Horsepower Revs Up

On a beautiful, late spring day, I meet up with Charlotte Weinman, the artist behind Horsepower, at a quaint and bustling café in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It’s the first day in a while without rain in NYC, and the air is filled with the smells of olive oil cake, americanos, and cherry blossoms. The back table I’ve selected is soaked in the early afternoon sun. I’m nervous in a polka dot dress as I rise to meet her, and she’s cool, calm, and collected in a bandana and tank top — her bright blue Baggu work back hanging casually off of her shoulder. After a brief hug, she slides into the bench across from mine and looks at me with bright eyes, clear skin, and a warm aura. 

Charlotte and I met on the set of her music video, “Excalibur.” I had been hired to work on the video as a favor to my good friend, Zoe Garrick, the lead producer on the shoot, and had never heard of Horsepower or their music. I was working as a production assistant, and I showed up outside of our location covered in sweat holding a half eaten bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, lamenting to the other production assistant waiting with me about the Q train. The second P.A. asked me if my sandwich was at least good, to which I replied with too much information about its cheese to egg ratio. Pretty soon, Zoe let us in, and I stepped inside to find that I hadn’t been talking to another P.A. about trains and sandwiches at all, but Charlotte herself. I might have died with embarrassment if Charlotte hadn’t been so forthcoming on her own cheese opinions. When the video and single dropped a little under a month later, I sat in my bedroom in complete awe of the song and the composer of it. I hadn’t been able to stay for the whole shoot, and had left before hearing the song at all. Riding high on the feeling of pride of working on something so beautiful, I cautiously reached out to Charlotte to see if she would be interested in talking more about her process in depth. I needed to know more about her and Horsepower, immediately. 

We jump right in, talking about everything from her musical process, to girlhood, to relationships, as her thoughtful and powerfully catchy tunes play on repeat in the back of my head. By the end of our conversation, I’m covered in the remnants of the aforementioned olive oil cake (I am somehow always dealing with a food situation around Charlotte), and also feeling extremely lucky to have gotten the chance to sit down with an artist I know I’ll care about for the rest of my life. It’s only when we are getting up to leave that I realize the painting behind us is of a horse shoe with the words, “make your own luck,” painted across it. A good omen, perhaps, but more likely a confirmation of what soon so many will know: this horse can win her race.

Agnes: Okay. Talk me through the Horsepower origin story.

Charlotte: I was working on a lot of different projects for other people across many disciplines. I studied playwriting in college and have produced some non-music projects in the theatre world and otherwise, and felt very solid in the role as a contributor. But, because I was in the assist role often, I began sort of craving something of my own. I’ve always loved music and I had all of these ideas for songs, and to fill that personal gap I started writing them with more intention and attention. That is sort of the beginning I guess. I recorded a bunch of demos on my phone with just voice and guitar and sent them to my brother, Ben. He encouraged me to flesh them out a little bit more, and once we had made some more complete demos we sent them to our other brother, Noah, who is also a musician. He’s the one who was like, “We should make these for real.” At that point, I had gathered a live band here in New York, so I had been gigging a lot and developing a comfortability with performing my own music and having an on-stage presence. Since then, I’ve been grinding working on this EP.

Agnes: Where does the name, Horsepower, come from?

Charlotte: I grew up riding horses… 

— There’s a brief pause here, a little laugh, and a sly, sweet smile as she adds, – 

....competitively. I definitely have a bunch of tricks up my sleeve. I love horses, though, I think they are such complicated and cool animals with so many layers. For example, they are culturally associated with little girls, but are also so masculine. They are so strong, so mechanical…I also love the word, “horsepower,” as a unit of measurement for force. I love the idea that the point of reference is a living thing, because it’s so true. There is nothing that we can create that tops nature. Even our most powerful car, the yard stick for its power, is a horse. It’s almost like the machine admitting defeat while it’s being made. Even further, I love that horses are often central to Americano themes. Whether it’s just being a masculine force, the majesty of the animal, or the pageantry that often goes along with it. The name itself though was a random idea that I said to my brothers one day, and they laughed but they were also like, “Yeah, that’s it.” It has so many meanings, but I think most importantly I feel really connected to it, and the momentum behind the word really gives life to the project.

Agnes: You mentioned that you started out by producing projects for others, and that Horsepower began as a way to fill the personal creative void you were feeling. At what point were you like, “Okay, I’m going to really start focusing on this project intentionally, and begin sharing it”? And what has it been like to pivot into performing your own work?

Charlotte: I started working on Horsepower in a very focused way about two years ago, and I recorded this upcoming EP last summer. So I had two years of performing with no music released, which was really fun because I felt like I could experiment with my stage presence and gauge reactions to my music before it was even out. In a way, there is a lot more pressure on the live performance when you don’t have anything recorded yet, because that is the memory you have to hope the audience carries with them. And, you have to hope thay they carry it long enough so that when the song comes out they remember that they had a good time at the show. But also, realistically, whatever little fuck ups I have made on stage don’t matter if my goal in performing is to have a really fun time. At the end of the day, they’re not going to remember the time signature or the change in the chorus of the third song or whatever. But, they might walk away with a memory of how they felt. For a couple of my live shows, I wrote thank you cards to give out at the merch table for people to come grab.

Agnes: I love a thank you note. I feel like it’s such an easy, and important gesture in everyday life but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one from an artist I’ve gone to see perform. What made you think to do that?

Charlotte: I think I just wanted to show how much I cared that people had come to see me perform. I also wanted them to have something they could use to remember that they had fun if they did. I think those little personal touches are so important, and ultimately what draws me to live performance. Getting to share my work in that way is not just an opportunity to give people a good time, but it’s a chance to create emotional connections that weren’t there before. Being in a room all together is such a special thing, and something I don’t take for granted. I want to make the most of it whenever I get the chance to.

Agnes: Speaking of connecting with your audience, who do you feel like you are connecting with them as? Do you think you step into a character, or is Horsepower perhaps just an extension of you in a more specific way? 

Charlotte: I would say I don’t really have a character in mind for Horsepower. I think it’s really compelling when people are honest, so I’m trying to do more of that. Perhaps Horsepower is just a more honest version of Charlotte. But, I think I chose not to go by my own name just to grant me some flexibility and privacy. I have a real distaste for publicity even though I’m a pretty extroverted person. It’s just that when it comes to the public stage, I don’t really have a ton of interest in that. Plus, I think when you put your name on something it becomes hard to separate when you are and when you are not working. If the project is just yourself, how do you know when to stop? Horsepower is a huge part of me – there’s no line where Horsepower ends and I begin – but it is an outlet of mine, my musical project. My project in life is to be a good person, and that’s Charlotte. 

Agnes: Despite this hesitation around publicity you do have this EP coming out. How are you feeling about it as you approach putting Horsepower in a more public light? 

Charlotte: I am honestly just so excited. I was really nervous that I would feel maybe lukewarm, or that out of protection for myself I would feign indifference, and not be able to tell between my coolness as a defense mechanism and the way I actually feel. Which is something I experience sometimes before shows. I never get nervous, and I worry it’s because I secretly don’t care. But, I do feel like I have given this EP so much thought and I just feel really confident. I really like these songs, and I’m proud of them and so instead of feeling indifferent I am just so pumped to finally share them.

Agnes: I also read that you just got signed to Rose Garden. Congratulations!

Charlotte: Yeah! I got signed officially in December but we announced it when “Excalibur” came out. I’m so psyched about it. I’m really afraid of suits and have big authority issues in general, but I have voiced all of these concerns to the label and they've been just so nice to me. I say this all the time to my friends and now the label as well but, I sometimes feel like I need to be dealt with like you’re feeding a chipmunk out of your hand. I am so easily spooked and have a hair trigger for when things feel like they're no longer in my control. Especially with this project, because the tent post of this whole thing has been that I want this to feel like it is mine. But the label has been so receptive to those concerns, so I’m feeling really good.

Agnes: You also work with your brothers as your collaborators, right? 

Charlotte: Yes. Ben is here in NYC, and Noah is in LA, where I’m originally from. For this EP we went out to LA to record with Noah and we were able to get it done in 3 studio days which was just so thrilling. Every move I have made has involved working with my brothers, and for me it’s a complete no-brainer because they get me, they’re rooting for me, and they also have their own projects. It’s very collaborative and easy. They know how sensitive I am about this project and how free I want to keep it, and that makes it even better.

Agnes: Is there a fuller record on the way? I’m hoping the answer is yes, haha.

Charlotte: Yeah! This is the beginning of it. They’re going to be separate releases. These four songs are going to be their own little world, though. The record I am figuring out now. It’s probably going to be 10 to 12 songs. It’s fun because as I’m writing, I’m seeing in real time how able I am to capture the definition of the tone I want to set. I’ll write a bunch of songs and then when I take a step back and look at all of them, it becomes like a basketball bracket. Some songs get kicked off, others move on. And, you would think that it would be sad but it’s actually just exciting because I know that I’ll come back to those ideas eventually, and it’s more gratifying to be able to confidently understand that something isn’t ready or doesn’t tonally fit with what I’m trying to explore on this record.

Agnes: I guess my follow up question is if these four songs are their own separate release, what are you trying to explore in this EP? What world are you building?

Charlotte: I think with this EP, I am sort of looking at arguing, and trying to explore both sides of a very righteous fight. 

Agnes: That’s so interesting, I feel like we all argue in different ways so it’s definitely a really creative way to introduce yourself as an artist.

Charlotte: Yeah. I really wanted to delve into something specific. It’s amazing, because as somebody who is a fan of music I'm always trying to decode each song by my favorite artists  – “A Beautiful Mind” style. And although it’s nobody's fault, it can be really disappointing when people give sort of “too cool" answers. I don’t wanna be too cool? My heart is on the line with my music. Meet me where I am. 

Agnes: Can we go through each song, and you can tell me a little bit about your inspiration for each one?

Charlotte: Absolutely. The first song is called, “Are You Blushing?” and I think it’s the beginning of the fight – when you’re abstracting yourself from yourself. I think having an argument and having a crush can be similar. There is that desire to absorb and connect. The idea of wanting to see what the other person sees. I think there is a feature of arguing that is like that. You argue because you want to agree. Having the focal point of the EP be an obstacle in between two people was really interesting for me to explore.

The second song, “Excalibur,” is definitely my point of view. I want to be firmly behind my own eyes here. I’m not trying to understand necessarily, I am just leaning into the conflict. But when I was writing it, I was trying to capture the argument from above a little bit, and that’s where the sort of mythic imagery that you see in the music video came from in that song. It’s not characteristic for me to fight that hard in real life, so I needed to call up these historical figures – things that I could never actually relate to in order to get the scale of what the argument was feeling like for the song. That’s where the Joan of Arc thing came in – having visions and being connected to something that you just feel like you have no right to connect to. Sometimes the argument feels so big it can almost be like a mythic quest.

The next song is called, “Coins” and that is just hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. Feeling like there's a complete paradigm shift. Thinking it was one thing but it’s a complete other thing. Misunderstanding your own argument and losing your thesis statement. Like, wait? What am I even arguing with you about? For this one, I feel like I was writing in particular about a fight where I couldn’t ever remember my points. We would start talking and I would just think, “Well I’m so confused because I can only make this point if this is true and I can’t remember if it is, and I am just turned around in my own head.” I wanted to try to define the idea of getting foundationally lost.

The last song is called “The Ring.” And that is looking at the argument after it has cooled. That song is the youngest on the EP, “Coins” is the oldest. “The Ring” is about a moment when you hit a very small and conquerable obstacle. And it’s no biggie, and you can get through it, but the way that it is handled tells you everything you need to know. It’s almost like, “We’re not going to blow anything up over this now, but this is the way that things will blow up later.”

So yeah…this EP is about fighting, haha.

Agnes: When did it become clear that you wanted conflict to become the central theme of the EP?

Charlotte: I think I’m just interested in conflict in general. I feel like I can be pretty confrontational, but I’m very principled about it because it doesn’t come so naturally to me. And I try to be really thoughtful in figuring out how to articulate myself in a moment of disagreement or disruption. But a friend recently said to me, “You only ever feel guilt when you act out of alignment with yourself. If you stand by what you said and did, you won’t feel guilty about it. You might feel bad that there were hurt feelings, you might regret the way things worked out, but you don’t have to feel guilty about the way you behaved if you’d do it again.”  And that is so true and the way I feel about these songs.

Agnes: That’s interesting. Maybe you never get nervous on stage because you’re never out of alignment with yourself when you’re performing.

Charlotte: I think that could definitely be true. I think a lot of the idea of alignment has to do with how much time you give to the issue as well. My friend Nat has a principle that I have adopted: if something happens that you feel like need to address, then you get 48 hours to metabolize and then speak. And if you don’t it becomes your problem. And you have to figure out how to make peace with that yourself. But there's a statute of limitations for bringing things up. Obviously, there are exceptions to this, but I think as a rule of thumb it's really great for me because sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I can’t bring this up until I get the words exactly right.” And that’s not true. If I don’t get it out, then it festers and the words will just never come.

The way that I have dwelled on conflict in this EP feels like a post mortem a little bit. I feel like I’m looking over arguments I’ve had move by move, blow by blow, and dissecting why my reflexes are the way that they are. Like, why is that my sparring position? Why is that how I would react in the wild? I don’t know! But it is. 

Agnes: You keep coming back to nature as source material…do you think that’s on purpose?

Charlotte: I think it’s hard not to be connected to nature. I feel really lucky I grew up in the Palisades. It was a really precious place to grow up. There was so much wildlife, and during the summers I was at the beach 12 hours a day. So I do feel like it’s a big part of me. I don’t feel like I am actively considering nature when I’m writing but it’s the original analogy for everything. 

For this EP specifically though, I grew up evacuating every year, so I think a part of my understanding of conflict reminds me of fire safety – being able to quickly assess what’s important in a room and get it out. It’s definitely an image I apply to fighting. Where am I willing to bend and what are my non-negotiables that go in my bag with me, you know?

Agnes: I feel like the more artists I talk to, the more they refer to their musical lives as projects. This is your project now, but do you think it will be your project forever? I know you’re just starting, but I think we’re seeing more and more artists retire from big “projects” to begin new musical lives. Do you see your musical life continuing once you feel like this project’s narrative arc is complete?

Charlotte: I would love to keep writing and recording forever. I want to make as many records as humanly possible, and I think I would love to keep collaborating too, maybe be a part of a collective at some point. But, I feel really excited about Horsepower. It is the thing I have felt the most energized to keep working on and to continue working on across any of the disciplines I’ve worked in. Having something that’s mine in this way is really special for me, and I’m excited to grow up with it – to be able to track the way I change and articulate myself through music. So, yeah. I would love to give it a full life and take it all the way.

In terms of professional roles though, the thing that is most important to me is the spirit of creativity. I see a lot of people’s dreams get crushed by industry. And if industry ever poses a threat to me, it’s an easy choice that I’ll choose creativity over industry. It's non-negotiable in my go bag. And it always will be.

Horsepower’s debut EP drops Friday, June 27th. You can listen to the first three songs wherever you listen to music, now.