Sasha Alex Sloan: "Hearing Pink sing a track I was part of was a really amazing moment for me"

One of the opening lines from Sasha Alex Sloan's compelling new pandemic album I Blame The World is "I'm scared of success 'cause I'm scared I'll want more." The down-to-earth Massachusetts singer-songwriter has raked in a slew of fans for her cutting honesty and addictive, vulnerable indie-pop jams and ballads. Speaking to the 27-year-old from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, it's easy to see why. S

oft-spoken, hilariously nihilistic ("I'm a glass half-empty kind of girl," she sings on the title track), always self-deprecating and almost too modest, she speaks to fans, journalists and strangers on the street unassumingly - like they're her equal.

I Blame The World came two years after her acclaimed debut, Only Child, and continues her path down diaristic, confessional route with added vigour, thanks to a pandemic you might have heard about. While unfortunately her Dublin show on October 11th couldn’t go ahead due to illness, Sasha Alex Sloan’s eager to return in the future. Don’t worry, she still got a pint out of her tour’s stop on Irish shores ahead of hitting the UK. We forgot to ask whether it was Guinness, but let's assume it was.

“I’m not leaving Nashville for a little bit because I’ve travelled a lot this year,” Sasha tells me. “It’s nice to be here right now, and it’s a big day today with the Midterms. It’s definitely a stressful time, as always in the United States for the past couple of years. I voted yesterday.”

Had she visited Ireland before her ‘I Blame The World’ Tour?

“I’ve actually been a couple of times as a kid slash preteen,” the musician recalls, warmly. “I wasn’t able to drink until my last trip there, unfortunately! We still stopped in Dublin because of our routing in the van. We stayed there and I got to see a little bit of it, even though I wasn’t feeling too good. We had a pint and explored, so at least I can say I was there again. Going to Europe is always cool, so it was definitely exciting. Touring and being places isn’t really being there, because you’re just in the venue all day. I love travelling in general, but touring is a different beast.”

Sloan hadn’t been able to hit the road for a headlining tour since 2019 until July, when she headed out with Jessie Murph and Slimdan before I Blame The World solo dates.

“I definitely get homesick,” Sasha admits, smiling. “I feel like I messed up and fell in love, and I’m always missing a special someone and my dogs whenever I leave. It’s honestly the dogs that really get me, I’m not going to lie!” she deadpans. “It’s a bittersweet thing.”

Sloan’s start in the industry wasn’t always easy. Having initially studied at the prestigious Berklee School of Music in her hometown of Boston when she was 18, Sasha secured a publishing deal and relocated to Los Angeles at just 19. Writing tunes for household names and respected creatives, Sloan worked in a coffee shop by day before her debut EP, Sad Girl, was released by RCA in April 2018. It was followed by her Loser EP that November and third EP Self-Portrait the next year.

The build up to her acclaimed debut album Only Child was literally years in the making, but secured her a dedicated fanbase for the hustle. Did May’s sophomore outing I Blame The World garner her new fans or simply retain, and nurture, her loyal Day Ones?

“It’s hard to tell. Man, that’s a great question,” she laughs brightly before pausing to think. “I feel like I definitely picked up more fans with this new record but in the age of TikTok, I think a lot of them were already there and just showed up, and supported the new record rather than gaining a tonne of new people. I would say that a lot of them have travelled with me from the Only Child phase to I Blame The World, and I’m very grateful for them.”

One track from her latest opus, ‘New Normal’, at first presumably references the phrase repeated throughout the Covid lockdowns. However, the stunningly intimate ballad instead paints a vivid picture of life post-break up.

“Wake up alone in an empty bed / It's quiet in the livin' room / Go for a drive like we always did / In the middle of the afternoon / Havin' a drink at our favourite place / Like we always used to do / This is my new normal without you.”

Both long players were influenced by isolation, loneliness and shifts in Sloan’s love life.

“Only Child was also kind of a pandemic record because it came out in 2020 and all that craziness started when I was like halfway through writing my first album,” the singer-songwriter posits. “I feel like all the life I lived during my first two albums was so specific and small. It definitely changed the music. I just didn’t know what else to write about because that’s all I was feeling, was trapped and sad and depressed about the state of everything. That’s what it is,” Sasha laughs, always the first to poke fun at herself.

The ‘House With No Mirrors’ artist retains a deep connection with her fans, drawn to her brutal honesty and infectious melodies that allow humour to bleed through the melancholy.

“I feel like I could go and get a beer with my favourite artists, and I feel like I have that relationship with fans,” she replies, nodding. “I was saying earlier that my fanbase is not massive, and there’s something that feels like a community when it’s not huge. Everyone just feels like a friend, and I feel like their friend. Every time I’ve met a fan and heard their story, it never feels like oversharing. On some level, I can sympathise or empathise with them. Even at meet and greets, everyone is just so freaking nice. They’re always respectful. It’s a very sweet, sensitive group of people. As corny as that sounds, they feel like friends.”

Lyrics like “It finally hurts being hungover/ But it’s still not worse than being sober” and “No one ever told me growing up gets kind of lonely” bottle the humour and heart of existing as a young person right now in equal measure, with song titles like ‘Global Warming’, ‘Adult’ and ‘Live Laugh Love’ also embodying eco anxiety and online culture.

“A lot of the big responses I was getting this time around on tour were from a song called ‘House With No Mirrors’. But from the new album, a lot of fans really connected with ‘New Normal’, which is a down-tempo track off that record. A lot of the more lyrically-driven, emotional ones are always up there, like ‘Older’ and ‘Dancing With Your Ghost’.”

Viscerally raw album track ‘I h8 Myself’ was re-written six times before it was forged to its current iteration. “There’s nothin’ you can do to make me hate me more than I hate myself,” Sloan declares, lamenting her “vampire”-toned skin and feeling like you have to wear a sweater at the beach. Yet again, Sasha expertly shines a spotlight on universal insecurities.

“I have a soft spot for that song because I remember coming up with the title and thinking it would be really funny if I could nail this,” she grins. “It was really hard to get the tone right. The chords needed to be what they are now. I wrote it a couple of times where it just sounded so depressing, but it needed to have a little wink behind it. I think we got there, but that song for me is like my version of ‘Shake It Off’ by Taylor Swift. Self-deprecation is my favourite form of anything, so I think that song is really important to me because it feels like my personality in a nutshell.”

In her time in the business, Sloan has written for the likes of Idina Menzel, Maggie Lindemann and Camila Cabello, but her favourite achievement relates to another pop icon.

“I wrote a song for Pink and that was pretty freaking cool,” Sasha smiles, recalling the track ‘Happy’ from the Grammy winning artist’s 2019 album Hurts 2B Human. “My mom and I have been her biggest fans since day one. She’s such a badass, she speaks her mind, she’s an incredible performer; Pink just does it all. She seems like someone, as I said earlier, who I could get a beer with and be a good hang. Hearing her voice since something I was part of was a really amazing moment for me.

"It wasn’t like a huge song, it wasn’t a single, but it didn’t matter because it was like, ‘Whoa, this is something I never thought would happen in my lifetime’. That’s probably my favourite song I’ve written for someone else. It’s not a cheerful song, shockingly, even though it’s called ‘Happy’,” she laughs, shaking her head.

“I’m really bad at celebrating when things like that happen. After being in music for so long, I got scared to make a big deal out of anything. We’re getting deep into my psyche now! I was definitely excited, but there’s part of you that goes, ‘Well, professionally, no one’s going to be excited about this unless it starts making money or it’s a chart topper’. I’m trying to get better at being cheerful about things whether or not they’re financially fruitful.”

Having been embedded in the industry for years, does Sasha feel confidence that improvements have been made for young female artists like herself?
“I think I’ve been relatively shielded from a lot of stuff that artists go through because I’ve never had a giant moment where there were a lot of eyes on me,” Sloan says, introspectively. “My label probably won’t be happy about that but I’m grateful for it. I’m so sensitive; I don’t have thick skin.

"That could be super bad for my mental health, but I feel like I’ve been doing it for long enough that I could handle it. I’m going to be 28 next year and I’ve been around for a while, and people have said some really mean things to me, but I feel bad for artists who just turned 18 and they don’t really know who they are yet. There’s eyes on them, and people saying vicious, nasty stuff about their character and music.

“As an industry, it’s gotten better. I think artist development isn’t where it used to be, unfortunately," Sasha tacks on. "It’s expensive to develop someone, and now there’s TikTok, where you can have a song be huge overnight. It’s gotten better and worse simultaneously, I will say.”

Living in one of the US capitals of music must provide Sasha with an insane network of artist contacts, not to mention the relationships forged as a result of her knack for songwriting.

“I’ve met a lot of people that I really looked up to, but the one that I would still really want to meet is Brandi Carlile,” the down-to-earth singer says, confessionally. “We have a lot of mutual friends, especially now that I live in Nashville. I know a lot of people who have worked with her and know her really well. She’s so sacred to me. Her, Norah Jones, Regina Spektor - that era was so big in my eyes. I almost don’t want to meet her at the same time! I know she’s an amazing person, but I want to keep her almost as a pretend presence.”

Brandi Carlile.

Spending her summers as a child on farms in Siberia, where her grandparents on her father’s side reside, Sasha’s own family were part of the reason for her success. After she went viral with a post about her parents trolling her by painting ‘DORK’ outside her bedroom, the musician found herself writing for Charli XCX and Katy Perry.

“I would say my parents are more into it than I was!” she laughs. “My dad’s from Sibera, so he was like, ‘There’s no way you’re doing this, you need to become a lawyer or doctor’ but then once he saw my grades, he gave up on that pretty quickly, thank God. My mom was the one who encouraged me the most. She has been my biggest supporter since day one, not in a stage mom way. I never believed in myself, but she always told me to keep going. She did my college applications for me, because I didn’t think I would go, and taught me to use GarageBand. They’re more supportive of me than I am, which is good to have that energy.”

Does she ever return to the coffee shop she worked in at age 19 when she moved to Los Angeles to write soft-pop vignettes full of cynicism, sarcasm and empathy?

“When I’m in LA sometimes, I can’t help but drive by. I worked at a gym in West Hollywood that I pass when I’m there as well. It’s kind of surreal, honestly. It feels like it was so long ago even though it wasn’t. Whenever I’m having a bad day and feeling down about my career, I just look at the gym I used to work at and go, ‘You know what? You’ve come farther than you thought you would’. I’m not carting dirty towels down Melrose Avenue anymore, so things are good.”

I Blame The World is out now.