SASAMI Shares New Single 'In Love With A Memory (Feat. CLAIRO)'

SASAMI has released “In Love With A Memory (Feat. Clairo),” the wistful new single from her forthcoming audacious and epic new album, Blood On the Silver Screen. Co-produced with Rostam, the duet with Clairo takes inspiration from traditional Japanese pop ballads. “Rostam and I both studied composition, so he wanted to bring out more of my classical side,” SASAMI says.

“‘In Love With A Memory’ was actually the first song I wrote that ended up on Blood On the Silver Screen,” SASAMI explains. “I grew up going to Japanese or Korean ‘noraebang’ private karaoke rooms with my mom, who was secretly the most incredible singer. Most of her go-to numbers were oooold Japanese and Korean folk songs that low key kind of made me feel like I was in a horror film or David Lynch movie. I can picture my mom in a Julee Cruise-type setting- single, jazz lounge spotlight and cigarette smoke hanging stalely in the air- singing one of those old songs with the most gorgeously haunting vibrato and breathtaking vocal control. That’s the feeling I was tapping into when I started writing ‘In Love With A Memory’, and there is a very timeless but relevant crooning feeling imbued in the song that I think was perfectly reflected by the production that Rostam and I orchestrated together. Claire has been a longtime, long distance friend and dream collaborator for me, so it was such a magnificent gift for her to lend her voice to the narrative. I really imagine this track as a cinematic duet with a ghost.”

Due March 7th on Domino, Blood On the Silver Screen finds the polymath combining her classical conservatory-trained skills as a player, producer, and composer with her fearless and bombastic stage persona to create her most realized music to date: the all-out SASAMI pop record. 

Additionally, SASAMI has also announced a North America tour in support of the album. Her explosive live show is not to be missed. Tickets will be available this Friday, Jan 31st at 10 am local time via sasamiashworth.com. All dates below.

Tour Dates:

3/7 - New York, NY @ Rough Trade *

3/10 - London, UK @ Rough Trade East *

3/12 - Liverpool, UK @ Rough Trade Liverpool *

3/13 - Nottingham, UK @ Rough Trade Nottingham *

4/19 - Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room

4/22 - Phoenix, AZ @ Rebel Lounge

4/23 - Santa Fe, NM @ Launchpad

4/25 - Dallas, TX @ Deep Ellum Art Co

4/26 - Austin, TX @ Psych Fest

4/27 - Houston, TX @ White Oak

4/29 - Nashville, TN @ The Blue Room

4/30 - Atlanta, GA @ The Earl

5/2 - Washington, DC @ The Atlantis

5/3 - Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts

5/5 - Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

5/8 - Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall

5/9 - Montreal, QC @ Le Ritz PDB

5/10 - Toronto, ON @ Great Hall

5/12 - Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall

5/13 - Minneapolis, MN @ Turf Club

5/15 - Denver, CO @ Larimer Lounge

5/17 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Block Party

5/18 - Boise, ID @ Shrine Social Club

5/20 - Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom

5/21 - Seattle, WA @ Neumos

5/22 - Eugene, OR @ Soreng Theatre

5/24 - Napa, CA @ BottleRock

* solo in-store performance

Working with co-producers Jenn Decilveo and Rostam, with SASAMI as sole writer, each Blood On the Silver Screen track viscerally captures a different thread of love, sex, power, and embodiment. “Pop music is like fuel,” Sasami says. “It’s just invigorating.” Eschewing today’s pop zeitgeist, Sasami gravitated towards late aughts and 2010s pop a la Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, plus Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, and Sia. She was influenced by modern country storytelling, mixing vulnerability with humor, and the mood board also included Prince, Japanese city pop, and the stadium-sized, denim-clad iconography of Bruce Springsteen.

Now in her early 30s, Sasami didn’t grow up listening to much pop music, and even felt pressures to avoid it. “I was always a weirdo outsider and I didn’t feel like pop music spoke to me,” she said. “Being a woman of color, I’ve always felt this pressure or need to make something that’s mysterious or innovative, and always shied away from lightheartedness.” But she also sees Blood On the Silver Screen’s embrace of pleasure as a kind of personal reclamation. Raised in Los Angeles in the “conservative religious cult” of the Unification Church, her senses of herself and her sexuality were skewed. “My relationship to love and sex was so tied into these repressive, super restrictive definitions,” she says. The album is an extension of her process of coming into herself as part of a generation unbeholden to conventions around love, sex, or the nuclear family. “This album for me is about having deep, meaningful relationships within a new definition of what is good, what is right, and what is powerful,” she says. “We are still passionate beings.”

“I wanted to go all out with this album,” Sasami continues. “I wanted to, in my tenderness and emotionality, have the bravery to undertake something as epic as making a pop record about love. I hope it makes people feel empowered and embodied, too. It’s important to not box yourself in.”

Photo Credit L-R: Lucas Creighton & Tanner Deutsch

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