Two Sasamis exist in harmony. First is Sasami Ashworth, the conservatory-trained classical French horn player, producer, and composer—an artist with a studious approach to craft. And then there is all-caps SASAMI, the fearless performer and protagonist of her three increasingly audacious albums. For Blood On the Silver Screen, these two sides fused for her most epic and realized music to date: the all-out Sasami pop record. “This album is all about learning and respecting the craft of pop songwriting, about relenting to illogical passion, obsession, and guiltless pleasure,” Sasami says. “It’s about leaning into the chaos of romance and sweeping devotion—romanticism to the point of self-destruction.”
After establishing herself with the poised melancholia of her eponymous 2019 debut, Sasami embraced volume and control on 2022’s Squeeze—touring with a metal band—but her goal on Blood On the Silver Screen was to speak her truth with conviction by singing. Working with co-producers Jenn Decilveo and Rostam, with Sasami as sole writer, each Blood On the Silver Screen track viscerally captures a different thread of love, sex, power, and embodiment. “Pop music is like fuel,” Sasami says. “It’s just invigorating.”
She came to that fact while training to tour Squeeze—shows that required her to run around with her Mockingbird guitar, mosh, leap off amps—at the gym. Sasami found herself fascinated by the high-octane music that sustains physical activity. “The gym became this place where I would exercise and be studying the music,” Sasami says. Eschewing today’s pop zeitgeist, Sasami gravitated towards late aughts and 2010s pop a la Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, plus Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, and Sia. She was influenced by modern country storytelling, mixing vulnerability with humor, and the mood board also included Prince, Japanese city pop, and the stadium-sized, denim-clad iconography of Bruce Springsteen.
“I’m such a Cancer,” Sasami sings in the first lines of the wistfully optimistic opener, “Slugger,” which name checks Dolly Parton, Chopin, and Steve Lacy. Though Sasami’s background is in classical music and production, she doubled down on Blood On the Silver Screen’s lyrics: “I wanted to be more playful and communicate more with pop culture,” she says. “I’m a classically trained musician, but when I listen to music, I think about how I feel, how I want to feel, how I want to move to it. And that’s what’s special about music—how it connects to culture, how it connects to different styles of music, how it connects to the timbre of the voice of the person singing it.”
Across Blood On the Silver Screen, Sasami’s lyrics narrate the ecstasies and agonies of being “a modern lover,” she says—writing about “big city dating endeavors” even as she found herself relocating, on a whim, from Los Angeles to rural Northern California. The anthemic “For the Weekend” explores “modern intimacy, where you can get deep without the relationship being defined,” while the irrepressible “Just Be Friends” bottles the dizzying longing that can overtake those in-betweens. The sinister “Nothing But a Sad Face” is about “celebrating Eve as a sex icon” after she’s “banished from the Garden of Eden for fucking a snake. She’s leaning on the Gates of Eden smoking a cigarette reflecting, well, it’s worth being banished to get laid. Eve’s empowering herself, but she can hear the angels singing in the distance, too, and it’s kind of heartbreaking—that combination of feeling empowered and living your truth, but also having grief for what you have to give up for that.”
An intense period of touring Squeeze included dates with Haim, Mitski, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Before traveling as Haim’s opener, Sasami was actually rehearsing to play in the sisters’ touring band; having known Haim since high school, Sasami calls their “elevated pop music” a definite inspiration to Blood On the Silver Screen. The pandemic disrupted the plan to join their ensemble, but through those rehearsals, Sasami met Rostam (at the time, Haim’s music director), who she worked with on two songs for Blood On the Silver Screen: the grungy closing ballad “The Seed” and the stirringly arpeggiated “In Love With a Memory,” featuring Clairo. A duet in which “one character longs for the past, another wants to move forward,” “In Love With a Memory” drew inspiration from traditional Japanese pop ballads. “Rostam and I both studied composition, so he wanted to bring out more of my classical side,” Sasami says.
Another crucial collaborator was director Andrew Thomas Huang (Björk, FKA Twigs), with whom Sasami began conceptualizing the new record’s visual world before the music was even recorded. “I like there to be a union between the visual and musical world,” she says, care that shines through the corporeal video for “Honeycrash.” The song is a panorama of longing: Sasami’s widest-screen rendering of the processes of love in all its devastation and expansiveness. A stadium-sized ballad that swells with cinematic grandeur, this is Sasami as an auteur of heartache, mixing the epic sweep of a romantic era opera with sci-fi action to say, “This is how I feel, I’m going to let you figure it out. But don’t give up on us.” It’s another moment where she drew on her classical roots: “I still long for those expansions and contractions, swells and whimpers. For me, the oscillating feeling is, ‘Okay, I’m somatically grounding and self-soothing—and then all of a sudden I’m completely devastated.’”
Now in her early 30s, Sasami didn’t grow up listening to much pop music, and even felt pressures to avoid it. “I was always a weirdo outsider and I didn’t feel like pop music spoke to me,” she said. “Being a woman of color, I’ve always felt this pressure or need to make something that’s mysterious or innovative, and always shied away from lightheartedness.” But she also sees Blood On the Silver Screen’s embrace of pleasure as a kind of personal reclamation. Raised in Los Angeles in the “conservative religious cult” of the Unification Church, her senses of herself and her sexuality were skewed. “My relationship to love and sex was so tied into these repressive, super restrictive definitions,” she says. The album is an extension of her process of coming into herself as part of a generation unbeholden to conventions around love, sex, or the nuclear family. “This album for me is about having deep, meaningful relationships within a new definition of what is good, what is right, and what is powerful,” she says. “We are still passionate beings.”
“I wanted to go all out with this album,” Sasami continues. “I wanted to, in my tenderness and emotionality, have the bravery to undertake something as epic as making a pop record about love. I hope it makes people feel empowered and embodied, too. It’s important to not box yourself in.”
As Sasami says, the album’s final words apply as much to love as to one’s own instincts:
Dark is the night when we’re losing track
But trust is the light that will bring us back
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