If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to conduct an interview inside a cosmic portal disguised as the business center of a Hampton Inn in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—well, Sasami’s already beat you to it.
“I’m in the business center of the Hampton Inn of Tuscaloosa University,” she informs me. “It’s like the Sedona of the South… a serious energy field. People from all over the world come here on pilgrimage to receive energy injection.” Whether this is satire or science is never clarified, and that’s pretty much the vibe of the entire conversation.
We’re ostensibly here to talk about Squeeze, her shape-shifting, genre-bending sophomore album, a record so intense and dramatic it might as well come with its own medieval sword and wind machine. But Sasami is not giving up the goods in any traditional way. She’s giving myth. She’s giving metaphor. She’s giving golden grunions and a satchel full of glowing caterpillars.
When asked about her pivot into metal, she doesn’t reference riffs or records. She talks about elemental phases: “I went through all the elements—liquid, gas, metal, earth, fire, water—and that’s the one that attracted me the most. Like a magnet.” She then casually mentions inhabiting a metallic force after emerging from a river, passing through a forest, and encountering a colony of musically gifted caterpillars she then placed on her guitar strings. “Boy did they dance,” she says. “Dance they did.”
It would all sound like a fever dream if the music wasn’t so dead serious. The riffs on Squeeze are seismic, the production brutal and operatic. Yet somehow it’s also filled with softness and humor, as if PJ Harvey took over a Looney Tunes writer’s room during a Mars Volta session.
There’s the darkly romantic “The Greatest,” which includes the line, You drew a line and I lick the paint. “That’s actually from a very dark time in my life,” Sasami says flatly, “when I was addicted to licking paint.” She then launches into an extended memory involving the Sherwin-Williams paint factory, her “gigantic nose,” and emotional synesthesia.
Elsewhere, the record starts with “Skin a Rat,” which seems like a direct shot at something or someone. Sasami blames it on “seals… so slick, so slippery,” followed by a tight-lipped “no comment” for “political reasons.”
Even a casual System of a Down reference sends her off. A cover of “Toxicity” played a key role in her stylistic evolution, she says, describing it like a spiritual transformation: “I shrunk myself very small, went inside the acoustic guitar, and bellowed out my voice as loud as I could… and decided I needed to travel somewhere different. Somewhere metallic.”
Sasami doesn’t answer questions; she performs them. Every metaphor is an odyssey. Every detour is the main road. By the time we try to ground things in something as normal as daylight saving time, she turns it philosophical: “In losing, we gain. And in gaining, we lose. So… we leveled out.”
The truth is, Sasami’s music does what she does in conversation: it disorients, amuses, confounds, and then clobbers you with clarity when you least expect it.
As for the energy field in that Hampton Inn, “You can feel the energy through the phone, can’t you?” she asks.
Yes. Yes you can.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
