jasmine.4.t’s album, You Are The Morning, is so much more than a debut album and our Record of the Week. Behind the record is a story that includes getting ripped off by a promoter in Bristol, a happenstance booking, journeying through self-actualization, being embraced by Boygenius and making a historic recording in one of the United States’ most famous studios.
Beginnings
jasmine.4.t started making music when she was just four years old. Her uncle passed away and left her an old guitar. Inspired, she bought a chord book and started playing. “I learned a lot of Elvis,” she tells me from her apartment in Manchester, England, where she currently lives.
Early on she started performing and recording in her parents’ computer room. By high school she was covering some of her favorite artists. There were bumps along the journey. As a teenager she recorded an album of Daniel Johnston covers and her local café agreed to sell it at the counter. They sold quickly. Pleased, she asked for some of the proceeds. They offered a couple of vegan cupcakes, instead. “They sucked,” she lamented.
She continued and started forming bands that played around Bristol, her hometown. One of her first bands was a punk outfit that only covered songs from the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 video game.
Being ripped off by a promoter in Bristol and opening for Lucy Dacus
Her first serious band was a garage rock two-piece called Human Bones. They made a name for themselves in Bristol and were booked to open a show for Sunflower Bean at a venue called The Louisiana. Before the gig they went over payment with the man who booked it and, after previously promising payment, he said that they would not be paid. The local promotor found out about this and, feeling bad, promised to put them on some good shows to make up for it. One of the shows that he got for her was opening solo for Lucy Dacus on the “No Burden” tour. “I was thrilled, that album changed my life,” said the artist. When the show filly came to be, Jasmine had pizza with Lucy Dacus before the show. “We just got on so well.” The two became fast friends.
After the tour Dacus said, “I will invite you on tour the next time I’m around.” Jasmine didn’t expect much to come of it. A year later Dacus sent Jasmine a life-altering text saying that she just got authorization to invite her on tour for the “Historian” tour in 2018. The shows were a massive step in solidifying her as an artist. Then Covid happened and her life really changed.
Coming out
Until this point, Jasmine was not out as a trans woman, and that was burdening her. She got long Covid, which was destructive to her body and relationship. Everything came to a head on December 24, 2020. “The weight of my gender dysphoria really hit. That morning the postee delivered a parcel to me and said that I was a ‘lucky man.'” She broke down crying. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I need to come out. I need to transition.’” That evening she told her spouse that she wasn’t a man, going into the conversation with so much optimism. “Sadly, the conversation didn’t go well at all.” Her marriage ended shortly after that. Her family didn’t react well. She ended up on her friend’s floor in Bristol with nowhere else to stay. This was chronicled in her song, “Best Friend’s House.”
“It was a terrible time. I was trying to access healthcare and HRT, which is so so difficult to do.” It’s a pathologized process. “To get a diagnosis of your gender. No cis person has to do that and it was very dehumanizing,” she said. Jasmine was the victim of several violent hate crimes around that time. The song “Highfield” details the events and her feelings going though them. Those experiences led her to have PTSD, where she was experiencing hallucinations, dissociations and delusions.
“I thought I had killed myself, facedown in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. I thought that I was dead and living some kind of horrible afterlife,” she describes. Those experiences are what she sings about in “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation.” She says that unfortunately, it’s an experience that many trans women will relate to. “If you haven’t been through that, no matter how much you want to understand it, it will be difficult to really relate to. That leads to a lot of friction between trans women and the rest of society, when our needs aren’t met.”
Getting signed to Phoebe Bridgers Record Label, Saddest Factory
“Lucy Dacus was like the third person I came out to as trans,” Jasmine said. The two had sent each other demos throughout the years. She sent Dacus the demo for “Skin on Skin” and Dacus replied with the chilly emoji and said, “This is a hot song,” and then said, “I would love to produce you one day.” Again, Jasmine didn’t expect anything.
After making the demo for “Guy Fawkes Tesco Disassociation” she sent it to friend and producer Joe Sharron, who loved it and said that she should ask Dacus to see if her boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers would release it on her label, Saddest Factory Records. “Worth a bloody punt,” he told her. So she did. And then waited.
“Then one day, out of the blue, I got the second life-changing text from Lucy.” Dacus said that she just played Bridgers Jasmine’s demos in the car. She was raving about them and was on the phone with her manager talking about signing Jasmine. “It was such a dream come true for me.”
Historic recording of You Are The Morning at Sound City
Jasmine signed with Saddest Factory and flew to the United Stated to record the album with the boygenius crew and the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles in Sound City Studio in L.A., where Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, Elton John and countless other culture-shifting records were made. “Filling that space with trans people really felt like an incredible moment in history. We all felt the weight of it. I remember watching the chorus sing and I turned around to Lucy and she had tears in her eyes.” This exact moment is captured at the end of the track “New Shoes.”
Coincidentally, Japanese Breakfast was recording their new, soon-to-be-released album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), in the studio next door. Jasmine went into the studio and saw a fretless banjo. The engineer offered for her to borrow it and that is the banjo heard in the song “Gay Fawkes Tesco Dissociation.” Phoebe Bridgers said, “That banjo has got to go.” It’s a line Jasmine kept in, along with many other studio bits that would normally be edited out of the record. Jasmine felt that capturing the energy in that space was important for the record and kept so many wonderful and surprising studio moments in the album.
Reflecting
“Everything has come so quickly. It has all felt like a dream,” said Jasmine. “I was in such a dark place then and this has been such an incredible and healing journey for me. I was in a really unstable place following my divorce then a period of homelessness. Since then I have formed this incredible band of trans women here in Manchester. We all flew out to L.A. to record with the three members of boygenius to make this record, which is about queer hope, it turned out. We didn’t mean to make it about that, but that’s how it turned out. And then to be here telling this story about queer hope, my trajectory through life…it’s something.”