Photos by Lauren Khalfayan, find more of her work here.
Check out an excerpt and some outtakes from our upcoming zine feature on SASAMI
A classically trained French horn player, teacher, and film score arranger, the technicality present in SASAMI’s work progresses harmoniously as these parts live as one. Accumulated, all of the above — along with a vast set of experiences as a woman, roles as a musician, and education (in both ends of a classroom) — were required for Ashworth to commit to music on her own terms and with intention.
Since you’ve been involved in music before starting to write songs, how did you realize that, “Oh, I’m going to write songs now,” and how did that come to be the fruit of an album?
SASAMI: I don’t know. I guess it’s just one of those things where I’ve always approached music in a studious way in the sense that I wanted to gain the skills of songwriting before I even tried to songwrite. I feel like it took a long time. I’m just developing my musicianship. So when I was ready to songwrite, I just could tell [in] an unexplainable way. I think because it became effortless. I wasn’t like, “I’m going to write a song today,” I was just like, “Oh, I have to write a song today.” I just knew. I can’t really explain that it just started happening. I was on tour and I would have a melody or a chord progression in my head so I would just grab a guitar. I would go down the hallway in the hotel wherever we were staying because I was on tour for most of it and I would just start kind of singing and playing into my voice memos. It happened naturally – I think I was kind of improvising a lot when I was writing. I was trusting that I had developed my musical vocabulary to be enough that if I just improvise, that will be interesting in some way.
I feel like your ethic towards being a musician is like you are looking for perfection, even when it’s something so simple.
Yeah, I don’t want it to be fabricated. I feel like so much of the entertainment industry is already like that. And I see how I see how this connection between making art and existing as a human can really wreck people and I don’t ever want to go down that path. I’m definitely very lucky to have signed to a good label and it’s so shocking to me that people come to my shows and I feel super lucky that things are going well. But I never want to compromise it feeling real for success. Because success is so rare, I think people will do anything to survive because it’s so hard to make money doing music now. Think it’s easy for many people to make a lot of compromises. And you do have to make compromises, everyone does. It’s because of the democratization of the music industry with the Internet and with SoundCloud. The listenership is also very spread out, so the financial resources are very spread out. It’s not as cut and dry, like you signed to a label, now you don’t have to worry about money anymore. It’s not like that. It’s so, so very complicated.
…because I am such a student of music, I seriously view every show as a learning opportunity. Even if it’s really subtle.
Read the full feature in Issue 8 available to pre-order here or pickup a copy in person this Thursday, August 8th, at our zine release party at The Broadway! Tix here