There’s More to FLETCHER Than Chaos
Up until this moment, some could distill FLETCHER’s brand into two words: chaotic and queer. She’s not afraid to be messy in her music, and her shows are typically filled with LGBTQ+ fans, specifically lesbians and queer women. Her 2022 single “Becky’s So Hot” exploded on TikTok and Reddit after the singer called out her ex-girlfriend’s new girlfriend by name, associating the 31-year-old pop star with drama. “When I would be on tour, my videographer would go out and ask, “What’s one word to describe FLETCHER?” she says. “‘Chaos’ was the most-used word.”
Now, the singer, whose real name is Cari Fletcher, is embarking on a new era. Yes, she still has a little chaos in her, and yes, she is unapologetically queer; but on her new record Would You Still Love Me If You Really Knew Me?, out today, Fletcher is showing a softer, more tender version of herself. “For a long time, when people would come to a show, I felt like I had to give them this epic experience,” she says. “Meeting the love of their life, getting back together with their ex, having a threesome with new hot people they just met, or getting fucked up. That started to feel like it was at the expense of my own [experience]. I can’t give you that kind of party anymore. I want to have a different kind of party right now.”
The “party” is comprised of 12 introspective and eye-opening tracks where the New Jersey native lets everyone in. Her music has always been autobiographical, but this record has a different kind of rawness. She’s not always singing about relationships; she’s detailing her challenges in the music industry and the evolution of her sexuality. The last track, “Would You Still Love Me?” ends on a spoken word and asks herself and her fans some tough questions: “Would I still love me, even if you don't? / Will I be okay not ever knowing the answer to that?”
These questions feel especially relevant given the lead single, “Boy,” which sparked a firestorm upon its release. Fletcher, who has written love song after love song about women, reveals she smooched a man on the track. In tandem, she also archived some of her former, sapphic posts on Instagram, signaling she was about to release new music. The queer singer’s comment section exploded, especially as the song came right at the beginning of Pride month. Interview magazine even published an op-ed criticizing her and other famous queer women for “coming out” with a male-female relationship and for “self-victimizing.”
Fletcher sees and hears the outrage, but she stands firm in her queer identity and in creating welcoming spaces for her LGBTQ+ fans. On this record, she is undeniably herself. This is her life. She’s on her own journey with her sexuality, as many of us are. “I’m queer ’til the day that I die,” she says. “No matter where I’m at, no matter who I’m kissing, that’s never changing, and I’m so proud of every version of me and all of my magic, all of my chaos, all of my softness.”
Below, Fletcher opens up about the making of her new album, Would You Still Love Me If You Really Knew Me?.
I feel like this is your most personal project yet. Do you agree?I think I do. I think my music, albums, and art have always been really heart on my sleeve. Open a random page of my diary, and if I’m writing it to my myself, I’ve been willing to write it to the world. I think there’s a new layer here, because a lot of my music in the past has been so focused on my relationship to being in relationship.
Love has been my greatest muse. I am a Pisces, have four planets in Pisces, and have mostly water signs in my chart. I feel so much, and I just am such a lover. This is the first record that’s not an album full of love songs. All of it is how I experience myself as an artist, as a public person, and it explores my relationship to so many different facets of who I am.
For that reason, this album feels like the most personal one. I didn’t know that it would be possible for FLETCHER to share an even deeper layer, but this record does that.
I played sports growing up. I would be referred to as “Fletcher,” and so it eventually became my artist’s name. I had so much anxiety growing up as a little kid and really struggled with mental health and OCD, and was navigating a lot of sensitivity that I channeled into music. If I was having a panic attack or nerves before I would get on stage, FLETCHER would just allow me to go out there and be this bad bitch. She embodied these superhero qualities and these quirks that Cari had.
I am FLETCHER—however, [there are] parts of me [that are] softer, tender, vulnerable, or anxious, that I felt like needed protection. FLETCHER would be this embodiment of the toughness that I needed.
This record comes shortly after your last, In Search of the Antidote, which you released in 2024. Why did you write this album so quickly?Last year was just one of the most challenging years of my life. I was on the road for most of the year, and I was processing so much around my mental health, physical health, and my relationship to being on [tour]. This album came from a place of desperation for me to express all of the things that I was feeling and to see myself. Music has always been the medium for me to process really complicated, challenging emotions. When the world isn’t seeing me because I’m not sharing the depth of what I’m going through, music has always been the, “Okay, at least I know I can get this in a song, and if I can get this in a song, then I can decide to share the parts of the story I want to share here.”
This album came from a place of needing to see myself, hold myself, and express what I needed to express. It just poured out of me so quickly. I had a few ideas for what I wanted to say and what I wanted to write when I was at the end of my tour last year, and when I got off the road in the fall and through the beginning of this year it all was just like, “Whew.” On this record, there’s not a single extra song. Everything that I wrote is everything that’s on the album.
I wrote 12 songs, and all 12 are here. This album really explores my complicated relationship with the music industry, with being an artist, and with being a public person. There has been such a level of overthinking that I have experienced over the years, which I think so many artists face. There’s intention with everything, but then it crosses a certain line. You’re overthinking your art. I just was like, “I refuse to do that to myself this time around. I just want to create what it is and not overthink it. Most of the songs on the album are just my demo day-one scratch vocals. There’s an undone-ness and there’s a rawness that I’ve never been able to capture before.
You’ve talked a lot about how hard touring has been for you. Will you tour again?
I think this whole record is really just about me creating space for myself. I love creating music. I love singing. However, it has gotten so woven into becoming a really complicated relationship for me, because it doesn’t feel like it gets to just be about me writing music. It doesn’t feel like it just gets to be about me sharing my songs.
There are so many other layers of the industry, of parasocial fan relationships, of all these different layers that have really complicated it. Somewhere along the line, over the years, I’ve lost my love for creating music. I know I’ll sing for people again, but I just am giving myself a beat to feel the release of this album. I always release a project and then I’m either already on the road when the album comes out or I’m immediately touring it after, and I just wanted this one to be different.
It was a song that I really wanted to come at the front end of my album campaign. I could have hidden it in the context of a larger track list or larger story. I knew if I put that on the album, that would be the only thing people talked about, when in reality, that is only a very, very, very, very small portion of what it is that I have been processing … I was really nervous and really scared about releasing “Boy,” but my entire career all I have ever preached to people was to unapologetically be themselves, express themselves, and share who they are in any given moment.
How have you felt since its release?Oh, girl. I’ve been on such a journey. Such a journey with the internet, such a journey with social media, such a journey with self-trust, such a journey with self-love, such a journey with letting go of this idea of needing the whole world to love me, to accept me. I have some strange trust in the way that everything has unfolded my entire life. So, it’s been beautiful, too. It’s been painful, it’s been confusing, it’s been hard, and I also feel like I’m growing so much.
Thank you. All of my romantic relationships over the last 10 years have been with women, and so it’s what I’ve written my music about. It’s what my stories have been about. I’ve always just written from a place of wanting to capture what I’m going through and what I’m experiencing. My music has been about my life and also my queer experience. This song, “Boy,” is not something that I see outside of that. It’s just another way of [thinking] like, “Wow, what does this mean for my journey? What does this mean for my life? What does this mean for my career?”
If I am writing something, it’s because I needed to hear it, which means that somebody else does too. To have fans reach out and share their own fear with the discovery or the evolution of their own process, it’s been really beautiful for me to connect with other queer people who are navigating their journeys.
I saw fans saying you’ve deleted old content that was more sapphic. I just wanted to give you a chance to clear that up.Every time I’ve released an album, I always sort of clear my Instagram as an indication of new music coming out and a new chapter of my life. So, I did that with this album. It was my 10-year anniversary of releasing music on June 17, so my plan was to bring back 10 years of FLETCHER. I am so proud of all of the women that I have been, every version of me, the entire journey, and there is no erasure of my sapphic identity.
I released a song back in 2022 called “For Cari,” and I think just for a long time, I’ve been wanting for all of the parts of me to be seen. The whole point is for us to evolve, and this album is a permission slip for evolution, whether that’s about a career or a job or a relationship or whatever it is in your life that you need to give yourself the permission to change from, that’s what this record is.
All the comments that I’ve been seeing, and the frustration, anger, hatred, and the outright harassment I’ve been receiving, the criticism, the backlash, the feedback, whatever, all the things you want to call it, everybody is very entitled to their experience, to their feelings, and to their emotion. I see you and you’re valid. Also, I see me, and I’m valid. My experience is valid. There’s no right or wrong here. You are correct for yourself, right? Rock on with your bad self.
[Amid] so much fear and hatred and pain, I believe that it’s possible to live in a world where people can respect each other, see each other’s sides, and have compassion, empathy, and understanding for the very nuanced and complicated journey that all of us are on in life. I do hope for more grace for each other within the community, within the LGBTQ+ community, and also with the world at large.
You seem very calm and centered now. How did you reach that point? I think of “Becky’s So Hot,” which was a wild time, and I’m curious how you’ve weathered all of it.From the minute my career launched, there’s been chaos. I really started to get momentum was when I released my song “Undrunk” in 2019. I was playing shows and doing radio tours, the song was charting on radio, and I was supposed to go on tour with Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi. Then, COVID struck and everything shut down. I was facing so much fear in that time, as we were collectively.
From the beginning, I was really struggling with figuring out how to show up as a person on the internet and share my heart [with] the industry and the music business and the record labels. And then COVID happens, I’m off for a while, and then I come back. I’m playing an insane number of shows through 2022, and my body starts to just shut down on me. I later find out that I was diagnosed with Lyme disease.
There’s just been so much over the course of my career, and then with “Becky’s So Hot” and then all these songs, I felt like my brand really starts to become affiliated with this word “chaos.” There’s so much more to me than the fact that I am chaotic. When I started this, I was 20 years old. I’m now 31. I really just wanted to capture an album, even aesthetically, that puts forward these softer, more tender, more vulnerable parts of me. It’s why I’m standing in a field with flowers and a dress because I’m like, “Bitch, I just need to touch grass and ground and regulate my nervous system.”
I think people’s journeys with their sexuality and with their queerness is their own. For some people, it is fluid and it ebbs and flows and it shifts, and other people, it’s fixed and it never does. I don’t know what six months from now holds for me. I don’t know what a year from now holds for me. I don’t know what 10 years from now holds for me. All I know is that I am a queer woman. I’m a queer person. I will be to the day I die.
Queerness has been such a gift for me to look at everything with such an open heart and open mind. It’s become this lens that I get to view life through, and I bring it into every relationship. Every person in partnership with me experiences this openness and curiosity and this questioning of gender norms and gender roles.
What’s challenging is when [sexuality] becomes connected to someone’s brand. You create this entire world that’s built off people only experiencing you in one way, which brings into question this idea of how we put people up on pedestals, how we relate to their brand, and then marketing these different components. I’ve written music, I’ve had songs that have male pronouns in them, but those have not been the focus of my career, because that’s not been the focus of my life. I’m just honoring my heart. If people don’t fuck with that, that’s cool. I don’t need you to, because that’s just for me.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
elle
