Asi Kemera Talks JETTY, Atlanta and Learning to Care Less

On her new project, Asi Kemera lets instinct lead, finds inspiration close to home and stops worrying so much about what the music is supposed to be.

Ask Asi Kemera who she is right now and the answer is two words.

“Having fun.”

Ask what separates the artist who made JETTY from the version of Asi who started making music and the answer gets even shorter.

“I’ve learned to care less.”

There’s probably no better way into JETTY than that.

The project doesn’t sound like someone trying to prove how carefully every piece fits together. It moves through haze, distortion, softness, desire and heavier textures without stopping to explain itself. Asi’s approach seems less interested in deciding what a song should become than following it until it tells her.

“I never know what I’m making until it’s done,” Asi tells Everyday Jams. “The music tells me what it’s supposed to be.”

That looseness feels like part of the point.

Spiral

The name JETTY comes from Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a coil of rock and earth extending into the landscape.

Asi became fixated on it.

“It’s inspired by this work of land art called the ‘Spiral Jetty’ by Robert Smithson,” she says. “I became obsessed and made a series of songs inspired by how it made me feel.”

Then Asi adds the part that makes the answer feel unmistakably hers:

“I realized the Jetty was sort of a metaphor for the journey. And sex.”

It’s a fitting origin for a project that feels more interested in movement than destination.

The title track came first. Asi says she thinks “JETTY” was the first song she made for the record, and the rest grew around it.

Publicly, the track arrived August 31, produced by Asi alongside Tyran Donaldson II.

Instinct

That process lines up with the way Asi has talked about making music for years.

She tends to start alone. Earlier in her career, she described building initial ideas herself before opening them up to collaborators, and that instinct is still intact.

“I start the production on nearly every song I record, usually alone,” Asi says of JETTY. “Sometimes I finish them myself, sometimes I bring friends in later.”

It gives the album a strange kind of consistency even as the textures change.

“Wilt” and “Set Yourself Free” open the record before the title track arrives. Asi calls those first songs “the bridge between my old and new world.”

Then the record keeps moving.

Titles like “New Sensation,” “Heavenly Lust,” “Countdown,” “White Pony” and “Tulip In The Rain” sound cinematic before you’ve even pressed play, but Asi says she wasn’t sitting around storyboarding them.

“The songs weren’t visually imagined at all while writing them,” she says. “I just read a lot of poetry.”

Somehow that makes more sense.

Atlanta

For an artist whose music can feel slightly removed from reality, Asi’s current inspiration is surprisingly close to home.

“Lately, I’m inspired by my friends,” she says. “Atlanta has been my muse.”

Atlanta has always sat somewhere in Asi’s musical language. Earlier interviews trace her sound across R&B, rock and influences picked up through the city’s cultural mix, while more recent music has pushed into hazier, less easily categorized territory.

JETTY doesn’t feel like an attempt to settle any of that.

If anything, it sounds like Asi becoming more comfortable with not needing to.

The world changes from song to song because her interests do.

So does her life.

“It depends on where I am in life and that fluctuates a lot,” Asi says.

That might be the only explanation the record really needs.

Connection

Asi doesn’t seem particularly interested in deciding how listeners should feel about JETTY either.

“I hope they enjoy it,” she says. “I never anticipate how people will feel when they listen.”

There isn’t a prescribed emotion waiting at the end of the record. No neat takeaway.

But connection still matters.

“It’s great when people tell me that they connected deeply with my music. It’s a wonderful feeling.”

For an album that started with an earthwork, became a metaphor for a journey and sex, and apparently revealed itself to its creator only after it was finished, that openness feels right.

Asi isn’t telling you what JETTY is supposed to mean.

She made it.

Now you get to decide what it does to you.

JETTY‍ ‍is out now. Stream the new project from Asi Kemera wherever you listen.