OUT MAGAZINE
"I’ve been sitting on a secret," Fletcher sings in "Boy," the first single off her new album, out today.
The secret is that the sapphic singer, who has performed on stage with lesbian music stars like Hayley Kiyoko and Chappell Roan, fell in love and is now in a relationship with a man.
When she released the song, discourse came quickly. Some criticized the song being released on the first day of Pride month. Others questioned why the song sounds like dating a man is something scary or sad in today's world. Some long-term fans said they weren't interested in songs about men.
To be known is to open yourself up to be judged, but it also gives you permission to be free. That's how Fletcher looks as we talk over Zoom on a Wednesday afternoon. More than free, she looks happy. She looks healthy.
Now that everyone knows that Fletcher is in love with a man, she's ready for her fans to get to know her more intimately than ever before on her new album, Would You Still Love Me If You Really Knew Me?.
On the new album, Fletcher sheds her messy party girl/fu**boi persona for an introspective look into where her career and life have led her. She sings about self-love and romantic love. She sings about the fires she's lit, the chaos she's caused, and the consequences of her actions.
It's a departure from much of her typical music, especially the songs she's best known for, like "Undrunk" and "Becky's So Hot," where her sapphic fans can indulge in the fantasy of being wild and reckless while making out with lots of women. The songs are still 100 percent Fletcher, even if she's speaking with a different tone.
Fletcher knows she's "always been somebody that's preached unapologetically and boldly being yourself," but while writing and recording her new album, she found herself on uncertain ground, she shares.
For the past 10 years — her entire music career — her life has been marked by her romantic relationships with women. Now, she wanted to write about her love for a man.
"I've had songs that have male pronouns, but that's not been the center or the focus of my career or what I've talked about," she says. "That has not been my muse. My muse has been my relationships with women, my loves, my heartbreaks, and my losses."
She felt a "certain weight" in sharing this news, and didn't know where it fit in her experience as a queer woman.
"I went on such a journey when I came out to my parents when I was 21 or 20, and came out 10 years ago, and just fought so hard to be seen and held in my queerness and celebrated and accepted. And so I had so many questions for myself," she recounts. "I was confused about what to do. But I know my whole thing this whole time has just been about never denying yourself a human experience, never denying yourself, no matter what body it shows up in, no matter what soul it is; for me, it's always been about energy."
Fletcher knows announcing her relationship with a man wasn’t brave in the sense that coming out as queer is brave, but she was still "really nervous" about releasing the song and "definitely expected a response, of course."
However, the response was "much more intense and complicated than I thought that it was going to be," she says. Still, she understands why so many of her fans felt hurt or confused by the release.
"I do not take lightly that I have been such important representation for so many people, and to anybody who felt anger or frustration or confusion or abandoned in some way, or the rug was pulled out from underneath them, I understand all of that and I see you and I love you," she says.
"I think the thing is that everybody is so deeply entitled to their response, to the feeling that it evokes, to their perception, to the way that it landed for them," she adds. "It's so valid, and I think this is such a complex and nuanced conversation."
Even when she's singing about a boy, Fletcher will always be a queer woman and a queer artist.
"That is the lens that I view my life through. So no matter who I'm in a relationship with, no matter what body parts they have, no matter how they identify, no matter what gender they are, someone is in a relationship with a queer woman and that is the perspective that I bring, the curiosity and the open-mindedness and the open-heartedness to everything that I look at in my life is through that lens," she says. "And that is why being queer is the greatest fucking gift of all time. I wouldn't trade that for anything."
However, she is aware that her candor might mean some fans looking for sapphic songs may turn elsewhere. It makes her excited that there are so many places they can turn to.
"There's so many people, and there's so much representation, and there's so many people to narrate what your love story looks like. And if I've been that person for a long time, I am so honored," she says. "If I'm not that person anymore, that's totally fucking OK. It just makes me stoked to see how much music there is, and how much from when I started, and how scary it was to come out as an artist 10 years ago, and where we are now. It's so powerful to see how much has evolved over the last 10 years."
Other sapphic fans of hers felt seen in a new way. The majority of queer women are bisexual, so there are plenty of people who heard "Boy" and related to it. "I think it is so interesting because I have received thousands and thousands of comments and messages of people being like, 'I feel really seen,'" she shares.
Fletcher has heard from "gender-nonconforming people and trans people and bisexual and pansexual people and people who have previously identified as lesbian and had an experience where they've fallen in love with someone else," who all feel validated by the song and Fletcher's message.
She wants to give them a "permission slip that it's OK to continue to experience yourself and have these human experiences and learn."
"And it doesn't mean that you were ever incorrect... It's just you are exploring more of you, and that'll continue to flow," she says.
Fletcher is best known for being very vocal about the women in her life, so some fans might have worried that the new album would be full of love songs about men. But she's more complicated than that — and so is the album. WYSLMIYRKM starts with the song "Party," where she sings that this album won't be the kind of party (or album) her fans are used to.
It's definitely not. For one thing, the songs are slower and more low-key than many of her hits. These are songs that you listen to in bed with headphones on, not ones you drunkenly sing along to at a bar. For Fletcher, calming things down and taking a break from the whirlwind of her life was something she needed to do.
"I think I started to feel like when people would come to my shows, I would have to give them a very specific type of experience," she says. "That it would be like getting back together with their ex, or having a threesome and fucking a hot stranger, or meeting the love of their life."
Being a touring artist is already demanding, and as Fletcher is living with Lyme disease, the lifestyle started to take its toll on her body. "Some of the days where I would be feeling, like, the most shitty, I would feel like I would have to step on stage and still give people the best night of their lives, even if I was having one of the hardest ones of mine," she says.
In the second single from the album, "Hi, Everyone Leave Please," she presciently sings about her love life being the subject of public discourse — and says she needs to take some time for herself.
"I've been seeing commentary about me for years, my whole entire career of just, 'she's for the male gaze.' Even as I'm deeply in love and in multiple relationships with multiple women," she notes. "I've been seeing commentary on everybody dissecting my expression, my sexuality, how I show up on a stage, how I move my body since I was a 20-year-old woman, my entire career. And I had seen in the fall of last year, TikTok had erupted with these rumors about me potentially dating a man. And I saw everybody's feedback. I already saw the response before I wrote 'Boy,' before I wrote the song. And so I wrote this from the perspective of already having a taste of how this world would receive me."
When she finally did release the song, she says the discourse around "Boy" was "a further highlight of the way that we feel like we are entitled to an artist's experience and perspective, and the ways in which they should live and create, and how they should show up with their platform, and what they should be responsible for.
Despite the controversy, "Boy" is "very small piece" of the album's deeper exploration of Fletcher's "relationship with being a public person, my relationship with the music industry, the complications that I have felt since the day that I started, and all the ways that I have struggled with being an artist."
"It is an album of me getting to share parts of me, parts of the way that I feel about the music industry, the way that I feel about my career, who I love at the moment. But I'm constantly in a state of evolution, and I'm not the same woman as when I started this music career 10 years ago. And I don't know what a year from now holds for me, or two years from now holds for me, or 10 years from now holds for me."
A song like "Party" or "Hi, Everyone Leave Please" might have been a more representative first single of the album as a whole, but Fletcher isn’t known for taking the safe route. Sometimes you have to jump in the water head-first, get the scariest thing out of the way, and by releasing "Boy" first, Fletcher did just that.
In the album's closer, a powerful piano ballad called "Would You Still Love Me," Fletcher asks if her fans will still love her "when the lights come on" and "the music stops."
"This isn't a goodbye forever / It's just until next time," Fletcher says on the song's outro. "But promise me one thing, if you see me around, you'll say 'hi.' / We don't have to be strangers."
More than anything, WYSLMIYRKM is an invitation inside, and Fletcher hopes it helps people understand her better. Understanding each other, she says, is paramount right now.
"There's so much painful stuff happening on the planet. And for there to be this much division and separation within our own community where we need each other's support, where we need each other's love, when we are trying to be ripped apart at every angle," she says. "Can we stand together of just like, I see you in that journey, you see me in this journey, I will fight for you till the day I die, and vice versa? My whole career has been dedicated to lifting up this community and showing up for this community. And whether I'm on a stage or whether I'm off a stage, or no matter where I'm at in my life, that's never something that's going to change."
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