The reinvention of Sasami Ashworth

Raised in church ensembles and orchestras, the 34-year-old L.A. native grew up with the mentality of being one in a group of many, doing her part to make the whole better but not necessarily wanting to venture into the spotlight herself. With her latest album Blood On the Silver Screen, the famed musician is flipping that script and going full pop star, embarking on a character study of both the genre and of herself.

“I grew up in a house with six people, and I grew up going to church and playing in symphony and in the band. … In my mind, I really thought of myself as, like, a sidekick type person,” she tells me, sipping tea in her cozy Northern California home. “It wasn’t until much later in life that I realised there was a whole other way of thinking about the world when you’re viewing it as a main character. It took me a really long time to feel like the main character of my own life. I always was kind of the funny friend.”

To date, Ashworth’s career has been something of a series of births and rebirths, numerous explorations into how far her talents could take her. The boundaries, seemingly, have been endless. With an almost encyclopaedic understanding of music and music theory, Sasami has found herself a music teacher; a French Horn player; a member of the band Cherry Glazerr; a tour companion to veterans such as Mitski; a producer, quarterbacking other artists’ projects behind the mixing board; and everything in between. Slowly but surely, through faith in herself and faith in her inner creative North Star, she’s forcefully become one of the industry’s most impressive names to watch.

She spent her childhood in El Segundo – which she affectionately calls the “Wisconsin of Los Angeles” – as part of the Unification Church. Her parents, she tells me, were the type to sing around the house, playing Simon & Garfunkel or The Beatles on the piano and in the car. Her mom was in a choir, while her father played in a bluegrass band. Music was also a big part of her church, which made it easy for her to join ensembles and choirs from a young age. And so, when her interest in the craft started becoming apparent, her parents helped her feed that passion and let it grow.

“I think if I had grown up in just a traditional Korean Christian household, I would have ended up really different,” Ashworth says. “But because my parents both joined this radical cult, they already knew the feeling of doing something that’s going against what society tells you to do, something that makes you feel alive and feel seen. So even though they’re very religious, because they’ve experienced that feeling of doing something that’s left-of-centre, I think they’ve always been really supportive of a lifestyle as long as you’re doing something you really believe in. They’ve always been very supportive."

As a kid, Ashworth describes herself as “clinically strange" – in sixth grade, for example, she won the award for “most unique" – so once it came time in her school curriculum to pick an instrument to learn for band class, she decided to pick the weirdest instrument she could think of: the French horn. That one decision ended up opening more doors than she could have ever imagined at the time. One of the less-sexy instruments (or so perceived by sixth graders), there weren’t that many French horn players floating around Los Angeles. By being one of the few on hand – and by being good at it – Ashworth earned spots in prestigious ensembles in need.

In middle school, she earned a scholarship to the prestigious Idyllwild Arts summer academy program in California. Eventually, she was asked to audition for the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts [LACHSA], the same school that was home to the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Haim, and even Ashworth’s friend Lorely Rodriguez (Empress Of). Going there, she says, pretty much changed her life. “I grew up in L.A., but I didn’t really experience L.A. until I went to [LACHSA],” she tells me. “I was just exposed to so much shit that I wouldn’t have been otherwise.”

The pool of talent at LACHSA is infamous, and Ashworth was right in the fray. She attended Teen Vogue parties and ‘young Hollywood’ it-events with friends, checking afterward to see if they’d made it on the paparazzi posts. While the whirlwind was exciting and intoxicating and inspiring, it was also tiring. By graduation, Ashworth explains, she was burnt out, tired of the industry ringer, and jaded. She decided that instead of jumping into the pop-star ringer, she would go as far away as she could.

Alongside teaching, Ashworth was also playing in groups and ensembles wherever she could, most notably as part of Cherry Glazerr. She played in the band for around two years, until she dropped out to pursue her own solo project. But as they say, often the steps that make up a journey only make sense in hindsight. Such was the case for Ashworth: her intention, she tells me, was never really to be the frontperson of any project. The moves from teacher to band member to solo recording artist were less like radical leaps of faith than they were sporadic musical explorations that kept bleeding into each other.

“I started recording my self-titled when I was still in another band, and even at that point, I always thought of myself as someone in someone else’s band,” she says. “But I was so maestro about everything, and then I was like, ‘Oh, I actuallylove being maestro. I actually love having all this control over things.’ I’ve always been a very detail-oriented person, but I wasn’t used to actually being able to do the things I wanted to do. It was like I finally got my wand.”

Soon thereafter, Ashworth shared her first solo track “Callous” on SoundCloud. It skyrocketed, eventually earning Pitchfork's hallowed “Best New Track” label. Having that early success, Ashworth says, was critical for confidence building. What it gave her wasn’t only in the tangibles – yes, she got management offers and record contracts, but what she also gained was trust in her own vision, something that she’s followed ever since, wherever it wants to go.

Part of the magic of Sasami Ashworth is that she isn’t afraid to reinvent herself. “Everyone makes art for a really different reason. But for me, it’s that I always get really into character with whatever I’m making,” she explains. With her first record, for example, she went documentary style, writing tracks as if she was penning a diary, trying only to be sincere and earnest. With her second album Squeeze, she went full metal, releasing a collection of face-melting songs that channeled physicality and theatrics and disillusionment. Though the two albums were so different, Ashworth tells me that the driving force behind them both was the same. She was really just trying to make the records that she needed and wanted to hear.

Getting into character is something that comes naturally to Ashworth. It started when she was a child, navigating the self she presented at home, the self she presented at school, and the self she was just trying to figure out on her own. Such is what happens to most teenagers. There are the versions of ourselves our parents know, and then there are the versions of ourselves we begin to try on for size as we move through new places, new social groups, and new interests.

“I think a lot of kids that grow up in very religious households are very good at having two personalities, or two identities. There’s the identity of your house and going to church, and then there’s the identity of trying to fit in at school and trying to figure out who you are,” Ashworth explains. “So, from a really young age, I think I was very good at splitting myself in that way …. I almost felt just like I was good at dissociating, or something like that.”

With her third record, Blood On the Silver Screen, Ashworth has reinvented herself once again. The core principle, she tells me, is that same gut instinct, the desire to simply make the world she wanted to walk around in. “You can actually write characters that don’t exist, and you can write yourself into a story you’ve never lived,” she explains. And on this record, that character is simply being the main character.

“From a young age, I didn’t like being pigeonholed into things,” Ashworth says. “I don’t like being just a jock or just a band kid. I always rejected this.”

“I’ve been very lucky,” she continues. “Because I went so hard with Squeeze, people just don’t have expectations for my music anymore. … You never know what you’re going to get.”

As she was developing the world of Blood On the Silver Screen – before even realizing it was an album – Ashworth found herself getting immersed with the lineage of pop greats. She was still touring Squeeze, but she found herself obsessed with the lexicon of idols like Britney and Adele and Rihanna and Lady Gaga. Because the Squeeze tour was so physical – jumping and running around on stage comes with the metal territory, but it’s also extremely grueling – she found herself hitting the gym and needing music to get you pumped up and motivated. In that process, she caught the pop bug. And after catching the pop bug, she wanted to crack the pop code. Why was pop just so addictive? What made it so good? Most of all, what was it about pop music that let you feel like a bigger, better, badder version of yourself?

“I really was fascinated by pop songwriting and pop melodies. Every genre of music feels like a language that I’m gaining literacy in. So, I got very immersed in it,” Ashworth explains. “What I thought was so cool about pop music and so exciting about working in that realm is it’s extremely powerful in connecting with a listener.”

“Part of it is that, like, I’m classically trained. I’m very interested in studying things and gaining skills and practicing things. With this album, I was really fascinated by the craft of pop songwriting,” she continues. “In my mind, making this record was like making the best grilled cheese sandwich or the best pizza. Something everyone loves and is so ubiquitous but is not easy. It’s a skill making pizza. Like, it’s hard to make good pizza. It’s a skill that you actually have to learn.”

Indeed, the magic of pop is that it works like a well-oiled machine. At its best, the mechanics of the genre are invisible, understood only as whatever catchy hook is stuck in your brain at any given moment. And yet, despite its glossy sheen, to be really good at pop is no less an intellectual endeavor than composing a score or writing a folk ballad. “There’s a reason why if you look at the credits of your favourite pop song, there are like twenty people that worked on it,” Ashworth points out. “There’s so much to the creation of our favourite pop.”

“I think I grew up in a scene that was a lot more about cool kid stuff. … I was so weird. I was never a hot, cool popular kid. And there’s still a part of me that still feels weird and evenaspires to,” Ashworth explains. “That’s why I had this bad feeling about pop music, and I was kind of allergic to cheesiness and on-the-nose-ness. There’s also this element of being a POC kid and having to be cool and prove yourself.” But with Blood On the Silver Screen, Ashworth made the choice to let those inhibitions go. In coming to pop. Ashworth wholeheartedly embraced the heart-on-your-sleeve earnestness that it peddles, both in life and in art. “I just wanted to lean into the guilty pleasure without the guilt,” she says.

Heavily inspired by film, each track of Blood On the Silver Screen is in its own cinematic genre. These mini-movies, when examined as a whole, tell stories of big love, expansive experiences, and big feelings. Ashworth moves feelings like the seductive ache of choosing to love even when it’s destined to end ("In Love With A Memory") and the guttural, uncontrollable passions that define romantic ups-and-downs ("Love Makes You Do Crazy Things").

The record, really, was an exercise in taking up space, in going too far, in going for it and not looking back. Lyrical professions like “Honey crash into me / Like a storm into the sea / Like blood on the silver screen” (‘Honeycrash’) or “I’m such a Cancer / I wish I had the answer, baby / But I’m quite a mess now / It takes me all day to get dressed now” (‘Slugger’) litter the record unabashed and unashamed.

“When I was younger, it was so hard for me to say how I really felt about things,” Ashworth says. “I’m just in the place in my life where I say what I mean now.”

Making Blood On the Silver Screen happened both slowly and all at once. The writing process started when Ashworth made the move from L.A. to Northern California. Originally inspired to get out of the city by her growing interest in mycology (the study and cultivation of mushrooms), she was looking for a place where she could have easy access to her newfound obsession. The original frontrunner was Maine, but she settled on her current location to be closer to her working city. Ultimately though, the move, she says, was necessary.

“I can’t live in L.A. anymore,” Ashworth says. “You’re just required to do so much social media and so much touring. I was like, I don’t need to live in TikTok. I can live in the woods, and then when I need to switch on to a professional mindset, I can turn that on.”

After all, the music industry now is faster paced than ever. Back in the day, artists used to be able to make a record, tour, and then rest and recuperate before the next cycle. But with the insane pace of social media cycles and trends, touring and writing and releasing has all blended together. Off time is relatively nonexistent. Moving north, for Ashworth, was a physical manifestation of clawing back that reset button at a time when the industry has all but taken it off the table.

In January of 2022, Ashworth started writing in Northern California, soaking up the new space for inspiration. Once she’d finished a track – Ashworth is the sole writer credited on the record – she’d drive herself down to L.A. to build it out with one of her two co-producers, the iconic Jenn Decilveo and Rostam Batmanglij. She had the entire thing almost entirely finished by the end of that year.

Letting those two collaborators into her world (along with visual collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang), she explains, was a big step. “From the world building and the writing standpoint, I feel very solitary about it. I feel so protective and controlling that it feels really special when I do find a collaborator that I’m like, ‘Bear it all! Tell me everything!” she says.

Rostam in particular Ashworth calls a “kindred spirit.” He too was classically trained, and together they brought razor-sharp precision to her ideas. On “In Love With A Memory,” for example, the pair worked for hours on the guitar solo, building it up from a MIDI keyboard demo to its eventual 50-50 guitar/MIDI split. Getting that one section alone right, Ashworth tells me, took hours. The solo pulls from classical techniques, an area of her expertise she tells me she wouldn’t have dipped into without Rostam’s encouragement. This was just one of the many ways, she says, he helped pushed her and turn the record into the best version of itself.

“Originally, the record was going to come out earlier,” she explains. “In my mind, I was like, ‘I’m just going to make this fun pop record really fast, turn it in, and then start working on something new.’ But the label really liked it, and they wanted to draw it out and make a bigger campaign around it.”

As she and her team took time to build that world – and make space in her schedule to allow her to embark on a tour with Yeule – the release date kept getting pushed back. But now, almost three years later, the time is here for Ashworth to unveil her next act.

“It’s been one of the benefits of actually not becoming extremely popular,” Ashworth says of her experience launching this new era. “I think there are people who become very popular and very successful, and they’re very scared to change what they’re doing because they don’t want to upset their fans, and they know that it works. For me, I’ve always been on the fringe. Even now, I’m successful, I don’t have another job, I’m very fucking lucky to do what I do. But it’s also because I am basically a blue-collar musician. I tour manage myself. I sell merch. I still work really hard, and I’ve been doing this for a really long time.”