JASMINE.4.T: WORKING WITH BOYGENIUS WAS “WILD”
The Manchester-based artist sat down with VOCAL GIRLS to discuss live shows, chosen family, and the recording of her debut album, You Are The Morning.
Jasmine Cruickshank, styled as jasmine.4.t, is the UK’s first signee to Saddest Factory Records, the boutique label founded by indie darling Phoebe Bridgers in 2020. Getting the stamp of approval from one of her proclaimed heroes, however, has clearly not gone to Jasmine’s head; “I don’t really consider myself a performer,” she shrugs. “I’m a guitarist and a songwriter – I just go on stage and do that in front of people, and they don’t seem to mind!”
Two weeks before our Zoom chat, jasmine headlined The Waiting Room in East London. The crowd assembled in the basement had already set the tone before the show, when SOPHIE’s ‘Immaterial’ bounced over the speakers and someone let out a scream of excitement. To say they ‘didn’t seem to mind’ Jasmine’s subsequent arrival is to comically undersell the point. “It was difficult to contain my joy onstage,” she beams now, nodding. “It was so lovely having all those people singing along and smiling back at me – a very wholesome energy.”
In September jasmine was back in the capital – just ten minutes down the road, in fact – to open for labelmate Katie Gavin at The Old Church. The audience there was just as enraptured, singing the words they did know and hanging onto every one they didn’t. A clear favourite was ‘Skin On Skin’, the single she put out in July as her Saddest Factory debut.
Photo credit - Matt Grubb
A tender ode to queer love, the track was produced by Phoebe alongside Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker – the other two-thirds of boygenius, (the greatest supergroup since McBusted, probably) who stormed to mainstream notoriety last summer with their three-time Grammy-winning album the record. Their success helped raise the profile of LGBTQ+ voices in music; championed shirts and ties as the height of stylishness; and arguably laid some of the groundwork for 2024’s so-called sapphic renaissance.
Tracing the origins of her relationship with the band, Jasmine explains it was a “really sound” promoter in Bristol who first set the dominoes falling, putting Jasmine forward to open for Lucy on the latter’s debut album tour in 2016. The pair immediately clicked over pre-show pizza, prompting Lucy to insist they do it again some time.
“I thought that was a pipe dream, and that she was just being nice,” Jasmine grins. Happily, it turned out, she wasn’t: When the time came for Lucy to tour her follow-up record, Historian, she personally invited Jasmine to open for her – and drive the van – across Europe. After the tour, Jasmine flew out to visit Lucy on the East Coast a few times, yet, despite a now firmly-established friendship with one of Phoebe’s bandmates, the ever self-effacing Jasmine hadn’t planned on sending her demos to Saddest Factory until another friend suggested it.
“It was wild,” Jasmine gushes, recalling the first call she had with Phoebe to discuss getting signed. “She was complimenting every single song I’d sent her – in depth – for about half an hour! This was someone I’d been following very closely for a really long time, and I’m just obsessed with [her] music, so to have that from Phoebe Bridgers?” She grins: “I still haven’t got over that.”
Once signed, Jasmine flew to Los Angeles with her bandmates (guitarist Emily, drummer Eden, and Phoenix on keys and strings) to record their first album, You Are The Morning, with “the boys” (i.e. boygenius). Walking into a recording studio with “the most important musicians of our time,” as Jasmine describes them, was surreal – but the album was daunting in more ways than one.
Photo credit - Matt Grubb
You Are The Morning traverses joy, love and intimacy – as with ‘Skin On Skin’ – but there are also some far darker memories weaved into it. ‘New Shoes’ (a reimagining of ‘Shoes’, a track on Jasmine’s Worn Through EP) started life as a song about beginning a relationship and starting a family with her ex-partner, prior to their marriage ending. In its new image, the track is about leaving them – but, as Jasmine tells me, arriving at a better place doesn’t mean it can’t still hurt.
“There’s a shot on the inner sleeve [of the record] of me and Eden just lying on the floor, holding hands and crying while Phoenix plays her piano part [for ‘New Shoes’]. Phoebe took that photo,” she remembers. “I broke down in the vocal booth at the end of that song and all of the girls came through and just held me. To be there, and to be held by my chosen family – and then also by boygenius! – was such an important, healing moment for me, and now that’s what I think about when I sing that song.”
All three members of boygenius are equally well-versed in setting vulnerable moments to music – particularly Julien, of whose writing Jasmine’s is possibly the most reminiscent. Both revolve around their guitars, delivering quietly devastating lyrics laden with catharsis. “I’m such a huge fan of Julien’s,” Jasmine says, remembering the “oof” moment they’d experienced when they first saw her live at End of the Road Festival in 2018. “This was when I was deep in the closet!” they laugh. “That really stayed with me.”
Her show at The Waiting Room had its own ‘oof’ moment, too, in the form of set closer and album finale ‘Woman’. A heartbreaking soliloquy about her first coming out experience, this was the song that travelled home with me on the Overground train, disarming in its vulnerability and difficult to put down. “It is a painful one,” Jasmine nods, explaining that, like a lot of her songs, it was first written as an emotional, stream-of-consciousness outpouring into their voice memo app. “But I know at the same time that it’s so hopeful, because I’m in such a better place now with my transition and all the people in my life, my chosen family.” She smiles. “I feel so loved and respected by everyone.”
Having that tight-knit support system around her feels now more important than ever; that her platform is primed to grow is something she admits to feeling apprehensive about - particularly as a trans woman. “But I also think it’s really important for me to be out there as a role model and to advocate for [trans] rights,” she counters. “To raise awareness of how oppressed we are, and how much we’re dying – that’s super important to me.”
In Manchester, where they live, they’re involved in meet-up groups and mutual aid projects, raising money for housing grants and gender affirming resources. At her shows she talks about politics on stage, as well as selling bracelets handmade by her friend Yulia. Her music reflects this ethos: ‘You Are The Morning’, the album’s title track, is ostensibly about queer friendship but also, as she explains on stage, about how much people can do to change the world around them. “It’s very intertwined, my activism and releasing music,” she says. “Everything is part of the job, I think.”
Jasmine’s shows feel like community meet-ups in their own right; most of the crowd at The Waiting Room stayed on afterwards to admire and buy Yulia’s bracelets, chatting both with the band and each other. At The Old Church people thronged around the merch stand between sets, one person enthusiastically explaining that they’ve followed Jasmine since she opened for boygenius in Kingston last summer.
Audiences like this seem just as integral to Jasmine’s musical project as the songs themselves - confessions whispered into her phone, they rely on friends and empathetic ears to listen, understand, and bring them to life through moments of connection. On this evidence, they achieve exactly that - and despite Jasmine’s bashfulness, it’s an experience you really do want to see for yourself.
You Are The Morning is out 17th January 2025 via Saddest Factory Records.
