There is a moment on the ninth track of Jasmine Cruikshank’s debut album, “You Are The Morning“, where you can hear the indie rock singer-songwriter gently dissolve into tears. The song is called “New Shoes”, and, along with the rest of the album, it was produced by Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker—the three members of queer supergroup boygenius.
Cruikshank, framed on Zoom by a curtain of vibrant hair—one half hot pink, the other half electric blue—reveals that when she broke down towards the tail-end of recording the track, “Everyone came in and held me, and we left the audio in. It perfectly represented that atmosphere of mutual care.” At the time, going through a painful divorce, her marriage having ended after coming out to her then-spouse as a trans woman, Cruikshank and her music were luckily in safe hands.
Under the stage name jasmine.4.t, Cruikshank was the first artist from the United Kingdom to be signed to indie folk powerhouse Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, which is also home to such names as indie pop three-piece Muna and chamber pop-rock band Sloppy Jane.
When asked to describe the experience of working so closely with the Grammy Award-winning artists, she says, laughing incredulously, “Wild. I still can’t believe that that happened. It’s so disconnected from anything I’ve ever done before.” She paints a picture of the recording process. “We were recording in Sound City, which is where Phoebe recorded her last album, “Punisher.”
It is also where legends such as Johnny Cash, Fleetwood Mac, and Neil Young, among countless others, have recorded – big boots to fill. “So we were using the same vocal tuning that she used. She really knew her way around. She was very keen on trying to get the perfect song, the perfect sound before hitting record.” It seems that Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker all brought different talents to the studio. “Phoebe just has an incredible ear for harmonies. She was doing a lot of the direction on vocal harmonies throughout the record,” Cruikshank explains.
“And Lucy and I go way back, so she had a lot more confidence to edit me, I think. Cutting a word from a line here and there to make the meaning more concise. Lucy has a really good knack for that. Julien has this incredible brain for guitar tones, which I think is one of the things that really holds the record together. It was amazing to have an authority on that.”
The Fat Angel Sings 