"I am the snake and I'm, like, the slutty Eve that fucked the snake," Sasami Ashworth laughs.
She comes by this duality naturally, but never is it more outright than in her self-described "revisionist history" of the Garden of Eden with "Nothing But a Sad Face On" from Blood on the Silver Screen, her new record as SASAMI.
This isn't her first turn as a snake: her own head appeared atop the Japanese water spirit Nure-onna's serpent-like body in the artwork for her last album, 2022's Squeeze.
But this time around, she has recast Eve as — in her words — "this kind of sex icon, as opposed to this wretched character that destroyed the future of humanity."
It's an awfully good analogy for the polarizing twin-flamethrower emotional responses elicited by pop music, which Ashworth has fully immersed herself in with this transition from the explosive nu-metal of Squeeze — not that there aren't still glimmers of those teeth in the distortion-drenched guitar shredding on tracks like "The Seed" and "Honeycrash." Of touring with a full metal backing band, the singer-songwriter reflects, "I was bruised and battered every show, just running around and headbutting my bandmates and screaming into the microphone. I just go very method in every direction I go into."
Inspired by her body craving something that was more nourishing to her voice as an instrument, Ashworth's pop turn has been no different: "I really studied pop music for at least a year or two before even trying to write any of the songs," she explains, likening the experience to learning a new language with the intention of being able to actually communicate with native speakers rather than labouring over grammatically correct writing. "It's not necessarily the most polished pop music, but it's my broken-English version," the classically trained musician adds, saying that she considered anything beyond her first musical language to be a form of cosplay.
Ashworth credits collaborators Rostam and Jennifer Decilveo as her "language tutors," helping her dive even deeper into the vernacular, which she wasn't well-versed in — and even avoided — growing up. "I didn't feel like mainstream music really represented me," she says, having felt resistance to what was popular at the time as a queer woman of colour, and finding herself more aligned with the alt music of Elliot Smith, Yo La Tengo and My Bloody Valentine. "Now that I'm older, I have these nostalgic attachments to a lot of pop music, and I can appreciate it in a different way."
She continues, "For me, the unifying thing about pop — whether it's Pulp or David Bowie or Beyoncé or Rihanna — the thing that makes it pop, I think, is that it makes the listener feel like a main character." It's clear that she was able to get into that mindset, having collaborated with Andrew Thomas Huang, the photographer behind Blood on the Silver Screen's album cover and director of the "Honeycrash" music video, on the LP's visual world before the music was even finished.
"I really think of myself as a composer and almost like a screenwriter of the story that I'm trying to build. Whether people know or understand the lore is kind of irrelevant to me, but it helps me really fully commit to the character I'm trying to bring to life in the process of making the album," Ashworth explains, painting me a picture of the Asian femme protagonist: a wild-haired alien gunslinger clad in Bruce Springsteen's Americana denim, who must face the shapeshifting personified character of love. "The protagonist in every song is the same actor, but in a different film genre. So, as you're going through the album, you're flipping channels and it's like, 'This is an old Western film.' Then the next song is a '90s rom-com, and the next song is a futuristic thriller."
Fittingly, Blood on the Silver Screen sounds like a larger-than-life 4K rendering, and swings with the visceral heft that its title suggests. The Rostam-produced Clairo duet "In Love with a Memory" rolls out like a classic Western in sparkling synthpop, Ashworth's character walking into a ghost town all steely-eyed but full of yearning, resolved to whatever certain death fate has in store.
"I'm such a Cancer," she sings at the top of opening track "Slugger," almost parodying a 2020s pop hit atop chugging, gym playlist-ready percussion. "It felt extremely disrespectful to the genre — or just kind of insincere — to take it too seriously," she tells me. "It felt really punk to just make something that's kind of saccharine and sweet and silly and playful." The irrepressible hook was engineered to be sung into a hairbrush, adding a Dolly Parton reference to its roster, which also includes shoutouts to Steve Lacy and Frédéric Chopin.
"When someone listens to this 50 years from now, there's something about it that's nodding a cap to the time in which it was made," Ashworth remarks. "That's what's cool about pop: it's very colloquial and connected to contemporary culture, and I think that's something I did want to play with," she says, explaining that she had shied away from anchoring her previous work to the present, instead hoping to make something futuristic-sounding or timeless.
But the different eras that Parton, Lacy and Chopin occupy underscores time's elasticity, as "9 to 5," "Gemini," and Nocturnes become equally accessible intertexts. It's a reminder that, throughout all of their evolutions, popular music and culture bring people together: "Music is just a language that humans are using to tell stories and exchange experiences, you know?" Ashworth muses. "I do like to pick up phrases and vocabulary from different genres and kind of include that in my own made-up language."
While she was slinging a lucite Mockingbird on stage and covering System of a Down, a major gig Ashworth snagged was opening for HAIM — pop's prodigal sisters and her own high school classmates. "Touring with HAIM definitely gave me so much data for my pop algorithm understanding," she says, citing the group's penchant for making the visual world of a performance as potent as the sound. "They really invite the audience to kind of be present and go along for the ride."
The seeds of eras to come will be sewn on the road, as one of this generation's leading authorities on the genre pivot brings Blood on the Silver Screen to life on stage with the winking promise of theatricality. Her heady, extensive studies of pop song-form are behind her, and the succeeding act will bring a new level of embodiment to the deeply embodied craft, as she extends an invitation for the audience to participate in the narrative — and geek out with her. "It's definitely a dream to make a record that someone said to be 'nerdy about pop,' because that's literally where I was at when I made it," the artist says.
It feels both futile and irresistible to ask an artist like SASAMI if she has any idea what direction she'll be going in next. She wonders aloud if touring with her French horn for the first time will have her working on a symphony down the road.
"I've been in a Joni acoustic folk kind of world lately — but again, I never really know," she admits.