Cari Fletcher — musician, provocateur, and sapphic gossip mainstay known by last name only — wants to take me backstage. Dressed in white platform Converse sneakers, loose medium-wash jeans, and a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers shirt tucked up into a crop top, she leads me to the greenroom at Asbury Park’s historic Stone Pony venue, where dank incense smoke from a Nag Champa stick swirls around us. “In my past, I just thought, I have to tell everyone everything. There was part of me that wanted to be seen and understood,” FLETCHER says, gesticulating elegantly to make her points and switching the part of her hair this way and that. “Things I keep more private now are personal relationships.”
From someone notorious in sapphic circles for broadcasting messy intrigue in her music, this admission about not confessing everything anymore comes across as an intimate revelation. The greenroom is large and echoey, with just us, two couches, and a huge table in the middle. But FLETCHER doesn’t want there to be a gulf between us, so we settle in together on one sofa. Her tour outfit — an oversize pinstripe suit jacket, to be stripped down throughout the show, leaving a beleaguered, tight tank — hangs over a pipe because she forgot to bring hangers. We compare our droopy day-old curls and our teenage years spent straightening our hair to minimal success. Then, FLETCHER pulls out a madeleine-shaped lapis lazuli rock. “It represents communication and truth, so when I do interviews,” she says, “I hold it because I’m like, All right, cutie, let’s get our communication right!”
There’s nothing like a hometown visit to initiate the sense memories: There’s where you layered on thick black eyeliner and pulled on your stomping boots outside of pop-punk shows, there’s where you played soccer, there’s where you had a first kiss. FLETCHER, 30, grew up here in Asbury Park, a seaside town most would associate with rockers like Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt. When FLETCHER speaks, she punctuates anecdotes she deems particularly important by lightly resting her hand on my knee. She repeats that she’s trying to make “simple pleasures” a priority instead of posting everything that she experiences to TikTok (where she’s got over a million followers watching her lip-sync to her own provocative material). She lists some of those: driving around the shore, homemade breakfast, and the comfy old mattress in her childhood bedroom. The giddy teenage joy of going to see Kesha perform and spiking slushies with cheap vodka on the way, Fletcher explains, is a peak memory of a simple pleasure. So is her first kiss with a girl, when she was 14. “I kissed a girl and I liked it,” she says, quoting the Katy Perry song she interpolated in “girls girls girls” in 2022, which received 42 million streams on Spotify.
FLETCHER couldn’t wait to escape this “conservative pocket of New Jersey,” she tells me, twirling a gold ring in the shape of a frog around her finger. Both her parents are from Asbury Park, and her grandfather was the chief of firefighters. But for two nights in early June at the second annual FLETCHER & Friends festival, the musician molds the town in her own image: queer, yearning, and shout-singing about it. Musicians G Flip, Maude Latour, and Ari Abdul joined the lineup, selling out the Stone Pony summer stage and flooding the place with lesbians galore. Figures from the musician’s past — her chiropractor, her former vocal coach, the person who gave her piano lessons when she was 5, some other teachers, and her old varsity-volleyball teammates — sprinkled the crowd.
A friend’s girlfriend had warned me that “FLETCHER concerts are a serious see-and-be-seen scene. It’s where TikTok lesbians go to run into their exes.” I’d considered this as an atmospheric descriptor, but it turned out to be quite literal. Online busybodies specializing in LGBTQ gossip have even credited a 2022 Los Angeles FLETCHER concert as a site that destroyed a small handful of notable lesbian relationships, including Jojo Siwa’s.
FLETCHER’s performances embody the lesbian id. When I attended her show, the crowd screamed along most deafeningly to an especially petty line from her new song “Ego Talking”: “You’ll never fuck someone hotter, right?” Her music sulks and pouts and envies and desires and begrudges. She doesn’t favor subtlety; her biggest hit, from her last album, is called “Bitter.” “I left a taste in your mouth / I hope she tastes me now / I’m bitter, I’m bitter, I’m bitter,” she sings. “There’s something about Jersey and the vulgar lyrics that go together,” she tells me backstage.
In FLETCHERs work, I hear an unrelenting, explicit horniness that spikes the classic soft longing of lesbian music. Before Billie Eilish sang, “I could eat that girl for lunch,” FLETCHER released “Sex (With My Ex)” on THE S(EX) TAPES EP in 2020. She released her second album, In Search of the Antidote, in March, and it debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album sales chart. She wrote the songs while living with her parents in Asbury Park, attending twice-weekly treatment for Lyme disease. On this album, she sings about maturing and healing, but the songs still burst with classic FLETCHER themes (lust, vanity). Her track “Doing Better” is sort of a sequel to 2022’s “Becky’s So Hot,” a divisive, libidinous sucker punch about FLETCHER’s ex-girlfriend’s then-girlfriend, a woman actually named Becky. In “Doing Better,” FLETCHER acknowledges her shit-stirring, albeit in self-parody that relitigates the same dynamic: “Your girlfriend never thanked me for making her go viral / Fuck it, I’m her idol.”
“Becky’s So Hot” is, perhaps, the most representative of FLETCHER’s particular subgenre: spite pop. It traffics in the range of emotions that we’re not usually supposed to admit to experiencing, like arrogance and a taste for vindication. It also comes with firm beats, demanding you put your shoulders into it. In a performance she gave to approximately 5 million viewers, FLETCHER sang “Becky’s So Hot” at Miley Cyrus’s NBC New Year’s Eve party — a moment she tells me she’d seen in a dream years beforehand.
This was, FLETCHER says earnestly, a prime example of her psychic abilities. “It really comes through. I’m a Pisces,” she tells me, “so I’m deeply intuitive.” In her dream, she was on the way to perform with Cyrus, sitting in a big SUV with bright lights all around. “I journaled about it,” she says. Before the New Year’s Eve show, when she got into the car that Cyrus’s team sent, it had little twinkling lights strung to the ceiling.
When she’s home, FLETCHER is tempted to dig into her personal archives. She recently read her old journals in her childhood bedroom. One from sixth grade, she says, included the first song she ever wrote with her friend Nicole. “Neither of us had dated anybody, nothing, had never kissed anybody! The lyrics are so funny,” she warns before half-singing, “Why should it be so hard to carry on? / I need the strength to move along and mend this broken heart.”
FLETCHER’s lyrical interests haven’t drifted far in the past couple decades, but there’s a lot more lived experience to draw from. These days, she calls herself a “nomad.” She’s lived out of a suitcase for well over a year after she left her most recent home base in Los Angeles for a tour starting in October 2022. “The L.A. queer scene, it needs a TV show,” she says emphatically. (Never mind the fact that there famously were two such shows, The L Word and its reboot, Generation Q, on which FLETCHER appeared in a cameo last year.) “In L.A., there are all these characters, every ex. Everybody knows each other. There are these interconnected webs and story lines that all branch from one person. Everybody’s connected,” she says, making tightly swirling motions with her hands. “In New York, it’s not like that. Everyone is their own individual being. It’s a whole different energy.”
Today, reminiscing in her hometown, the musician finds herself in flux about her future. “I’m always somebody who goes into hiding to reinvent myself,” she tells me, holding her chin in her palm. “I can see that coming again. It’s brewing, like, who do I want to be next?” When you pour yourself into and pull yourself out of your art every time you release an album, reinvention might be the most expeditious way to create new material. “Maybe it’s the middle, it’s the balance between Cari and Fletcher. Maybe it’s Elise, that’s my middle name. It’s a throuple now,” she says, laughing, “between me, myself, and I.”
Is FLETCHER seeing anyone right now? Sort of. She’s trying. It’s hard to keep a steady relationship when you’re touring, she explains, and relationships have taken a bit of a back seat. “I’m in a phase of just figuring out what’s important to me and what I’m looking for in a partner and how I can be a better partner,” FLETCHER says. “I’ve been on Raya, I’ve been on all of the things. I’ve been on dates. I’ve met people. When love shows up, I’ll just be like, ‘Hi! I am ready for you!’”
With a taste for starting over, she habitually erases her social-media presence. “Every time I have a new chapter starting, I archive my social media. I’m like, Fresh start, clean slate, I’m a new version,” she says. Will she wipe this moment she’s in right now? “Maybe. Enjoy it while it lasts, people, get your screenshots! It might be gone soon!” she says through laughter. “I’m not who I was when I first started posting, so I don’t want that energy hanging on. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s just that … I’m a new version today, and I just always get to be that.”
This new version of herself, she emphasizes, is focused on healing, maturing, small pleasures, a rich interior life. But she also has a long memory, a loudly beating heart, many muses, and a desire to share all of this in her music. So, despite intentions to keep her personal life private, in front of 3,000 people at the Stone Pony, in front of the chiropractor and the lesbians running into their exes, FLETCHER made a special announcement: “The first girl I ever kissed is here tonight at the show!” She just can’t help but tell everyone everything, just a little longer.
Correction: A previous edition of this story referred to musician Cari Fletcher as “lesbian.” However, she prefers the term queer.
