The Met Cloisters houses some 2,000 works of medieval art—silk tapestries and woodcut illustrations, stained glass from Austrian castles—but for the moment, Ana Roxanne is not in a rush to see them. Instead, we’re on our umpteenth lap around one of the museum’s small gardens, as if we’re circling a thorny existential inquiry. “I hope it’s OK that we’re just walking,” she says softly. Because it snowed a few days before, the glass panes enclosing the garden are frosty; rows of potted plants line our path, lending warmth to the space. Tentatively, I ask her why she gravitates towards towering concepts in her quiet, methodical music. She hesitates at first, her voice trailing off as she tries to articulate her thoughts. “We’re so small—our lives are just a fraction of a second,” she says. “I think about this when writing, maybe there are depths within ourselves that we won’t ever know in our lifetimes.”
Deeply perceptive and unpretentious, the 34-year-old musician is the type of stranger that Humans of New York would salivate over. She is dressed casually today, in a navy windbreaker, tiny backpack, pink scrunchie, and Doc Martens scouted from eBay. And while she can be wry and low-key, tossing around opinions on Shania Twain or The Sopranos, her observations typically feel like the product of prolonged thought. Roxanne likes to store away passages from various media and revisit them years later in her music, a practice that she relates to the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, one of her favorite writers. “Kundera gives you many opportunities to think and consider certain concepts,” she notes. “I’ve enjoyed making music that could serve a similar purpose—a place to contemplate, a place to process.” On her debut EP, ~~~, she highlighted a striking question from one of his novels: “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?”
Slowness is Ana Roxanne’s mode of being. She is a slow reader, a slow eater; she’s always liked slow, sad songs. But late last year, seeking a challenge, she moved from L.A. to arguably the most tense, hurried city in the world, New York. As a remnant of her chiller lifestyle, she brought along her ’90s pick-up truck, which she drove this morning to the museum. Sitting atop a tall hill near the summit of Manhattan, The Cloisters—with its Gothic and Romanesque architecture—reminds Roxanne of the castles she visited while touring Europe with Weyes Blood in late 2019. “I’m obsessed with castles, how old and rare they are,” she says. “You don’t really see structures like that here anymore.”
Roxanne and I are here to discuss her debut LP, 2020’s Because of a Flower, and the gradual process of seeing herself as a serious musician. The album is a patient meditation on gender and self-identity, embedded with samples that have accrued intimate meaning: an astrology passage, French movie dialogue, the voice of the Italian castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi. On it, her voice is swirled and layered so that it sounds like fog drifting up to the heavens. Strolling around what is effectively a European monastery seems pretty fitting right now. One of our first sights at the museum is Jesus outstretched on the cross, suspended from a cavernous semi-dome. Golden light streams in from the windows behind him. “Wow,” Roxanne whispers, quietly snapping a photo.
Roxanne grew up Catholic in Vallejo, California, a waterfront city in the Bay Area with a vibrant Filipino community. She was homeschooled by her father for several years before attending a Catholic high school, where she sang in the choir. Her ambitions of singing fully expanded in the seventh or eighth grade, when she saw Alicia Keys performing “Fallin’” on MTV. “I was just blown away with her style, so I would try to copy her,” she recalls. At home, music played constantly: Her dad liked classical music, oldies, and Phantom of the Opera, while her mom preferred the R&B of Anita Baker and Toni Braxton. A loving portrait of her upbringing emerges on “In a Small Valley,” the closing track of her 2015 EP: her mom and aunts banter animatedly as Anita Baker’s “Caught up In the Rapture” streams in the distance, their voices eventually replaced by other beatific sounds—waves splashing, wind chimes clinking, a choir singing in unison.
In 2005, Roxanne left the Bay to attend a two-year jazz/classical program at a community college in rural Iowa. Her department was small, only around 30-40 people, and because she hadn’t had any formal music education, she had to spend an extra year catching up on the basics of music theory. It was around then, at 18, that she discovered she was intersex. Unsure how to process this revelation in such a small town, she found a private support group on Yahoo. The group’s symbol was an orchid, and she became moved by the fact that most flowers have “female” and “male” parts, and are seen as conventionally beautiful.
At jazz school, she found solace in performing choral music in cathedrals around the Midwest, describing it as a kind of “next-level beauty.” At the same time, she was frustrated by the technical complexity of her education and the dreariness of sitting for hours in a practice room: “I was like, why am I doing this? What is this actually contributing to life?” She dropped out of the program, eventually finished college, and moved to Minneapolis to continue playing in a band with her friends. “I was having fun being away from my parents, so I just wanted to chase this little spark of inspiration,” she recalls. She stayed for three years, working as a barista, making “spazzy prog/math rock,” and browsing the Eastern Philosophy sections of local bookstores. She resists talking about the philosophy for too long, though. “I don’t want to come off as a super-spiritual monk or something.”
Roxanne doesn’t consider herself particularly religious, but she is sometimes mystified by life in a way that causes her to seek higher meaning. In 2013, she traveled to Uttarakhand, India to learn traditional Hindustani singing. The experience was emotionally energizing, freeing up possibilities with her voice that didn’t occur to her when she was studying jazz. Though the choice of training may seem arbitrary, there is a throughline between Hindustani music and some of her more contemporary influences, including virtuosic pop and R&B singers like Whitney Houston. “From what I studied, there was a very strong devotion to the beloved,” she says, “and a powerful concept of vulnerability.” Roxanne is drawn to raw, emotional music; that’s what she listens to, and what comes out of her. “It can be kind of exhausting—the weightiness of it all,” she admits. “But I also enjoy it, and it feels natural.”
At the beginning of this year, Roxanne was hanging out in the Bay with her family, when Thom Yorke shared a song from Because of a Flower on a radio show. “I was freaking out like, ‘Mom, do you know Radiohead?,’” she recalls. “She was like, ‘I think I know that name! I don’t know the music, but I know you like them.”
The song Yorke shared was “A Study in Vastness,” the first composition she’d ever written for herself after years of playing other people’s music. Back in 2013, while sitting in her friend’s practice room at Oakland’s Mills College, she toyed around with his Line 6 DL4 loop pedal. Within an hour, she had a song. But nervousness kept Roxanne from sharing much of the work she wrote at Mills, a haven for experimental music, where she had enrolled after returning from India. “I just thought I hadn’t paid my dues, or maybe my music was too simple and boring,” she reflects. “Like, is this music that people would actually want to listen to?”
When she finally released her six-song EP in 2015, it was distributed to only a modest group of friends and acquaintances. She moved to L.A. shortly thereafter; years passed without commotion. In 2018, somewhat out of the blue, Leaving Records producer Matthewdavid got in touch. He’d been searching for someone to play an ambient gig at a park, and Roxanne’s friend had passed her EP along. ~~~ was officially re-released by Leaving in 2019, and for Because of a Flower, she signed to the experimental Chicago label Kranky.
Essentially, it took Roxanne roughly a decade to finish her education, and much longer to find her way as an artist. This ambling trajectory is a reminder of how slow-moving transformation can be. It’s easy, these days, to be swallowed by urgency, to want to rush yourself into finishing the next big thing. But ideas and self-conceptions take time to ferment; a passage from an anodyne tonal harmony textbook you read in college might materialize as a rumination on gender identity in the album you release over a decade later. Roxanne still doesn’t have a standard writing practice, although she would like to; she has mostly composed new music after being invited to play a show. “There’s only one song that I wrote after deciding I was going to make an album,” she says—the last one. The rest had been in storage until they were ready.
These days, Roxanne is trying to simply enjoy herself. She’s been playing a lot of chess, and logging her results on a secret Twitter account (a hobby that predates The Queen’s Gambit, she proudly adds); she might drive over to New Jersey someday soon to see Whitney Houston’s mansion. Then, whenever she’s feeling up to the task, she’ll try writing again. “It should be interesting with the next album,” she says. “I don’t want to take five years to make this one.”
Ana Roxanne: It comes back to the concept of duality. Voices have so much subtlety, whether you’re belting or singing softly. Singing is inherently very emotional—there’s the outward experience that you perceive, and then the internal place you can’t always understand. Especially when I was writing, I was performing secrets, but I found the freedom to express them.
Timing is interesting. Especially with last year, people have a lot of questions right now, including myself. Writing music that is helpful in some way, that aids in people processing whatever they’re going through—I think it’s nice.
At Mills, one of my close friends recommended [his 1988 novel] Immortality, and I really liked it. I feel like I’ve read more Kundera than anything else. His work deals with love, life, and chance happenings that become significant in one way or another, and it really integrates classical concepts with modern life. His genre of writing, philosophical fiction, has always aligned with me.
I picked that quote from Slowness [for my EP] because I’ve always been kind of a slow person—it’s something people would make fun of me for, and I felt self-conscious about that. Reading that book helped me reconsider qualities that I have as not just weaknesses and think that maybe there’s a place for me.
A lot of it stems from experiencing painful situations in my early adulthood: dealing with intense heartbreak for the first time, but also encountering death. When I started college, I was away from home for the first time, feeling expansive and wholly excited about life. Coming from this sheltered upbringing in a small suburb with strict Asian parents, I was trying to explore my new freedom.
Then, my second year, there was a car accident, and my friend lost her life. She was the one driving. I couldn’t walk for three months and was in a wheelchair. I was so young, and everything had been taken away instantly and beyond my control. That’s when I really started to seek ways of coping with tragedy, but also coming to terms with the preciousness of life. Trying to find happiness or contentment or connection to whatever is happening to you, because it could just be gone.
At the time, I’d already been through two years of Western music training. In the jazz world, singers are not really respected. I played in bands, and I felt like I couldn’t accompany myself. But when I heard my Hindustani teacher sing for the first time, it was completely about the voice; the only instrumentation was the drone. It was so simple, yet so complex, so beautiful and lush. I was freed in this way to explore my voice, and how that could be a complete package—it opened up this whole other perspective to what music could be.
I had also been frustrated by the complexity of jazz theory, all of the chord changes. With drones and these simpler structures, it’s sometimes just one quarter scale, but it’s infinitely vast. You have these limitations and you find ways to make them interesting.
I don’t speak French, no. Those choices are more about gender. One of the earliest recorded memoirs of an intersex person was written by someone [Herculine Barbin] in France in the 1800s. It describes what she went through, her demise. Her book was then integrated into a film, which translates to The Mystery of Alexina, and so I included a scene from the film in “Camille.” “Suite pour l’invisible” is also a nod to her legacy—a dedication to her but also to anyone who’s ever had to feel invisible in some way.