Sasha Sloan (real name: Alexandra Artourovna Yatchenko) is a YouTube singer-songwriter. In February of this year, she made her first debut on national television on The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert. Although she's only been an officially recognized artist for several months, I believe she's achieved quite a lot to be considered a pro-C in the musical domain.
BEGINNINGS
Sasha Sloan was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up teaching herself to play the piano that her mother had bought for her when she was 5. When she reached the age of 19, Sloan moved to LA to pursue a songwriting career. To support herself, she worked at a coffee shop.
Between the years 2015 and 2017, she was featured in and credited for several songs. She continued writing songs for Idina Menzel, Camila Cabello, Charli XCX, and many others.
In 2018, she released her debut EP and an additional EP: Sad Girl and Loser.
This year, she released her first album, Self-Portrait. If you ask me, she's quite a hardworking singer-songwriter.
PROCESS
In a Q&A session, Sloan talks about her feelings on pop songs:
"I would feel uncomfortable putting out songs that were pop and happy, because that's not who I am as I write... when I write for some reason, I just get really emotional, so it feels natural to me."
In addition, she talks about how spontaneous her musical process is:
"I think I've been writing for so long that it's easy to take my hat off and just be myself... But it's weird -- I just kind of know when a song is for me. It's just a feeling; I can't explain it." Therefore, her past experience with writing music has helped her gain the tools for good songwriting as well as helped her discover her own style of music.
Upon being asked the question, "Does your songwriting correlate with where you are at that point in your life?", she responded with, "...most of the songs were written before I had broken up with my boyfriend, so they were kind of foreshadowing. Super weird, I know... But I think sometimes when I'm writing, I don't really know what's going on in my brain, so I'll write something and be like, 'Oh shit, this is how I'm actually feeling'." This shows that instead of having a thorough method for writing songs, Sloan just writes songs based on how she feels at the moment, or what she has actually experienced in the past. For example, one of her songs called "Older" from Self Portrait talks about her, as a kid, hating her parents for always yelling in the house, but then growing up to understand that "loving is hard". With her music on YouTube, she usually comments under the videos about the meaning of her songs so that her listeners can better understand where she got the ideas from. With "Older", she shared that she had cried while writing this song because she wasn't sympathetic for her parents' situation until they had actually split.
ANALYSIS
As I've stated before, I would consider Sasha Sloan to be a pro-C because she has worked with many popular artists before she actually became remarkably recognized by the public.
Another artist I would easily compare her with is Billie Eilish, because they both write songs about things that many people can relate to: depression, divorce or unhappy relationships, death, and many more; this is what I think makes her stand out from typical pop artists (Songs such as "Older", "Dancing with Your Ghost", "Thank God", etc. prove my point.) Both of their songwriting processes are completely spontaneous, but I believe Sloan really moves people just a little more with her songs.
However, I'm not too sure as to whether Sasha Sloan is extrinsically or intrinsically motivated.
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References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasha_Sloan
https://www.onestowatch.com/blog/qa-sasha-sloan-discusses-her-writer-to-artist
This year, she released her first album, Self-Portrait. If you ask me, she's quite a hardworking singer-songwriter.
PROCESS
In a Q&A session, Sloan talks about her feelings on pop songs:
"I would feel uncomfortable putting out songs that were pop and happy, because that's not who I am as I write... when I write for some reason, I just get really emotional, so it feels natural to me."
In addition, she talks about how spontaneous her musical process is:
"I think I've been writing for so long that it's easy to take my hat off and just be myself... But it's weird -- I just kind of know when a song is for me. It's just a feeling; I can't explain it." Therefore, her past experience with writing music has helped her gain the tools for good songwriting as well as helped her discover her own style of music.
Upon being asked the question, "Does your songwriting correlate with where you are at that point in your life?", she responded with, "...most of the songs were written before I had broken up with my boyfriend, so they were kind of foreshadowing. Super weird, I know... But I think sometimes when I'm writing, I don't really know what's going on in my brain, so I'll write something and be like, 'Oh shit, this is how I'm actually feeling'." This shows that instead of having a thorough method for writing songs, Sloan just writes songs based on how she feels at the moment, or what she has actually experienced in the past. For example, one of her songs called "Older" from Self Portrait talks about her, as a kid, hating her parents for always yelling in the house, but then growing up to understand that "loving is hard". With her music on YouTube, she usually comments under the videos about the meaning of her songs so that her listeners can better understand where she got the ideas from. With "Older", she shared that she had cried while writing this song because she wasn't sympathetic for her parents' situation until they had actually split.
ANALYSIS
As I've stated before, I would consider Sasha Sloan to be a pro-C because she has worked with many popular artists before she actually became remarkably recognized by the public.
Another artist I would easily compare her with is Billie Eilish, because they both write songs about things that many people can relate to: depression, divorce or unhappy relationships, death, and many more; this is what I think makes her stand out from typical pop artists (Songs such as "Older", "Dancing with Your Ghost", "Thank God", etc. prove my point.) Both of their songwriting processes are completely spontaneous, but I believe Sloan really moves people just a little more with her songs.
However, I'm not too sure as to whether Sasha Sloan is extrinsically or intrinsically motivated.
----
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasha_Sloan
https://www.onestowatch.com/blog/qa-sasha-sloan-discusses-her-writer-to-artist
Interestingly, her creative process stems from incubating her emotions. Her incubation periods seem lead her to have moments of insight where she spontaneously writes about those emotions. I wonder when she knows a song, that she has written, is for herself. I agree that Sloan is a Pro-C creative, and she will continue to be a Pro-C creative. She will continue to push for her emotionally exposing music to become integrated into today's industry along with other artists.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading this blog post because I have never heard of Sasha Sloan before. I think you did an amazing job capturing her creative process. I really like how the lyrics she writes help her understand how she is feeling about situations in her life. I also think it is really cool that she leaves a description/explanation of her songs for her fans to understand the lyrics because I feel like a lot of people wonder what songs are about and what inspire them. Many people don't get these answers, but Sasha Sloan makes sure to provide them in terms of her own music. I will definitely be checking her music out. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI love Sasha Sloan! Her song "Normal" is one of my favorites. The spontaneous aspect of her creative process is really interesting to me, because I feel like that's definitely the mark of a Pro-C creative, when you can be really confident in the success of your creative product. I feel like the most authentically creative works come naturally — not that creativity doesn't take hard work, but I think that the most comfortable you are in the field, the more confident you can be in what you've created.
ReplyDeleteI've never heard of Sloan before, but now I feel compelled to look her up. I like what you had to say about her creative process in terms of collecting of experiences and her art as an emotional expression of those experiences. I relate that to the early Picasso experiments in which researchers had creatives talk through their process while creating. It's difficult to do so when you don't know what your process is yourself. I'm an artist, I work with graphite/oils, and often people ask me "how did you do that?" or "how do I draw this?" and I always answer "I don't know." Sometimes I put things down on paper that I don't even recognize. You just do it in the moment, and thinking about it can get in the way.
ReplyDeleteI really think good music draws on personal experiences, which seems to be exactly what Sasha Sloan uses as inspiration for her songs. It also seems like her process leads to insight about her own feelings that sometimes were not known to her before she attempted writing about them. She gains clarity about herself while writing music for others to enjoy.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how music could be an outlet for feelings she doesn't fully understand yet. Like she said her songs before her breakup had elements of foreshadowing in them, which probably weren't intentional but came out in the creative process. This just goes to show that there isn't one correct way to interpret songs and art, because the meaning of the art can change even to the creative over time.
ReplyDelete