The Outsider Wins: Adrienne Ash of Plasma Canvas Talks Punk and 'KillerMajestic'

Calling Plasma Canvas a Punk band is clear and concise, but other hyphenated combination music genre terms might soon turn into a long list. Their sound is still evolving, but more than that, it's still willfully exploring musical options, and that exploration might become a permanent fixture.

Adrienne Rae Ash and Jude McCarron have been working together for a couple of years now as Plasma Canvas, with Ash on vocals and guitar and McCarron on drums, but the recently released KillerMajestic is their first EP with SideOneDummy, a label Ash has aspired to for some time. It is an EP with very good bones, each song spinning out in a variety of sonic directions, but the title track is the duo's "statement of intent", and as Ash says below, the song declares: “We’re loud. We’re queer. And we’re not apologizing for any of that shit.” There is a lot more to learn about Plasma Canvas, though, as you'll hear in songs like "Saturn" that inspire a kind of quiet resolve to value oneself.

Adrienne Ash joined Tower's PULSE! for an interview about the new EP, the band's "Saturn" video, musical tastes, and more about what makes Plasma Canvas go boom.

Hannah Means-Shannon: It seems like you and Jude are at a very interesting point right now, because there’s a lot of momentum building for this record. I know that you had quite a cool tour planned that isn’t happening at the moment, but I thought I’d ask you about a gig that you have enjoyed in the past.

I heard somewhere that there was a New Year’s Eve bash that was a lot of fun.

Adrienne Ash: Oh, yeah. We were supposed to go on tour with Less Than Jake and Lagwagon, then the world fell apart, but it’ll happen at some point. We did actually get to play with Against Me! on New Year’s Eve at Summit in Denver.

That was a real cool moment for me because I read Laura Jane Grace’s article in Rolling Stone and that was one of the things that got the gears in my mind moving about whether or not I could be a trans person. It was really cool to just be able to share the stage with someone that was so influential to me. It was a neat full circle moment for me and for the band, too.

HMS: That’s amazing. Were there other bands that night, too?

AA: Well, it was us, and after we played, Sincere Engineer played, and that’s one of our favorite bands.

HMS: That sounds like such an awesome night.

AA: That was a really cool night too because I got to meet Deanna Belos from Sincere Engineer and other people from that band. The whole night just had this wholesome vibe to it because it was New Year’s Eve and everyone was feeling whimsical and sentimental about the end of the year. I’m glad that that night got to happen before everything went to shit, you know?

HMS: Yeah, I totally hear you on that. It’s good to have some heartwarming memories to hold onto right now. Someday things will be good again, I promise.

AA: We’re all hoping for it. This is just a big pause button. As long as we can keep things together, we’ll be ok. We just need to try not to spread around a lethal virus.

HMS: Have you all been doing anything like performing online or taking part in shows? Or are you just focusing on surviving?

AA: It’s a weird time for everyone and everyone is going to react in their own way. We’ve been offered the opportunity to do a couple of acoustic or living room performances, and stuff like that. Part of me feels like I want to play some kind of music for people that love the band, but the other thing is that I don’t want to play a show until we can do what we do in the way that we do it, if that makes sense.

HMS: That makes total sense. You have, I think, a brand and aspects of style and having to change those radically based on circumstances would not necessarily make sense.

But I forgot, what you have been doing, is releasing awesome videos! I have been so impressed by them. Those have been doing the rounds and reaching fans.

I’ve seen two of them, “Saturn” and “KillerMajestic”. It was great timing to release those, since it gives people something to look at and think about. “Saturn” was one of the coolest videos I’ve seen in a long time. I want to congratulate you all on that. It has this time lapse artwork.

What’s the story about how that video came to be done in that way?

AA:  What happened was, I wrote the song, recorded it, and the folks SideOneDummy reached out to a mutual friend, Alfonso Vargas, who plays in a band called Lighterburns. And we played Warped Tour in 2018 so we got to know them. It was really neat, because we found out that Alfonso was doing the artwork for “Saturn” and I didn’t even know he did that kind of stuff. I just sent him the lyrics and he did his thing with it. I only gave a few small creative ideas to SideOneDummy to give to Alfonso and he created something really cool with it. 

He does video visualizers, where it’s not necessarily a lyric video, but it kind of follows the narrative of what the song is about. And I was really impressed with how that came together, since we didn’t really have much control over that. Fortunately, he was able to throw together something really cool and special. I actually think that’s my new favorite video of ours.

HMS: It’s definitely got something special about it. Sometimes things just work out. Clearly, he really got a handle on the way to express the song, and his artwork is beautiful.

I was asking myself why I liked that video so much, and I guess it just felt normal to me for there to be a handmade, DIY art aspect to a Punk music video.

AA: Oh, yes, totally.

HMS: The use of the brown paper bags felt so down to earth, too.

AA: Yes, I really loved that. I think Jude and I are going to try to get ahold of him to see if we can buy some of the art. I really loved the “skull-truck”.

HMS: That was awesome!

AA: The whole hand-drawn aspect. He did it all himself, and edited it together himself, as far as I know. He made it feel so organic, and we can see it all, start to finish. It feels like we’re in the drawing with these weird little demon characters. I love the way it turned out.

HMS: I think the song has a really positive vibe to it, even though it’s a very real and honest song. To me it seemed encouraging, about building yourself back up, holding on, trying to get to a better place. I feel like we need that right now!

AA: It’s a very big coincidence that it dropped right as all this was going on. In general, it’s a message that universally applies. You can always improve upon where you’re at. But one more thing about the video—Jude and I have the same favorite part of the video, where the heart says all the OOOOs, flying around on all the Os. I think that’s really neat.

The song itself does have a really positive vibe because that’s where I was trying to be. I had just gone through a breakup and there was a really weird, complicated situation, where the relationship had been dissolved for a long time, but we were both really stubborn about it. Finally, severing those ties, moving into a new place, and starting a new job, helped keep me facing the future rather than sinking into my sadness.

It was a song I wrote when I was going through a hard time but also optimistic about where it would go. That’s something I try to remember on shitty days: there are also good days. Even when it feels like there are never ever going to be any good days, you might wake up tomorrow with the right combination of happy chemicals in your brain to let you get out of bed.

HMS: [Laughter] Yeah. That’s so true.

AA: Well, I have bipolar disorder, so days like today, I had some coffee, I made some pasta for my partner and I, listened to The Gaslight Anthem, and danced around my kitchen. But the other day, I couldn’t get out of bed at all.

But the whole EP is five songs that sound very different from each other, and that’s an intentional move.

HMS: I was going to ask about that. The different sounds show quite a range, and I think it’s showcasing everything you all are capable of right now. You show the range that’s possible when you combine Punk with other elements. It sounds like some of the songs had a longer life than others. I heard that “KillerMajestic” has a long history.

AA: Yes, it does. It was the first song written for Plasma Canvas and I was using a whole different guitar rig. Back then, I didn’t know what I was doing or what I wanted to do, so it was my off-band, counterfeit Les Paul, through a big muff, through a bass amp. Just this loud, disgusting guitar sound. So I wrote “KillerMajestic” with that guitar set up. I just knew that whatever I did needed to be loud, and crazy, and weird, and beautiful, and awesome, and sad. [Laughs] I was feeling a lot, and that song came out of a whole lot of emotions mixed together.

HMS: Is that what made it the right song to the be title track on the EP and the first song on it?

AA: Yes. The original title of the song was “Plasma Canvas”.

HMS: OH. That’s so cool.

AA: Yeah, and I really liked that as a band name. The band name sort of means a bunch of vulnerable material. And it was like making a painting out of all my blood and guts for everyone to look at and judge. That’s where the band name came from. At the time, the name evolved over time for the song, since originally, it was “The Killer, Majestic”. At the time it was supposed to be ‘what happens when the bad guy wins’, or ‘the villain glorified’, though that sounds a bit cheesy now.

I just wanted to start the record off with, “And things didn’t go your way.” I put it at the front of our very first record, since if you could get past that, then you earned the rest of it.

HMS: [Laughs]

AA: I kinda wanted it to begin on a very adversarial note, because that’s kinda how I feel, walking through the world as a transgender woman. I’m still pretty outgoing, and I’m nice to everyone I meet, but that’s definitely driven some misanthropy deep within me. Being terrified of most people all the time now.

HMS: Especially now. Well, it’s just my opinion, but I think that things have gotten worse in the past few years rather than better, which is the wrong direction to be heading.

AA: I sort of agree and I sort of disagree. I think what it is, is that the more tolerance and acceptance is shown for trans and queer people, the more backlash has shown up, too.

HMS: True. Sure.

AA: That’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we’re getting recognized as real people, we’re getting rights, and people don’t ask a million invasive questions anymore, but at the same time, the more people know about you, the more people that disagree with your “lifestyle” come out of the woodwork.

Originally, the song was, “The outsider of your society is the one who wins.” And that is me. But it turned into “KillerMajestic” over time because I think it came to showcase the vibe of what the band really is: “Here we are. Boom. Deal with it.” “We’re loud. We’re queer. And we’re not apologizing for any of that shit.” It’s a song that we open most of our shows with. It’s like, “If you haven’t heard us before, you’re going to know what we are by the end of this song.” It’s a good kick-down-the-door moment for us.

HMS: It’s definitely very weighty, and very loud, and very riveting. I love the fact that you want to start the album in an adversarial way. Because that’s probably the opposite of what a corporate PR person would tell you to do with your music.

AA: To be honest with you, that’s sort of true. That’s kind of what happened. We put out “Firecracker” recently, and that song has done really well. It’s our highest on Spotify. But I didn’t want to introduce us to the world as a Skate-Punk band. Or a Pop-Punk band. I wanted to introduce us to the world as the loudest, grossest sounding, queerest, gayest, transest, fuck-you-iest band in the world. And I wanted that to be the foot we got off on.

And then I wanted to have the room after that to explore my identity, and say, “But we also write love songs, songs about getting through hard times, and suicidal ideations, and ennui, and feeling stuck.” I wanted to start off with, “We’re loud and we’re queer, and we’re proud of who we are.”, but that also doesn’t define who we are as people or as a band. Like we’re not a “trans band”. We’re just a band.

HMS: Yes. I get that. I think that really all of the songs on the EP are such that if you took one of those songs, you could do a whole album in the style of one of them, and people would’ve assumed that you were THAT band, with THAT sound. But they are each different enough that you kind of mess with peoples’ heads in that way because they aren’t going to be able to put you in one category, as a whole. They’ll have to look and see what you do next. I think that’s great.

Also, you’re a relatively young band. I know you’ve been going for a while, but this is your first bigger release. You have a lot of possibilities for your sound and your identity.

You don’t want to just pick one direction.

AA: Thank you. Yes, that was sort of the point. It’s been a pretty big tenet of our philosophy as a band. We like so many different kinds of music. Some bands are like, “We’re this sort of band. We’re that sort of band.” And that’s okay. It’s their right to do that. But I don’t want to be pigeon-holed anymore.

Whenever we put out “KillerMajestic”, it was “Sludge-Rock band from Colorado”. And then we put out “Firecracker” after that and they were, “Skate-Punk, Pop-Punk, Surf-Punk band from Colorado”. It’s entertaining to me to see these words fly around. To me, I make Rock ‘n Roll.

To rewind a little bit, when I was 19, I played in a band called Eric Moeller & The Strummalongs (Now referred to as Eric Moeller and the All-In Band). I played rhythm guitar and backup vocals, and I learned a lot about what to do, what not to do. Because it was the first band I played with where I made real connections.

There was a band that we played with called Continental. And Continental is made up of Rick and Stephen Barton. Rick used to play in the Dropkick Murphys. He was their guitar player for the first four records.

HMS: Oh, wow.

AA: Continental and the Strumalongs played together, so I got to talk to Rick a few times. Getting to know he and his son, and people like that, who really just thought that Punk was more of an idea than a sound, really had a big impact on me.

My mom showed me Metallica and Sammy Hagar around the same time. I found Sum 41, and Smashmouth, and the music that was coming out around the early 2000s on my own. But I never really shut anything out, since was always really into Classic Rock, like The Guess Who. And Glam Rock. I really love Slade. I’m not saying, “I’m not like other girls,” or something like that, but that’s just not something I hear a lot of my peers talking about.

I want to feel free to do whatever I want to do. And if I want to throw in a Glam part, or a Rock part, or even a Rockabilly thing, I’m going to do that. But I think the other thing is that I try to write what I know, so trying to balance between not saying no to ideas, but also, I don’t want to be like Ween.

HMS: [Laughs]

AA: I don’t want to have extended jam sessions. I just want to be able to do different things without being told, “Oh, you’re a Metal band. Or a Punk band. Or a Thrash band.” Or whatever.

HMS: You’re not alone in this. It’s been coming up a lot when I’ve been talking to musicians. I think the past ten years have really been about breaking free from some of those categories. I think people are feeling rebellious about terminology.

AA: One band I’d like to plug because I think that everyone should listen to is Jeff Rosenstock. Because he does that all over the place. I only discovered who he was a couple of years ago, but he’s a big influence on me in this regard. He has a lot of influences and does whatever he wants. There’s a record he put out a few years ago, one SideOneDummy, where there’s a Hardcore song, and a Ska song, and a couple of Indy Rock songs. A lot of experimentation.

But I think it’s become a lot more common knowledge that Punk isn’t necessarily a sound. You’ve got people who will tell you that defining Punk isn’t Punk, which I also kind of agree with in a weird way. But the whole thing is: these genres and these labels have their place. They really do. I don’t want to go to a jam band concert. That’s not my vibe. So I’m glad that we have genre words. But I think what is wrong with that is that people get very hung up on genres and argue about genres. And I think that’s where the problem is. People take them a little bit too seriously.

HMS: Especially on the internet.

AA: Yes, especially on the internet. You can’t please anyone on the internet.

HMS: I can see the usefulness is that people need to know what they are spending their money on. And they get upset if they are spending their money, and think it’s on one thing, and it’s actually on another. You wouldn’t want to buy a concert ticket and be totally bored and unhappy or an album that arrives and isn’t what you thought. You make a good point.

AA: Oh yeah, imagine thinking you’re buying London Calling and you get Sandinista! It’s like that.

HMS: Yeah. You’re having a good influence on me. You’re persuading me of the importance of some of these words.

AA: It’s like in the queer community, too. Why do you need a label? Well, labels help people find communities. Labels help people categorize things and experiences. I think genres are helpful in that way, too. I want to know what Stoner Rock is. If a band calls themselves that, I might enjoy it. I don’t necessarily want to go to a drum & bass or EDM show, so I’m glad there are genre words for that. I think whenever people start tearing each other’s throats out about it, that’s the issue!

Stay tuned for the second part of our interview with Adrienne Ash of Plasma Canvas!