Horsepower is the project of the New York-based songwriter Charlotte Weinman. A self-proclaimed former horse girl, Charlotte’s creative outlets had, up until recently, mostly revolved around other people’s visions. She studied playwriting in college, crafting stories for other people to bring to life, and she sang in a revolving door of bands for friends and siblings alike. Shortly after moving to New York, she even started a monthly “works in progress” show where musicians could perform early drafts of the songs they were writing for an audience of their peers.
When Weinman decided to build a project she could hang her own flag on, Horsepower materialized swiftly and organically. Music offered the perfect opportunity to translate the things she loved about playwriting to a brand new medium — pair this with a flair for theatrics and an eclectic scattering of influences ranging from Hole and Sleater Kinney to Lomelda, and Horsepower was born.
Last month, Horsepower released her debut single “Are you blushing?”. Now, Horsepower returns to announce her signing to Rose Garden and her self-titled debut EP (out June 27). To mark the announce she is sharing the new single ‘Excalibur.’
Charlotte says of the track: “I was soooo mad when I wrote this song. Anger can be really hard for me to sustain, so writing this was an exercise in stamina for that. As I was writing, though, I started to find the anger kind of silly too, so there’s definitely an element of that in here. When we’re fighting righteous fights full of love, if we’re good to each other, we’re occupying both sides of the argument. In this song, I tried to capture the conflict from above — how stupidly unavoidable it feels to dig into a bad conversation at an inconvenient time.
“I grew up as a massive fan of Hole and Sleater-Kinney and Kim Gordon, and I’ve always generally had a huge attraction to women who are being serrated and disgusting with their language and presence, and not aestheticizing their anger — “feminine rage” etc. — but expressing it with a critical mass of urgency and conviction to dress it up or perform it any other way.”
