Meditation through Gunfire was written as if Cashavelly already knew Kamala Harris would be our next president. She calls the bluff on societal narratives that normalize hidden misogyny and that seek to diminish women with age, knowing they find their full power at the moment they’re written off. Her album is a mix of the emotional rollercoaster of Chappell Roan and Fleetwood Mac, the punk poetry of Patti Smith, and the heart, swagger, and universality of powerful pop queens like Weyes Blood, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple. This is an album full of the cleansing fire we’ve been waiting for after the fall of Roe. Cashavelly’s substantive music defies, provokes, and empathizes, convincing all who listen that the rebirth of a new world is here. It is one in which women find immovable strength through self-inquiry, sisterhood, and decentering men. It makes a strong case that accountability is a man’s greatest love and patriarchy his worst enemy.
The album is a passionate yet contemplative journey through all the various forms of “gunfire” Cashavelly has faced as a woman – the forces that seek to diminish, rob, violate, or kill her – and subsequently the “meditation” of focusing inward to find her strength and innate worth. Cashavelly explains, “It’s time to break up with patriarchy. Maybe our world and climate are so out of balance because women’s gifts have been predominantly silenced, ignored, or never even created because she’s too busy sustaining those around her and enabling their dreams. Just like the earth, we use women as an endless resource. It hurts me to think of all the gifts women have wanted to create but couldn’t, that would have been unique medicine for all of us and that we truly need. We are each meant to be fully expressed – it’s a human ecosystem. Women have sacrificed themselves to keep the peace and survive, but we are waking up to how this has made us co-conspirators with our own oppression and destruction. It hurts everyone.”
Her album also benevolently embraces men, seeing them equally victimized by the status quo. The songs rail with truth-telling rants balanced with the most romantic pleas for connection and love. Cashavelly explains, “I think patriarchy infantilizes men, robbing them too. Men grow old to find out that all those external conquests they’ve spent a lifetime chasing actually meant nothing. I think this belief keeps men co-dependent on women and distracted from what it is they long to do. There is so much repression of their passions because it is also unsafe for men to be outside these very limiting definitions of manhood.” In the album, she asks men to risk as much as women do, to remake life and love to reflect universal truths, that vulnerability is strength, and when one person is harmed, we are all harmed.
Cashavelly spends her days doing exactly what she preaches. She gathers women locally and globally through her initiative, The Cashavelly Collective, where she empowers women to explore their inner inflammatory insights, amplify their voices, and trust in their innate miracle-working. She hosts a popular monthly performance series and leads a global collective of women who are creating their dreams. Through this work, Cashavelly has written a comprehensive manifesto to be published in 2025.
Cashavelly arrives not a moment too soon, and she’s made for it. She makes pop music for inciting a movement, and she means every minute of it.
