Bunny White explores an elaborate fantasy of dying

The artist formerly known as Ms. White, or Marina to her friends, feels like she has finally arrived with her recently released debut album, The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God. It might have taken a long time to hammer out in the studio but it’s been in her mind forever. “It was sort of obvious to me,” she tells me via video call, explaining how she based the Bunny White aesthetic on old photos of her family and houses she grew up in, full of antique furniture.

Inspired by Americana-tilted movie directors like Robert Altman and David Lynch, the eerie country-pop of Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee, and Ethel Cain, current queen of deep American lore, the Bunny White character is exaggerated and primped. Going thrifting for the outfits she wears in the visualisers for each song, she remembers thinking “I don’t need to write any of this down. I know what I’m doing.”

"Bunny White is when I get to play dress-up and do my thing," she says. "It's a similar idea to Ethel Cain; Hayden is to Ethel as Marina is to Bunny. There's a separate persona, but they're all interlinked."

“It’s almost drag, but it’s very serious,” she continues. “It’s a very real thing to me. It’s a playful thing, an inner child almost, allowing myself to play with these things I would feel otherwise embarrassed to do outside of the context of my music. I get to use the music as a vehicle to explore the women or various archetypes I want to try on.”

Those archetypes reach their peak on recent single "Lions in the Theater", which oozes alt. country cool. Encouraged by a friend in the studio to really go for it, White's breathy croon fills the space like smoke as the song evolves into a larger, more dramatic argument, her voice reaching an all-consuming apex. In the visualiser, a sleepy jaguar print-clad White winks and lounges on a chair as close-ups frame her red nails and hair. In a landscape of anonymous, highly-tuned and flattened pop, “Lions in the Theater” is a wake-up call. This, you think as the final notes play, is someone.

Much like the genres it tips its beehive to – country, soul, disco, electro-pop, R&B – the women of The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God, are incredibly diverse and immediately recognisable. There’s the hypochondriac checking her friends’ locations on “The Game”, the stagnant, anxious midlife crisis victim on “Culdesac”, the resigned depressive on “Wasted Years” who imagines all the ways she could die, and the grieving daughter pleading for one last trip to the beach with her mum on “Jolly Rogers.” “Every song had its own character and vibe,” she confirms, which is why she committed herself to filming a visualiser for each one, trotting around a suburb, or filming old-timey diners.

Perhaps what’s most impressive about White's reinvention is that she was able to create such a fully realised, fully self-funded, and self-written record with a vision so tight that its DIY origins are almost totally obscured.

White wrote all the songs on piano then taught herself to produce via YouTube, redoing the songs 15 or 20 times as her skills increased. She and others played the saxophone, flute, drums, cello, keyboard, and pedal steel, blending analogue, digital, and emulated instruments for an anachronistic feel. Kenny Gilmore (Weyes Blood, Sudan Archives) mixed the record after his creative spin on a demo track intrigued White. “I was playing around with what I could get away with,” she says. “I don’t have a lot of stuff in my studio. It was like, 'How analogue can I get, how warm can I make this sound, with the things I have at my disposal?'”

Naturally, the vision took its time to unfold, with six years elapsing since the Ms. White EP, Marina, but she never doubted her new direction was the right one. "I knew I had to make this," she says. "I knew I had to give myself this process, this album, and to do it the right way. I feel like it’s time. Frankly, it’s overstayed its welcome a little bit.”

Creating the album was a way to memorialise her mother, who passed away just before her 48th birthday, when White was only eight, as well as to work through her immediate fears of dying young. “I had this realisation when I was 24, like, what if my life is half-over? Am I happy with the way I was living my life? I want to do this album, because I know I have it in me. I want to give it everything I got.”

White is careful not to sound too “out there” she says, but she had an “extremely spiritual experience” while making the album. There were times she sat at the piano, writing a song that felt outside of her. Most of the songs date back to 2018, but only really started coming to life years later, as White was going through older photos and coming to terms with herself. “I was a very neurotic person for a long time, and it was affecting my relationships," she says. "Eventually I realised it was all along, this grief I hadn’t processed."

"Going from Point A to Point B, that’s the trajectory of the album," she continues. "The first songs are all frenetic, neurotic. It allowed me to become the version of myself that had processed it by doing it. I don’t really know what came first, but it was like a feedback loop – writing then grieving, and then another song would come out of that, so I went back and forth. I think the subconscious is such an important part of making art and it guided me where I needed to go.”

Unsurprisingly, the main theme is death. She opens the record singing “I think I’ll die before I ever fall in love” on country crooner “Wasted Years”, fitting for a dusty jukebox, while “Wife Before the Accident” imagines what she’d say to God at the pearly gates, describing a fleeting moment on the hood of a friend’s car.

“Every woman I’ve ever wanted to be / They keep dying on me,” she sings, not just about her mother but Amy Winehouse, too – someone she'd looked up to and a portrait of womanhood that had entranced her as a child. “Ironically, I wrote that lyric before SOPHIE died, but she was another one. Like, are you kidding me? Why do these people keep slipping through my fingers? I must be next!”

In writing and developing the songs, White says she was able to parse out why she was so afraid of dying, and where that was coming from. "It was almost like exposure therapy,” she says. “There’s nothing that can solve OCD. You’ll never get the answer or certainty you want. I may die young, there’s no way of knowing. To sit in the uncertainty, the best way was for me to create this elaborate fantasy around dying. I got it out of my system.”

My favourite song on the record, the timeless “Jolly Rogers”, investigates the absence of her mother most affectingly, with two show-stopping questions: “Where are you now? And is God really gracious?” When I ask White if she’s any close to figuring out the answers, she’s definitive on the first one.

“I lived my whole life thinking I had dealt with the grief, because I was so young when it happened,” she says. “There was this energy I was carrying around with me, and I didn’t know what to do with it or where to put it. Through making this record I feel like I was incorporating her back in my life. I feel like she’s with me all the time. I have some of her stuff in my house, photos of her, I buy outfits she might’ve worn. I don’t feel like I’m looking for her anymore, I know exactly where she is. Is God really gracious? I hope so.”

In our emails leading up to our conversation, White mentioned something in passing that I wanted to hear more about — the double-sided knife of being a trans artist. It can help you get publicity, sure, but in the past, she felt that it had overshadowed any real conversation about her music, wondering if her fans were just, as she puts it, "yas queen-ing" her. She mentions 2016 as a turning point, where identity markers like ‘queer’ or ‘trans’ supplanted artistic quality among well-intentioned liberals.

“I feel like I have been in community with a lot of people where that’s their biggest selling point, and I think it’s doing everybody a disservice by insinuating that being queer always means you are being thoughtful at what you’re doing,” she says.

White didn’t bill herself as a trans musician for this album cycle on purpose. “I have actually had a very easy time as a trans woman in the context of history,” she says, acknowledging that every trans person grows up in a different way. “I don’t think [being trans] has had the same effect on me as a different trans person making art,” she adds, saying that she didn’t want to take the spotlight from a perhaps more marginalised artist.

But there’s a professional angle, too. “I am first and foremost a musician," she says. "I am a very serious musician. I happen to be trans, and it does of course inform what I make and the music that I like and the things that I do. But I was cheapening myself so often by being, ‘Interview me because I’m trans!’ Then I get my foot in the door and it becomes only about that. You’re not talking about the art, you’re talking about the identity. And sometimes those things do intersect in a way that makes sense, but a lot of the time, they don’t.”

I didn’t want to chat with Bunny White because she is transgender, but because The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God is a marvellous, often stunning record – an intensely healing portrait of grief and nostalgia that has clearly taken its author a great deal of time and care. “I’ve always believed in showing and not telling,” she says, summing up. “I didn’t spend thousands of hours making ‘transgender music.’ I spent thousands of hours making music.”