Call Me Marina: Ms. White Drops a Transformative EP

Arts

Nov 25

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After a rediscovery of the self, both personally and musically, Ms. White has walked back onstage and into the studio with an assuredness of a musician newly in control of her persona and production. For any artist, this is difficult to execute. For female artists, this is even more difficult to accomplish. For a trans artist, it can seem insurmountable.

That’s why Ms. White’s deterrence from her more mainstream pop personality on Jade to her authentic jazz and genre bending self on Marina is an accomplishment beyond what is expected from the traditional evolution of an artist. And not all artists truly evolve throughout their careers. The trepidation being that they’ll lose fans, lose money, and lose hope for the future.

Ms. White was prepared for this, however: “by the end of it, [my producer] Theo [Shier] and I were definitely prepared to lose some people. This record is a bit more out there, sonically and lyrically and definitely as far as the genre is concerned. I don’t know what this means necessarily in a broader sense, but this was my way of priming everyone for the future of Ms. White. Less glitz, more substance.”

And that substance doesn’t just sneak through, it breaks the door down. In songs like “Arizona” -- which aims to shed light on the various ways in which trans women are mistreated by partners who would rather hide them away than show them off -- Ms. White ruminates on a specific romance that could never take off in the shadows. But the track isn’t a despondent confession, it’s a defiant opposition accompanied only by a piano.

“I know your tastebuds / are so fucking ordinary / but you got to / get used to / this different tasting cherry / ‘cause I got you with wide eyes / and I’ll make sure that I catch the light.” Ms. White’s voice is at times playful, sardonic, and at all times powerful. With a simple final thought, she encompasses not only this specific trans experience, but something that every queer person -- hell, every person -- has probably grappled with when it comes to unrequited love: “sometimes I think it would’ve been me.”

There’s a clear theme of a reckoning with identity throughout the album. Not only because Marina is titled after the artist’s name, which was adopted when transitioning and meant to be an ode to her fisherman father, but because Ms. White never got to do it on Jade. An EP full of pop hits that could be wistfully played at the gay club, Jade didn’t exactly introduce Marina to the public in the way Marina aims to.

“I almost would view Marina as a mixtape or compilation -- it’s not exactly cohesive in that it isn’t telling one story, but the songs all came from the same place inside me. I am always writing music, so ‘Marina’ is what I wrote during some seismic life changes. My goal with ‘Marina’ was to give you scenes, fragments of my imagination, to paint a broader picture.”

Ms. White does offer these lush scenes in stripped down songs like “Old Man Charlie” which begins with lyrics reminiscing on the singer as a very young child looking up at her father, eventually moving into quite emotional territory in the chorus: “old man charlie / you could be my best friend / with love / but I’ve gone and fucked that up.” There’s an overwhelming honesty the listener gets here, on the singer’s grappling with her identity and at the same time trying to please in both the private and public sectors of her life.

It’s clear that Ms. White is moving into a period in her career that some artists never truly get to -- when they can produce music that moves the listener, entices them, thrills them, and still feels genuine, still tells a story that is deeper than what we expected. These are the moments in which we truly connect.

After struggling with the reception and composition of Jade, Ms. White took a couple years to get Marina right, and to move in the direction she knew she had to for herself as an artist: “Though I love that people are actually listening, I am far more concerned with pushing the boundaries of what my music, and music more generally, can be. As long as I release something that’s authentic and better than the last one (to me) I’m happy, regardless of reception.”

The final song on the EP, “Candy Heart” is another velvety track that highlights the singer’s range and a coming to terms with who Marina really is and can be. Ms. White doesn’t want much, she just wants to be able to keep doing what she loves: “I just want this one thing / let me fucking sing.”

Marina was released November 8th via Flat Pop Records. Her EP release will be at Baby's All Right in Brooklyn on December 2nd. Stream the short film that accompanies Marina here.

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Dakota is a poet, journalist, and right in the damn center of the Kinsey scale. Follow her on Twitter: @Likethestates.

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