced with a blank page sitting at your desk. I think it’s much easier to walk around and say, “Well, for the next 40 minutes my goal is just to walk around,” and then I’ll catch whatever comes my way. Ideas are kind of inevitable because you’re not straining — you’re allowing them to navigate towards you effortlessly, instead of trying to chase them down, which I think probably frightens them away.

What’s the challenge for you in taking those ideas inside? Having to rewire them back into your process?

I think it’s just a chore to actualize it. Like, “Ugh, now I have to do the thing.” [laughs] I have to code myself into doing it. But usually I’m pretty excited about it. My phone is overflowing with voice memos of me walking and humming something half-heartedly, incoherently into the phone. Then I’ll bring those directly into Ableton. I’ll dash home and try to preserve them in their form. Sometimes the actual recordings themselves make it into the song.

You recorded the new album while living in Providence, and the way it’s framed and structured made me wonder if it’s uniquely tied to place for you.

Totally. It’s maybe the most mired in the specifics of that place. More than any other, when I listen to it, it’s so specific to that period of time. Usually I’m interested in keeping an eye on, or mitigating, the insularity of a project. I’m usually interested in creating something that can translate more ambiguously, more flexibly, more elastically. I feel like this album is somewhat of an outlier in that I was like, I’m just gonna go kind of emo. I’m going to unflinchingly make this something demanding and specific, misshapen and weird, and rooted very firmly in the vibe that Providence has — and also Providence in relation to the rest of the world in 2023.

Does that feel like a long time ago now that you’re releasing the album?

Yeah. There’s another album that is done that is way, way different, and that addresses the past year. I finished this album around a year ago, and since then I’ve made a whole new one and feel a lot more connected to that. Also a lot more optimistic about the way it will do critically and commercially, which is funny. I feel totally removed from it, but now I’m kind of approaching the point of distance where I’m interested in it as an artifact. I no longer identify with it, but I’m no longer embarrassed by it either. It’s jarring to be answering questions presently about an album that corresponds to a pretty radically different geographical, psychic, emotional point in my life. 

Talking about the vibe of Providence – what I  get from the album specifically is the loneliness you felt over the last year of living there. What’s fascinating is that it’s channelled in both diaristic songs and more narratively intricate ones that imagine and refract the experiences of others. Do you feel like some of those external points of inspiration became more internalized, or that you were able to be imaginative with them in a different way, as a result of isolation?

I think any real songwriter would scoff at my wide-eyed, naive discovery of the concept of fiction. [laughs] I kind of feel like I’m doing undergrad writing program exercises. It’s relatively unimpressive in the grand scheme of being a writer, but I largely feel that I “discovered” fiction that year. I wasn’t in school, Providence is very cheap, and I only had to work a day job three or four days a week, so I had a lot of downtime, and I was reading a lot more — especially fiction, which I typically hadn’t read. The galvanizing quality of fiction is its possibility to be a metatext. It’s this dual thing of always being autobiographical. This is like, duh, but it was revelatory for me. When you’re reading fiction, you’re reading speculative autobiography — this beautiful composite of the author, the author’s inventions, and the author’s guesses about what other people are thinking. 

And the reverse way of this is autofiction – this thing of, what if we made autobiography fictional? What if we reached fiction via the self? As opposed to what if we reached the self via fiction, which I think narrative fiction generally does. So I was thinking a lot about that. You get to couch yourself in these ideas and empathize with them by embodying a character that’s not you, or sculpting something outside of yourself. You can get to different points of yourself through routes you wouldn’t otherwise. You can approach landmarks in the geography of yourself via different angles, from vantage points you wouldn’t have if you were just like, “Here I go, reflecting on my life.”

What did Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star specifically illuminate for you on that journey?

It’s a really structurally weird and misshapen book. The story is refracted through a narrator who’s constantly undermining it, constantly intruding. It’s this really annoying narrator who has nothing to do with the story, ostensibly telling you about this girl he has some mixture of pity and repulsion for. There’s just a lot of bad faith in that book. A lot of misfortune and ugliness. People are very ugly to this girl. The narrator is ostensibly telling a tender story, but in an exploitative way. On a thematic level, it’s a story of poverty and real high-stakes human problems being told somewhat unsympathetically — not saccharine at all. It completely defies the tropes you’d expect from the story of an orphan girl who doesn’t know anyone. It’s told in this really dirty, gross way. 

In the way a dream does, it keeps erupting into abstraction. At every turn it’s on the brink of becoming a complete metaphysical tone poem. I really liked that way of storytelling, where it is shifting in and out of focus between narrators, between good faith and bad faith, between intentions. You’re constantly being jerked around. You can feel the diversity of her ideas in it. You can feel her warring with herself, experimenting, disagreeing with herself, even becoming frustrated with herself. It’s really interesting as a document of writing, and it’s also a good story, but it’s tricky and difficult. It’s a piece of literature I struggled with, which I liked, and I felt smart for doing it. I don’t often feel smart when I’m reading.

Was it exciting for you to translate that kind of corrosion or eruption from a sonic perspective? 

Totally. I always want to do that. Up to now, the game has been to smooth over and reign in the more corrosive, explosive, and jarring sonic tricks that I’m doing, because I feel like I owe the listener coherence, or at least some kind of entry point. I’d like to exist in an idiom that’s not so antagonistic as to barrage the listener with a bunch of different stuff without leading them through it. I think it’s generous for an artist to be like, “Here’s a bunch of crazy ideas, and here’s a way through it that’s navigable and pleasurable.” But this was the first time where I was like, “Oh, I’m not gonna make this pleasurable or navigable. I can leave it gnarled, fucked up, and confusing.” It was fun to be given tacit permission by what I was reading and listening to just leave it, or even feed into it, to let it go off the rails, to be unsparing with it. Now, when I go back and listen to my other albums, I can feel where, as an editor, I went in and thought, “Let’s tighten this up, let’s find an easier path through this idea.”

I like the word “unsparing.” It’s more about keeping certain ideas rather than the extent of experimentation.

I guess I believe in sparing. [laughs] I feel like this was uncharacteristic. I want to be unsparing in some ways, and there are projects worth being unsparing, and artists I look toward to be unsparing. There are voices I wouldn’t want to be spared from, but with the work I’m doing now, in the long run, I want to be more intentional. I don’t think I would have been able to make the album I just made without having done this, and I think it’s worth a lot in being unsparing. But I don’t feel like unsparing should always be the thing that we’re committed to as artists. That seems a little arrogant to me.

I’m curious about the relationship between idleness and recklessness, which also feels thematic on the record. People often say you’re bound to experiment when you’re bored, like when you’re a kid. Do you feel the same way, or do you get listless?

This is a major listlessness album. That’s kind of the core of it. What does it mean to be listless as the bulk of the world is sincerely scrambling to be alive – would basically kill to be listless? Not in the condescending, guilty sense of, “Oh, what it is to be American,” though of course there’s some of that, but more in the sense of knowing no one is exempt from listlessness. The question of indulgence or hedonism feels applicable here – it’s experimental, sprawling, weird, oddly shaped, binging on ideas. It’s brazen, hungry, messy, obstinate, like a toddler. This was a time in my life that definitely involved some hedonistic behavior – some sort of listless, masturbatory lifestyle stuff.

On the song ‘Travel safe’, you sing: “I just felt diffuse/ And so I mothered my exhaustion for the truth.” I understand it has strong political connotations, but it made me think about the relationship between burnout and honesty in songwriting. It kind of goes back to boredom. Do you feel like you can be at your most creative when you’re tired?

I like that interpretation of the line – it’s interesting to me. I now want to look at the rest of the song or the album through that idea. It’s kind of an angry line. It’s about people who are like, “I can’t read the headline, I’m so exhausted by it.” People feeling the inevitable burnout of being cognizant of the world, of caring, and how that allows us to comfort ourselves, shielding ourselves from the truth out of helplessness. “Mothering my exhaustion for the truth” would be shielding my eyes, really. But it’s not meant as a total condemnation of that instinct. It’s more an admission of guilt, and a plea to work beyond such a habit. I was trying to write a song that could work dually as a bored-at-home existential exercise, but also as a chronicle of emergent apocalypse and real, unfathomable human terror. Not to equate them, but to composite them – to put them together in a collage, an assemblage of things that exist in relation to one another. 

But being tired is really good. [laughs] I think it’s actually really generative. There’s an Eileen Myles interview where they talk about being hungover as a kind of second drug trip – you’re also in an altered state. Once I realized that being hungover was like a second, sedated part of being drunk, this hallucinatory thing, I started to love my hangovers. It’s such an optimistic way of envisioning the different ways someone can feel bad, even nauseous. I feel the same way about being tired. Feeling burned out, actually spent – it’s rare and specific enough to be an opportunity for ideas to take shape.

Do you burn yourself out when you’re producing or bringing a song to fruition?

No. But I have a scary tireless thing. [laughs] I’m speaking out of my ass a bit, but I don’t like to sleep. I’m like, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” If I burn out on something, it’s because I need to change mediums or change projects. If I burn out on a song, I don’t feel like I’m depleting – it’s just different areas of my brain. I don’t think that there’s a core motor that gets depleted, I think the motor’s always running.

There are songs on the album that feel more directly earnest, like ‘Voice memo’ and ‘Falls’, but sincerity seems important to you even when you’re satirizing or collaging perspectives. Is it something you’re consciously thinking about when writing?

Yeah, definitely. You can rely on anything – even journalists. I think about this from my very brief stint writing for The Line of Best Fit. I really love music journalism and grew up on it. Actually, your ‘Bull Believer’ track review was really important to me specifically. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, and it was part of what I was going for with ‘Cobalt Room’. It made me think that it’s a cool idea to release a single that’s eight minutes long and can really only be listened to once. [laughs] ‘Bull Believer’ is one of the most beautiful and devastating songs ever written.

Right, but it’s hard to go back to.

I’ve probably listened to the first two minutes of it as much as I would a normal song, but I don’t think I’ve actually listened to the full eight minutes more than twice or three times. It’s horrifying. It’s so upsetting and so powerful. But I feel like one of the most exciting things about criticism is that while the author is ostensibly honoring someone else’s piece of art, they’re also creating their own expressive form. If it’s good criticism, it’s confessional and personal. The sincere stuff – the “this is my life” mode of writing, kind of emo in that way – is inevitable and has a place. I can’t resist it sometimes, but often I trust that if I’m writing about something else, the way I write about it will still yield some kind of confession or positioning.

Both ‘Voice memo’ and ‘Falls’ are also sonically sparse, but the ways you effect and texture your voice are almost opposing. With ‘Falls’, as a closing track, it feels especially significant to have it sound so barren.

I wrote ‘Falls’ on basically two strings of the guitar – there’s no chords, not a lot going on in that song. I thought it would be interesting to just compress it really hard. Compress the room mics, so it fills the same sonic space. If you look at the waveform, it takes up about as much room as the other tracks, but it’s just air and strings and my voice. It’s not much quieter, but the elements are way starker. The room tone probably takes up the most frequency. So the barren voice thing was me deciding not to EQ it, just seeing if I could fill out the whole song with a recording that doesn’t have much going on. Which is why you can hear this metal pipe drop outside the window.

That’s a crazy coincidence.

My studio’s in an industrial building, and someone just happened to have dropped this metal pipe a few blocks away. And it’s perfect, it’s on beat. The vocal processing is just about responding to the arrangement. I always feel like entering a song is like barging into the room, so it’s like, how do I dress myself to best integrate into this room in a way that makes sense? With ‘Voice memo’, everything is bleary, gleaming, and a little delirious, so I needed to drape myself in some sort of time-based effect,  to become melted and shiny, like frozen ice in the nighttime. How can I be a substance that works within this palette? It’s really just trying to match it with the rest of the song, and with ‘Falls’, the bareness was just what it called for. I also respond really poorly when vocals sound the same over the course of a whole album. You can tell when it’s recorded on the same mic with the same compression and filtering every time – it gets hard on the ears, I think, unless people are messing with their voice.

Did you think about your voice differently with this album, or was it mostly about treating it differently?

Not really, except that every time I make music my mom is like, “You need to have your vocals higher in the mix.” She’s like, “I love your beautiful voice, my beautiful daughter, please put your vocals higher in the mix.” [laughs] So with each album I bend a little more to her will. I’ve also gotten more confident as a singer, so I’ve been boosting my voice a lot. But the discrepancy between this record and the one I just finished is going to be very pronounced. I’m really worried this is the only time I’ll ever get press, and it’s for an album that only people who are down to be messed with a little bit are gonna like. I’m kind of expecting it not to do that well, and that’s okay. I just want to tell everyone, “Wait, wait, wait, wait.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Asher White’s 8 Tips For Full Catastrophe Living is out now via Joyful Noise.