“It’s not just about love or sex. T4T is also about solidarity and community care”
BY NIC CROSARA, IMAGE BY SHERVIN LAINEZ
There’s a buzz of excitement in the air as hordes of queers line up outside Manchester Academy to see jasmine.4.t (also known as Jasmine Cruickshank) open for boygenius’ Lucy Dacus. This is my first time watching a show where there’s just as much anticipation for the opener as there is for the main event. And it’s well deserved. Jasmine commands the stage and her vocals range from delicate to ferociously raw. Her all-trans band consists of bassist Emily Abbott, pianist Phoenix Rousiamanis and drummer Maeve Westall and it was powerful to see the four women channel trans joy and rage on stage. “That was such a fun show, one of my favourites ever,” Jasmine tells me as we meet via Zoom the week after.
As well as falling even more in love with Jasmine as an artist, my trip up north made me fall in love with the city. I’m interested to find out what made her move from Bristol to Manchester. While the former is now bustling with queerness, Jasmine tells me it “was so much straighter when I lived there. Every time I go back, I’m like ‘this is not the same place’”.
Jasmine decided to change her life when she had long covid during a Christmas lockdown. She had a wake-up moment that made her realise she needed to come out and transition. “I came out to my then-spouse, and it really didn’t go well. My marriage ended really quickly,” she reflects. “I tried to move in with my parents, but their reaction made that untenable. So I came to Manchester, where I had two good friends, Han and Yulia. I was sleeping on Han’s floor and Yulia’s sofa. During that time, I met so many wonderful queer people.” Fans of Jasmine will likely be familiar with Yulia, as the singer-songwriter constantly uses her time onstage to raise awareness of Yulia’s imprisonment following an alleged attack on an Israeli weapons factory.
Jasmine’s life has certainly been transformed since that Christmas. At the start of this year, she released her boygenius-produced debut album You Are The Morning. Throughout our conversation, it’s clear to me how much the singer-songwriter admires and cherishes the platonic relationships in her life, so it’s no surprise that queer friendship is such a big theme in her music.
How did she get where she is today? A huge career moment was when she became the first UK artist to be signed by Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. I have to ask how it felt when she found out. “Bloody incredible. I mean, it’s every lesbian musician’s dream, right?” Jasmine says with warmth in her voice. “I’m a huge, huge Phoebe Bridgers fan. Having Phoebe call me and realising, ‘Oh, my God, she’s actually listened to these a lot’, I was like, ‘What the fuck? Phoebe fucking Bridgers likes my songs!’”
Not only is Jasmine signed by Saddest Factory Records, but all three members of boygenius (Phoebe, Lucy and Julien Baker) feature on different tracks from the album.
Jasmine and Lucy go way back. Jasmine has previously supported Lucy on her first European tour, and it was actually through her friendship with Lucy that she was connected to Phoebe.
And she’s full of praise for Julien. “[She’s] meant a lot to me in terms of my own acceptance of myself as a queer person. Julien is so raw and visible, in an almost spiritual way, onstage. She’s just harnessing the whole universe and it’s all flowing through her,” she gushes. “She’s one of my guitar heroes as well. Having her guitar solos on my record is kind of nuts to me.”
From the release of You Are The Morning to travelling around the world and performing with Lucy, it’s been an undeniably big year for the artist. Unfortunately, it’s occurred simultaneously with the rollback of trans rights here in the UK. The highlight of her year? “Getting 100,000 people at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado to boo the UK Supreme Court. It was so loud, it ruptured my eardrums.”
While it’s powerful for audiences to see Jasmine and her band of all-trans women perform onstage, she doesn’t sugarcoat the realities of touring together in this current climate. “It’s not easy. We get a lot of shit. You kind of get used to it and dissociate your way way through it,” she tells me. “I have been attacked in the past at venues.” This is one of the many moments Jasmine feels the weight of Yulia’s absence, as her friend would always protect her in those situations.
“We’ve had to do self-defence classes and planning around what happens if we get forcibly strip-searched at the border. That’s something that’s very much on our minds. Also, so many trans women get detained in men’s prisons if they get detained at a border.”
While it’s not easy, she has her bandmates with her. “We love each other so much. We’re all autistic and sometimes it feels very much like we’re the only people who understand each other’s needs,” she reflects. “I kind of don’t ever want to tour in any other way from now on. I’ve seen the light and the joy of travelling as a group of autistic dolls.”
I’m curious to find out how Jasmine came up with her stage name. “It was just my Instagram handle,” she explains. She had wanted an all-caps stage name but JASMINE was already taken. “I’m poly and I have several partners. But I have a cis girlfriend and everyone always jokes: ‘Oh no, you’re jasmine.4.c now,” she laughs. “Honestly, for me, it’s not just about love or sex. T4T is also about solidarity and community care.”
During Jasmine’s set in Manchester, she gave us a taste of some of her unreleased songs, which fans can now listen to on the extended version of her debut album.
Jasmine wrote the new songs on the roof because, “I was going through a lot of shit while recording the album”. “Between takes, I would go up to the roof and just sing into my phone, which is how I write songs, and these are sort of edits of those voice memos.”
A particularly emotional song is titled Did U No. It was originally about Jasmine’s first trans love. “Now, for me, it’s just about Yulia,” she reflects. “It was always her favourite song when we were on the road together. She’s who I’m thinking about when I’m singing now.”
You Are The Morning (YBT Deluxe), the extended debut album by jasmine.4.t is out now on Saddest Factory Records.
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