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Nestled in the sunniest corner of Bushwick's beloved queer bookstore and coffee shop, Hive Mind, singer-songwriter Avery Cochrane settles in between the poetry and the mystery tarot card packs, her hair still wind-brushed from escaping the sticky summer C line. A year or so earlier, she had graced the Mercury Lounge's lilac-lit stage, nightgowned and draped in blue tulle. "She's soft like sand beaches, she's all I wanted," the small crowd had sung along, cutting in just a few beats early: "it's coming, it's coming don't worry," she had laughed, corralling their eager wayward tongues. 

Those very lines were early gifts, unreleased and projected to a small crowd. "Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night" would go on to have over 11 million plays on Spotify. Up-and-coming queer pop icon Avery Cochrane has gone from writing her fans' initials into her tour guitar to opening for AJR and performing across the country. 

Cut to the first few days of Pride in 2026, Avery Cochrane performed at The Stonewall Inn's Pride Kick-Off Event alongside Broadway's Bradley Gibson and RuPaul's Drag Race star Yuhua Hamasaki. 

I had the chance to chat with her the following day; below is the Q&A, lightly edited for length and clarity. 

FX: How was the show last night? You were at Stonewall. 

AC: It was great. It was really wholesome and really uplifting. It was honestly surreal being there at Stonewall. Obviously, you hear so much about it. I don't even think I've ever seen it before or walked by it before, given how many times I've been into the city. So just being there on June 1st was crazy. It was really bittersweet in some way because there's still so much work to be done, and this year hasn't been great for trans rights or queer rights in general. 

FX: That's actually something I wanted to ask you about. Pride started as a protest. Being queer, visible, and celebrating is so important right now. But also, it can be really scary. It's just a really volatile, violent time to be queer. Not to jump right into it, but I was wondering how you interact with that dichotomy as an artist?

AC: I feel like there is a lot of art or music that's just passive right now. When you saw me at Mercury Lounge last year, that was me before I got signed, fully independent, before I had any sort of team. So it was just me writing songs in my room with nobody else's opinions. In the last year since moving to LA, I've been putting in so many sessions and meeting different songwriters and different people and just so many different vibes. I've probably done sessions with 50 different people. And then I've found my favorite five producers where I feel like I can actually just maintain that sense of vision and messaging that I've always wanted to convey in my music.

But some sessions I've been put in, they just feel really sterile and really like, “how can we get a hit today?” There might be two or three songwriters in the room, and they're just kind of wanting to make a really quick song and not put much thought into the lyrics or the messaging or anything, and just kind of make as much music as possible. It kind of feels like fast fashion for music. I hate sessions like that. It just always feels really soulless. 

I think my music can be queer without it being overtly stated because it's all about perspective and human emotion and experience and writing from a queer perspective.

Whether it's a sense of not feeling like you belong, or maybe it's a sense of, like, a devastating sapphic breakup or something. I don't know. I feel like it's been really important for me to find collaborators that help me find that perspective and allow me to express it. Does that make sense? 

FX: Yeah, absolutely. 

AC: And also, I'm privileged because I am straight-passing, kind of. People are more surprised when I say that I'm queer. So I do think it's important to continue to advocate. 

FX: Speaking of collaborators, I was thinking about your music video for "Blue Eyes." Even though you started as a very small independent artist, you’re still very committed to making music videos that have a really clear curatorial vision. How have you navigated seeking out and connecting with collaborators when your budget was restricted, or what motivated you when you were making smaller projects? 

AC: I mean, even now, like, I still have low-budget music videos, even working with a label. It's a very small label, indie. And they are still taking a chance on a pretty small artist, even though I have grown more in the last year. But back then, it was like having nobody; I did crowdfunding and just raised a couple thousand dollars. So with the "Blue Eyes" video, I really just told the director exactly what happened. The video kind of is exactly what happened in my real life. And that was definitely vulnerable and scary. And sometimes I even think about taking it down just because it hits too close to home, especially when I was younger.

But I do think it's important. Like just, you know, even seeing one comment from a young queer person that said it made them feel seen or, you know, less alone. Then that's all worth it.

FX: Yeah, absolutely. I was curious about what your relationship is to your listeners and if you've ever had some kind of interaction where you're surprised by how the music might change depending on the listener?

AC: That's a really good question. I mean, I love most interpretations that people have, and I feel like sometimes the songs are pretty obvious, like what they're about and stuff. But sometimes it can be more up for interpretation, like "Shapeshifting on a Saturday Night." For some people, it is an ode to themselves, you know, like, as I kind of wrote it as an ode to myself, but like other people can interpret it as like a queer love song, you know, like watching somebody else.Like singing about somebody else that might be struggling. And I always love that. It's like, 'Oh, this song reminds me of my crush that, you know, might be in fear of coming out' or something. Or like, you know, subjecting themselves to the male gaze too much. Or 'this song reminds me of me,' and then sometimes people are like, Shapeshifting to me is a happy song, but some people think it's a really sad song. 

But there's that, and then there are some lyrics that people have interpreted that I really enjoy hearing. I have this one lyric in my song called "Sex Etc" that says, "purpose of romance or spiritual cancer," and I just meant cancer in the disease form. And some people thought I was like, astrology-related.

FX: Oh, no way. 

AC: And I was like, Oh, that's actually really interesting, you know, cancers are known to be emotional. So I thought that was interesting, but I always love it when people take meanings that I didn't even intend. But when I release a song, it's for everybody. It's for whatever they want to interpret it as. 

As far as my listeners, I mean, I feel so much less alone. I need the listeners as much as they need my music, or like, you know, it's mutual. I love being a part of something, especially like being lonely, living at home and stuff.

Like, it sounds like, I mean, it's kind of parasocial, but at the end of the day I've got people that want to listen to my music, want to hear my guitar. And it feels special. 

FX: Truly. Not to take too much of a turn, but I wanted to touch on Blue Eyes again, because it’s one of your earlier songs that I think a lot of people probably connected to, and still connect to.  It’s about that experience in high school when you're having this sapphic awakening, but you might not be able to come out for some reason, or you don't feel comfortable being visibly queer. And I think even the term visibly queer is really strange, because there's no way to look queer. Regardless of the specificities, this buried homoerotic tension evokes such an immediate, softened pain: to care about someone, and love them so much, and then see them move on and be with someone who’s out. 

AC: Yeah, it was really, really confusing back then. I hurt somebody else because I was unsure of myself. I told myself that I would never let that happen again. And I know it's easier said than done. But that was a really harmful situation to myself and to somebody else. And striving to avoid that in my early 20s has been really healing for me. And like, just my relationship to the queer community.

I had my first serious queer relationship, like, in the last four years, which recently ended, but it was really healing. I was unlearning a lot of things, dealing with some shards of internalized homophobia. But still, even being out of it now, I'm like, there's still so much that I need to unlearn.

There's still so much that I do care about. And sometimes I, even at a queer event, like last night, I feel fraudulent, somehow, because of the Blue Eyes thing. And because I don't know exactly what it is that I am.

I feel like I owe everybody an answer, but I don't know, and I don't think I'll ever know.

But knowing that the experience I had with the girlfriend that inspired Blue Eyes, and then with my most recent ex-girlfriend, those were very real and genuine. And that was true love. But sometimes it is really hard-- I go back and forth between feeling a lot of internalized homophobia, but then also internalized, I guess, shame for not feeling queer enough.

FX: I hear you. I remember that you might have done your music video for "Losing Streak" with your most recent ex-girlfriend? 

AC: Well, we were still together for that. I wrote this song when we were on the decline. The topic or concept of Losing Streak came up for me because I had been saying, "We’ve been on the decline for a while now. And like, it’s just been a string of bad fights, incompatibilities." And I wrote that song three months before we actually called it quits and we were on a break. And then we were back together because of the holidays. The song was slated to come out in February, and I was talking to her about the music video. She was like, "Well, who would play the other person? I feel like it should be me?" And I was like, "Okay." Our director said we had good chemistry, and we weren’t even thinking about whether this would be a great marketing moment or whatever; we were just like, honestly, this could be a beautiful thing. And if we do decide to break up, at least we have, you know, this thing. And we did the video, and it was hard, because I knew we were gonna break up right after, like three or four days later. 

FX: Oh, wow. That’s definitely very intense. 

AC: Yeah. I feel like that did make the storytelling element of that music video so much more authentic, though.

FX: Not to project too much onto your relationship, but in the music video, you can really feel that sense of disconnect. A lot of the imagery in the music video, you know, with the boombox and the 90s-era styling, it really calls back to all of these 80s/90s classic rom-coms, like this classic contemporary love. And it's like, for me, when I was watching it, I felt that imagery next to this disillusionment, where it's, you know what love is in the movies, and that’s what it feels like when you first grab it. But then, when you finally disconnect from what you thought was that perfect movie love, you know, it can be excruciating.

AC: Yeah, yeah, so painful.  

And like, struggling with what's real and what's not. If you're in a relationship that long, there's obviously no clear answer. Like, should you break up, or should you stay together? It's gonna be hard. And I do think if you find yourself in that situation where the urges are equally as strong, it's important to just leave at the end of the day, but it doesn't make it easy at all. 

FX: Absolutely. It really captures the essence of something I grappled with when I got out of my first long-term relationship, where, when I got out of it, I was like, well, I thought that was what true, real love was. But, for me, I think in the last year, maybe it wasn’t. So there can be that sense of distrust of your own feelings. Did I really feel that? Am I gonna feel that again with someone? Do I deserve that? 

AC: Yeah, absolutely. It’s really, really hard. But I think, like, I'm excited to be single and kind of figure it out for myself.For the first time in a long time.

FX: But yeah, speaking of that on and off again, experience, I would like to personally thank you for the service that "Standards" did for me. 

AC: Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

FX: I feel like it actually speaks to a lot of the themes that still bleed into your more recent work. That feeling of being haunted, but within this dichotomy of melancholy and yearning. The melancholy of grief and loss, and being haunted by someone in the past. 

AC: I've always kind of written myself off as like, like, a stone-cold person. And even though I'm such an emotional person. But I always want to pretend that I'm not a griever or somebody that reminisces or feels things. But then, it's always interesting to hear people say that about my music. Like, there's so much yearning in these songs. And I really do feel these things. But sometimes it's like, really easy to tell myself to shut it off. And it was always something I was kind of meant to be, not by other people necessarily, but I've always kind of been ashamed of feeling too strongly for a person.This person treated me terribly, like an object, discarded me, all this stuff. So it's embarrassing to write such an emotional song about them. But it's just like I don't know. It's part of the job, I guess.

FX: I feel like that feeling of feeling like you do love someone too strongly and don't feel that returned can be conveyed through music really well. In "Existential Crisis at the Tennis Club," you capture the whole "Good Luck, Babe" of it all. Like, wow, I have lived my whole life, and I haven’t really been able to connect to this person that I really love and care about because of a mix of external forces and internal complications. 

AC: So, yeah, I feel like I definitely see a lot of yearning. And it's not even just yearning for romance; it's also yearning for being seen as a woman and a queer person, or, like, you know, having success as an artist in a world that's working against us. The queer perspective expands much more than just romantic relationships.

FX: Exactly. I won’t dive too deep into this, but the poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote a letter to Cheryl Clarke in the introduction to Clarke’s collection of poems, "Living as a Lesbian." She was speaking about how the queer, and specifically for her, the lesbian experience, is so much more than just loving other women or queer people, but how it is also about this community you have and how you love your family or friends or sisters. Queerness is so much more than just romantic or sexual connections. 

AC: Yeah. Family and friends have been proving themselves time and time again to be so important. The more time I spend with other queer people, and the more intersectionality I bring into my life, the more enriching and fulfilling it is. 

Cover image courtesy of Sonderview