Anger and exuberance combine in the North Carolina artist’s fourth album, which is one of the first album to be released by UNCSA Media.
by David Menconi
Nearly three decades ago, the artist Cashavelly was a teenage dancer studying with the renowned ballerina Melissa Hayden at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. After she turned 21, a serious injury put her in a back brace and bed for a long recovery. She spent her convalescence writing, which brought on some realizations about what she wanted to do.
“I actually did recover and could’ve kept dancing,” she says now at age 43. “But the thing is, I was always dissatisfied with staying silent. I wanted to do something where I speak my mind, and dance was not fulfilling that.”
That led her to acting and eventually music, adopting her grandmother’s maiden name as performance moniker (her birth name is Melissa Bickey). She started out as an Americana-leaning singer/songwriter, teaming up with her husband and guitarist, Ryan MacLeod, as collaborator on three albums. Then she moved in poppier, more elaborately conceptual directions.
Female-driven pop and latter-day feminism reach full flowering on Cashavelly’s fourth album, Meditation Through Gunfire, with a cover showing her holding a hawk like a newborn baby. A straight-up pop gauntlet to patriarchy, it’s a record that should resonate with the throngs going to Taylor Swift’s Eras shows and quoting speeches from Barbie.
There’s a lot of anger in the lyrics, but also exuberance. “Prom” rolls along like a girl-power drumline pep-rally chant about turning love into hate, while “Lucky Duck” seems like the sort of poison-pen letter to an ex that almost everyone has mentally composed without sending.
You’re a coward and a liar and deserve to die
I could let my rage burn me alive
But I can’t even hurt a fly
My heart is pure love…
You, lucky duck, you.
That’s quite a dispatch from the war between the sexes. (But for anybody wondering, the target is not Cashavelly’s husband MacLeod, who works as a couples therapist when not making music.)
“There’s a lot of journey with my husband on this record,” Cashavelly says. “Also a lot of horrible men from the past, which he is not. But it’s been healing for him, too, admitting shame experiences about only being allowed to feel certain emotions. Women are so armored-up from all the things they’ve been hurt by. But patriarchy hurts men, too, whether they realize it or not.”
Cashavelly grew up in West Virginia listening to tapes her older brother would make for her, mostly alternative-leaning ’80s and ’90s-era pop. What registered most strongly were female artists like Fiona Apple and Tori Amos, whose melding of sacred and sexual themes remains a touchstone. The Meditation Through Gunfire track “Part of Me Already A Ghost” declares, “There is no difference between God and making love to me.”
Folk music emerged as another influence while Cashavelly was in college and graduate school. Listening to old folk songs and murder ballads while writing short stories set in Appalachia a century ago stirred some thoughts about equality between sexes, races and social classes. Once a bandmate suggested she start listening to Taylor Swift’s stadium-sized pop, the template for Meditation Through Gunfire was complete.
This is Cashavelly’s first album with an outside producer, David Wimbish from the indie-pop band The Collection, who also provided most of the instrumentation. While MacLeod played guitar on a few tracks, he had a lesser role than on past albums. That left him mostly in the unfamiliar role of observer.
“When it comes to the songs that she writes, she’s on the journey and doesn’t need much from me,” says MacLeod. “We’ll have long conversations about social issues, women’s roles, masculinity and our terrible definitions of it, relational things, and she’ll bounce lyrics off me. She’s got such vision and is very dedicated. I’m really proud of her.”
The album is one of the first to be released by UNCSA Media, the custom label run by UNC School of the Arts, where Cashavelly teaches writing. They’re rolling out videos of each song, many featuring her dancing, in a multimedia package that’s along the lines of Cashavelly’s 2021 LP Metamorphosis, which had an accompanying film that played the festival circuit.
While Meditation Through Gunfire feels very much of this cultural moment, Cashavelly feels like it’s necessary to add her viewpoint.
“I think this is really needed now — I’m breaking stereotypes, too, as a 43-year-old trying to be a pop star,” she says. “I’m showing all these facets of myself where I’m girly and serious and sexual, trying to expand what’s allowed. I want to show that worth does not decrease with age. We become more powerful, not less.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of WALTER magazine
