I first heard Bunny White’s new album from a secondhand SoundCloud link a week after a breakup. A couple hours north of San Francisco, I sat in the car with my best friends, eating an In-N-Out burger for the first time in over 15 years. I was depressed. The burger helped a little. Bunny’s new album helped more.
The first track I listened to was “Wasted Years.” It opens with a swooping crescendo of violins, then slips into arpeggiated synth before crashing into a crooning, electrified ballad. Drums, organs, and amped guitars carry the weight of it, slow and aching, like something you’d slow-dance to at prom. I felt instantly nostalgic, though I couldn’t say for what. Maybe it’s because the lines were immediately familiar, easy to belt in the car and thrash your head to: “Never mind, these thoughts of mine are wasting my time, they’re wasting my time.” The song was both sincere and doo-woppy in one breath, like a lost ballad for the Pink Ladies, reimagined through grief and glitter and reverb. Luckily, now everyone can stream this song on Spotify.
I should admit that Bunny White is a friend, which was the only reason I got my hands on her complete album more than a year before she mixed or mastered any of the songs. But that day in the car, I didn’t know the story behind the album. I didn’t know she’d been working on it for seven years (which felt impossible — were we even old enough for that?), or that she’d written parts of it in the wake of a seismic shift in her life: coming into herself as a woman, grieving her mother, and trying to build a world that could hold it all.
I just knew that the song was written for me. Which is what all good songs should feel like: a personalized love letter to each of their listeners.
White’s hypochondria is at the heart of “Wasted Years” — not just fear of death, but the obsessive, exhausting awareness of it. “It wasn’t just that I thought I was dying,” she tells me of her once overwhelming anxiety, “it was that I couldn’t believe how much time I was spending thinking about dying. I felt like I was wasting my life.”
The song, she explains, would become a kind of wink beyond the grave if tragedy did strike — a nod to the absurdity of it all, an attempt at controlling her compulsive mental spirals, an attempt at controlling her own story.
That impulse — to make something that speaks when you no longer can — is a recurring theme throughout the album. While White sees “Wasted Years” as a thesis, the rest of the album unwinds as its argument, or maybe, an explanation. Over the seven years she spent working on the album, the answer slowly revealed itself: These songs were all a reckoning with a grief that had calcified over time.
White lost her mom as a child, but the full weight of grief didn’t strike until she was old enough to process it in her mid-twenties, right around the time she began transitioning. Without realizing it at the time, the two experiences became intertwined. In stepping into womanhood, she drew closer to the mother she barely remembered. But that shift also meant letting go of the version of herself who her mother had known, in an effort to become her daughter. “I didn’t hate myself before,” she says. “I just didn’t feel like I could ever really know myself. Transitioning helped me get there. But it also meant letting go of the version of me that knew my mom in that way and connecting with myself as a woman without her, and without knowing what kind of woman I wanted to be. Making this album felt like trying on different versions of myself. I kept honing in on the same ones, and you could say those collectively became Bunny.”
In the seven years she worked on these songs, White would find herself browsing vintage stores and purchasing what she thought were somewhat silly or outdated trinkets and clothes that looked like something her mother might have bought. “I felt like I was doing a process of elimination to try to find her. I just wanted to see what fit.”
Though she wasn’t sure where the line began or ended between what she was naturally drawn to and what her mother might have loved, the process of trying things on—through style, sound, and self—became essential to shaping her womanhood.
The album cover captures that ambiguity: a vintage-feeling portrait of White in a beehive wig, pearls, and a floral dress. It looks like a memory she wasn’t around for. The image is more than aesthetic—it’s a quiet form of cosplaying her mother, a way of saying goodbye to the version she never truly got to know, and hello to the woman she was beginning to understand.
“My womanhood was born from a place of understanding this quintessential, ineffable thing about myself, this fantasy world that I was living in, and so much of making music comes from that same place,” White says. “I catch a glimpse of something in a subconscious way that I know to be true but that I can’t really see yet, and then I’m tasked with pulling that glimpse out of thin air and turning it into a fully-fledged work. I’ve learned to trust my subconscious to guide me towards the things I don’t yet know.”
That writing process — chasing after a feeling she couldn’t quite name — eventually led her to this: the fear that womanhood might come at the cost of survival:
I think I’ll die before I turn 49
‘Cause my old Bunny didn’t make it there and I swear
If I check the mirror and I see my graying hair
I’ll be beyond repair
Wasted years just being scared
“There are all these women I look up to who kept dying,” she says. “It felt so scary for me to model myself after them because it’s like — look what happens to these women…”
White says that losing a family member means living with everyone else’s version of who they were. “I became fascinated with the way people project onto those who’ve died. You become this abstract figure on a pedestal — either saint-ified or crucified — but it can be dehumanizing. It’s not their fault, but my family’s version of my mother never made any sense to me.”
The album, then, is not just an attempt at controlling her anxious spirals, but a promise to herself: that if the worst happened, she’d at least told her story herself.
The full album, which will be released this summer, was inspired by Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising as well as Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. “He blends so many genres, but in such a masterful way that still somehow feels part of the same world,” White says of Ocean. “Putting ‘Pilot Jones’ and ‘Pyramids’ and ‘Super Rich Kids’ in the same album is crazy… So whenever I felt like my album was going off the rails or doing too much, I realized anything works with the right choices and conviction.”
What I’ve always admired about White’s music is its attention to language, to storytelling, and to the visual world a song can hold. “I didn’t want any fluff,” she says. “I wanted every lyric to be able to stand on its own, to hold weight even out of context.” For her, writing songs feels like starting with an imaginary slab of marble that she slowly chisels away at until she finds the nose of the statue, the one line that reveals the rest. Once she finds it, the song begins to take shape. Sometimes, that line comes from a phrase she’s been carrying around for years.
The song “Lions in the Theater,” the fifth track on the album and second single, which will be released April 25th, came from an old Maryland law that made bringing a lion into a movie theater illegal. It was a phrase saved in her Notes App for years that she was drawn to for its absurdity, and the fact that it ever had to be codified at all. It became a metaphor for the unspoken rules we place on others, the silent and sometimes absurd lines we have to draw. “We’ve all got our lions in the theater,” she sings.
The upcoming album moves from frenetic obsession to calm release. Bunny maps a psychological terrain few dare to name: what it means to come of age without the person you needed most, what it means to become yourself in a country that politicizes your existence, what it means to write your own eulogy while you’re still alive. The result is something layered and cinematic — not just in sound, but in scope.
“I wanted something that could speak for me,” she says. “Something that once I’m gone, would still be here. That could say, this is who I was. This is what I felt. This is what I needed you to understand. Words alone couldn’t explain what I had been feeling since I was a kid. So as an adult, I sequestered myself in my little home studio and created this musical world I could live in. I cried and I laughed and I danced and I felt like a kid again, like I had a safety blanket I could wrap myself in while I grieved.”
It’s not a stretch to call the album a love letter — to her mother, to herself, to a life beyond control, fear, and grief. In the end, she created songs that speak in her absence. That sound like they were written just for you. “The world can take things from you,” she says. “It can try. But if you create something — a record, a lyric, a moment that lives outside of you — then they can’t take that. Not really.”
