Cashavelly's journey is a tapestry of transformation. Beginning as a ballet prodigy, her path twisted through the tutelage of legendary dancers, a debilitating spinal injury, and a reawakening into the world of music and writing.
After an encounter with the iconic novelist Kurt Vonnegut, she realized her artistic path was too serious to take entirely seriously, yet it propelled her onto an unexpected path that birthed her into a visionary maverick.
Her early albums, The Kingdom Belongs to a Child (2015) and Hunger (2018), stood out in a crowded field, earning awards and accolades, for their haunting melodies, evocative lyrics, and dissent of America’s habit for hypocrisy and exploitation. But it was in her next album and award-winning feature film Metamorphosis (2021) where she would confront the world with questions that to answer would upend our way of life.
Meditation through Gunfire is that answer. The album is a mix of the emotional rollercoaster of Fleetwood Mac, the punk poetry of Patti Smith, and the heart, swagger, and universality of powerful pop queens like Tori Amos and Fiona Apple. It’s also a bold philosophical salvo of an equally loving and emphatic revolutionary, who is unable to do things by halves.
Each song is a node in a vast web of ideas, challenging listeners to confront their complicity, their pain, and the potential—which creates the responsibility—for a cathartic and ongoing inner and outer reckoning. From the stark and compassionate self-interrogation of "More than God" to the anthemic survivor’s strut of "The Queen," she challenges listeners to confront their foundational fears and shake their psychological shackles. "The Fire" explores the erotic and spiritual as a synesthetic swirl of inseparable forces, while "Royal Blue" and "Sacred Color" confront the fractal indignities society fires at women. The title track reveals how the shrapnel from these attacks diminishes everything it touches, including the earth itself.
It’s all made irresistible by the wise, fiery candor of Cashavelly’s voice and the bittersweet, often devastating melodies of her songs. Her sound is soulful, seasoned, tender, and slyly galvanizing—qualities that hold together a remarkably diverse selection of songs. Songs like "Be My Echo" and "Your Clue" highlight her lyrical prowess, while "Lucky Duck" and "Oyster" showcase her ability to blend highs and lows, as well as vulnerability and defiance.
Her creative process is as rigorous as it is reverent and playful. Cashavelly journals daily, weaving her raw thoughts into lyrics that reverberate into the nuanced actions of a leader. She gathers women locally and globally through her initiative, The Cashavelly Collective, where she empowers women to explore their inner inflammatory insights, amplify their voices, and trust in their innate miracle-working. For her, a new world in which women leaders thrive in equal measure has already begun.
Cashavelly arrives not a moment too soon, and she’s made for it. She makes pop music for inciting a movement, and she means every minute of it. Join the soul-rending singalongs of salacious transformation on this timely and timeless record.
—Emerson Dameron