The unbreaking and remaking of jasmine.4.t

But make no mistake, its purpose is not to harm or weigh you down. Look closely and with courage at the metal slug and you might find it resembles a key. Look closely and with courage at that key and you might find a whole new world rolling out to greet you as “the matrix” of binary language unlocks and breaks apart. A new world queerer than you could ever have imagined, filled with “lovers with [their] chests wide open” chanting “You are not alone.”

It’s in this warm and blossoming world that much of jasmine.4.t’s debut album You Are The Morning exists, bathed in a glow of candy-coloured joy and catharsis. The brainchild of Bristol-born and Manchester-based trans artist Jasmine Cruickshank, it’s an album that looks for meaning first and foremost in love – love for her friends, love for her personal journey, and for an intimacy that had once felt so far out of reach.

When the other reality of being a trans woman in our increasingly radicalised society does intrude, it creeps in softly, makes its sober point, and fades into the wallpaper of You Are The Morning’s house of rosy devotion. That’s not to say that the stakes are low. In centering her own hangups – and her tender heartbreaks, too – Cruickshank counterweighs her multilayered reveries with a dose of kitchen sink realism (one is literally called “Kitchen”) that keeps them from drifting into the ether like castles in the air.

Look for jasmine.4.t on streaming platforms and you’ll find just a handful of songs predating You Are The Morning – mostly from her 2019 EP Worn Through – but there’s a lot more out there under various guises, including whole albums that we’ll likely never hear, recorded on the cheap and sold in Bristol coffee shops on self-burned CD-Rs. Few things are ever entirely lost, though; she was bemused by meeting someone recently who had a copy of an album of Daniel Johnston covers she recorded at 16. She’s twice that age now, and finally at peace with who she’d always yearned to be.

The first time Cruickshank tried to come out as trans, she was an academic teen about to leave Bristol to take up a bachelor’s degree in maths at Oxford University. “It… didn’t go very well,” she says. “Oxford fucking sucks and is super transphobic as well. I really hated it there.” Forced to squirm reluctantly back into the closet to survive, her mental and physical health collapsed from the stress. A severe case of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME, followed and she was left with no choice but to quit and go home, where she lived in the basement of her parents’ house while working as temp staff for the NHS.

In 2016, she co-founded a punk, folk and indie label, the still-going-strong Breakfast Records, with friends Josh Jarman and Dan Anthony of west country Americana band Langkamer, through which she released Worn Through and other music with early bands Human Bones and The Gnarwhals. She got married, too, to someone she’d met while at Oxford, but the key in her chest still sat there, burning silently away. When the pandemic hit in 2020, she was knocked flat, ending up practically bedbound with long Covid (a close relative of ME) for almost half a year. It was there, during the long hours of unhappily staring at the ceiling, that she made the decision to try and transition again.

“It went just as badly as it did the first time,” she says with a hollow laugh, shaking her head of blue and bright pink hair. “My marriage fell apart. Then I tried to move back in with parents and that went terribly. I was very traumatised by the whole experience and had really bad PTSD symptoms.”

Shellshocked and broken, she left Bristol for Manchester, where kind friends offered sofas and long talks over steaming cups of tea. It’s to those friends, and the wider trans and queer communities of Manchester and beyond, that You Are The Morning is dedicated. Even before she played her first show as jasmine.4.t, “at a fundraiser for an incredible trans guy’s top surgery,” Cruickshank had around 30 songs written and demoed, capturing all the new sensations, superheated feelings, and heart-pounding crushes of the early months of her transition.

Forming a band with three other transwomen – Phoenix Rousiamanis on keys and strings, Eden O’Brien on drums and percussion, and Emily Abbott on bass – Cruickshank originally planned to DIY release her demos, having enlisted her new chosen family’s help to narrow them down. But it was her old Breakfast Records labelmate Joe Sherrin (aka SLONK) who encouraged her to submit them to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records through their demo submission page. It wasn’t totally random; pre-transition, Cruickshank had toured with and roadied for Bridgers’ boygenius bandmate Lucy Dacus, so there was a glimmer of an ‘in’ there. “I uploaded the demos to their website and I heard nothing,” she says, laughing. “So I texted Lucy and asked if she could play my songs to Phoebe, and she did.”

From there, things moved fast and jasmine.4.t became the first ever international signee to the label, joining Sloppy Jane, MUNA, Katie Gavin, and Claud, who adds backing vocals to the uplifting “Best Friend’s House”, alongside Bridgers, Dacus, and their boygenius bandmate Julien Baker, plus Becca Mancari and Grey’s Anatomy actor turned musician E.R. Fightmaster. With "the boys" sharing production duties, the recording sessions for You Are the Morning took place in the legendary Sound City Studios at Van Nuys, in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, where Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker recorded parts of 2023’s the record and the rest.

Chatting to me from her bedroom, where she regularly films makeup and guitar tutorials for TikToks and Reels, Cruickshank leans back in her chair to point out a California postcard Blu-Tacked to the wall behind her: “That’s from Lucy when boygenius were making the record. She was like, ‘Oh, I’m doing this top-secret thing that I can’t really tell you about just yet but I’m in LA and I hate it.” On another wall, a later postcard from Dacus walks that disdain back, saying “I can’t wait to welcome you to LA. I hated it here at first and now I love it, and I hope we show you a good enough time that you get to skip hating it. Let’s make a record you’ll be proud of forever.”

“I feel like they did that,” says Cruickshank, beaming. Describing her time in LA with Phoenix, Eden, and the boys as “an amazing glimpse into the little magical lives that they lead there, surrounded by the nicest people,” she recalls a night spent at Bridgers’ home, among her friends, to welcome the new moon. “We had this really deep bonding experience that was completely unexpected. I was like, ‘What is this life?’”

An essential part of any new moon party is to set your intentions for the coming month(s), and intentions are something that Cruickshank says she takes quite seriously. As someone who has long been involved in grassroots activism and advocacy, particularly with Trans Mutual Aid Manchester, there was a worry that people in her community might feel like she was leaving them behind as her star began to rise. “I don’t ever want to not be paying my dues to my community at home,” she explains. “So my intentions were very much about making sure that this record was made in a way that could benefit the wider trans and queer community that has supported me up to this point. And I feel like we’ve stayed true to that.”

As well as working out ways in which the record release and merch sales could support Trans Mutual Aid Manchester, You Are The Morning features the Trans Chorus of LA – the first of its kind in America – who joined the Sound City sessions for the album’s closing choral piece. Arranged by Phoenix Rousiamanis, whose composing credits include the London Philharmonic Orchestra and trans opera Songs of Descent(“mind-blowing, literally phenomenal”), it begins in the closing minute of the terrific single “Elephant”, continues through the interlude “Transition”, and concludes with the spine-tingling affirmation of “Woman”, the first song written and released as jasmine.4.t.

“We were recording in Studio B, which is what we call the Punisher studio [after Bridgers’ second album], but it wasn’t available on the day that the Chorus was coming in,” she explains. “So we recorded them in Studio A instead, which is this massive, iconic live room that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Nirvana’s Nevermind were recorded in. Thirty trans people in that historic room together? That had never happened before, clearly. Fucking hell. What a thing to be a part of. I feel so grateful to them. To hear that space filled with solely trans voices was a really incredible moment, and I think we all felt that. I have a video where I’m filming them and then pan around to Lucy Dacus next to me, and she’s just welling up.”

According to statistics gathered by Trans Day of Remembrance organisers, the past 10 years have seen more than 3800 trans people worldwide reported dead, with violence and suicide the two most common causes. That’s more than one trans person every day, and the increasingly fascist-leaning anti-trans rhetoric of the political class isn’t exactly inspiring confidence in brighter days ahead. It’s no wonder that other trans women and queer people are latching onto the jasmine.4.t vision of radical softness and unbending solidarity. Of being our own lights – and each other’s – in the face of loud injustice.

When the noise of negativity gets too much for Cruickshank to bear, she’s grateful for her chosen family like Han and another close friend Yulia, who will step in during the periodic pile-ons she endures to block, report, and delete if needed, to protect her from the worst. With the album coming out shortly, her excitement is mixed with some nervousness too. “I want it to go well but I’m still a bit on edge about the hatefulness that might come my way,” she says.

“However many lovely messages you get, the evil ones do stick in your head. Especially with what’s happening in America right now, it’s a fucking high stakes situation being a trans woman. So I need to be brave. It’s so important to not back down and to be visible and be fighting for trans rights and every other fucking thing that we need to be fighting for right now. It’s a long list.”

At 6’4”, Cruickshank knows that ‘passing’ as a cis woman isn’t really an option and she does sometimes “get a lot of shit on the streets,” but thankfully has only rarely been met with violence. As a touring musician, she’s potentially exposed to a lot more people than most other trans people, and she finds comfort in the fact that, “on the whole,” people are nice. And if there’s someone who isn’t, well, there’s usually another person around who will stand up for her when the abuse starts. “I think people are pretty aware of the shit that trans women go through and kind of feel bad for us,” she says. “And the people who are abusive are mostly ashamed of their behaviour, as they should be.”

Listen closely to “You Are The Morning” and you might notice that Eden O’Brien’s percussion has a different resonance than elsewhere on the album. “That’s body percussion, which no one expected we’d end up using,” says Cruickshank, grinning. “I think it was Julien’s idea to try that in the studio, and it actually relates to this psychiatric tool called EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) that I learned to help deal with my PTSD.”

What does body tapping have to do with eye movement, you may ask. Well, according to psychologists, it’s the bilateral stimulation that counts, whether it’s following a moving light with your eyes from left to right or alternating light ‘butterfly’ taps on your hands, knees or across your chest, just below your collarbones. Tapping while focusing on traumatic memories can help a person to regulate their emotional response to those memories, desensitising them to negative beliefs and introducing a more positive association.

“It’s surprisingly powerful,” Cruickshank explains. “I mean, it’s horrible and it shakes your brain up in really trippy ways. I wasn’t myself for about a month when I started it, but it was incredible how quickly I got through my symptoms. That’s actually what the song ‘Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation’ is about. There were fireworks outside Tesco and I just lost my mind and completely blacked out during my big shop.”

As it turns out, losing your mind in a supermarket is something that we have in common – only mine was in the tea and coffee aisle of a Carrefour in Istanbul, when I realised that I had to leave my husband. Cruickshank’s hit by the frozen foods section, but luckily she wasn’t alone. “I don’t remember getting home to my friend’s house, but they took me there and looked after me because I was completely a mess,” she recalls. “But I love this song, because it’s written from the perspective of imagining a future where I’m healed, so to record it in that future and to perform it in that future is so fucking terrific.”

As well as producing, playing, and singing backing vocals, each member of boygenius gets their own star turn on the album, with “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation” being Phoebe Bridgers’ moment, and it’s perfect for her breathy, deadpan warmth. Julien Baker blesses “Tall Girl” with her soft soprano, while Lucy Dacus adds some extra oomph to the moving and brilliant “New Shoes”, which Cruickshank originally recorded pre-transition for Worn Through.

It was actually Dacus who coaxed her into revisiting the song and bringing it into the benevolent world of You Are The Morning. The only hesitation was that she had originally written the song about her ex-spouse, early on in their relationship. “Recording it again after the divorce, with my chosen family singing ‘Let’s make a family,’ was both devastating and incredibly affirming of this new and joyful road that I’m on,” she says, her voice cracking slightly with emotion. She shakes her head. “Yeah, it was a lot.”

If you follow any trans advocacy accounts on social media, you might be familiar with a quote by non-binary trans writer Kai Cheng Thom that goes “Those who have survived the unthinkable are also those who know how to create a better world – because it’s ended for us before," and I think part of the blueprint for that world lies in You Are The Morning. Through confidently expressing her unbroken self, insecurities and all, Cruickshank is remade once again into a source of light and strength for us all.

“There has been turmoil, but it’s been beautiful too,” she says, summing up. “I feel like I’ve landed on my feet and it’s really getting emotional now. I wrote these songs at the worst possible time, when everything had gone to shit and no one was accepting me for who I was, so it’s been amazing to see other trans women getting hope from my journey and from this incredibly lucky life that I’m now living.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she adds, grimacing. “It fucking sucks being a trans woman in the fascist state of the UK, but I have my incredible chosen family around me and I’m so, so happy.”