Photos by Ariana Santiago
It’s a gloomy morning in Dumbo, Brooklyn, when Beatrix arrives for an interview. The first thing we talk about is death. You see, one night earlier, during a spellbinding performance at Sleepwalk in East Williamsburg, she introduced an unreleased song called “Grow Wings” by telling the audience about her deep fear of her life ending.
“Death is my worst fear, and it’s something that I really like to avoid thinking about,” says Beatrix, whose real name is Arielle Kasnetz. “Anytime you really do think about it too much, you just kind of end up having a panic attack, and it’s not great. But I found with music that it kind of bypasses some sort of fear mechanism within me and goes to a much deeper place of acceptance. So I don’t know; I’m trying to tap into the place that feels most peaceful within me, which is where I go when I write. It’s kind of my safe space to explore anything that scares me, and this happens to be my worst fear. So it’s taken me a second to be able to confront it.
“It’s not any less terrifying because I’m exploring it. I just think it’s important to look at the things that scare us.”
The New Jersey-born, Los Angeles-based artist is working on her third album, the follow-up to the haunting “We Swallowed the Sky,” released earlier this year. A classically trained vocalist, Beatrix draws on her academic background, an affinity for artists like the Canadian singer-songwriter Andy Shauf and life experiences, some of them dark, such as a physical attack that triggered a near-death experience. Her atmospherics and lyrics can feel otherworldly, but they are grounded in reality.
“We Swallowed the Sky” was inspired by the end of a romantic relationship. The forthcoming LP, she says, will move away from that theme.
“The new stuff is not about that relationship at all. I feel like I’ve gotten out everything that I wanted to say, and that’s why it felt appropriate to call it an album and put these songs together in such a way that it’s just like I’m exorcising this period of time and putting it all together, and I don’t feel like I need to write about that anymore after this. I paid many therapists over the course of 10 years, and none of them helped me as much.”
Before attending Vanderbilt, where she studied voice, Beatrix grew up in Short Hills. Her earliest musical memory is from when she was 3 years old.
“My mom played ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on our stereo system, and I remember finding the volume knob and realizing that I could turn it up and make it make it really loud. So I put it on full blast and I was running around the house, pretending I was a bumblebee. So classical music was a very early influence for me. My grandma loved opera. She loved Pavarotti. And then whenever I would go to my dad’s parents’ house, my other set of grandparents, my nana really loved musical theater and to entertain me she would roll out this TV set and play this old tape of ‘Cats’ on Broadway. So I loved the musical ‘Cats,’ like this kind of darker sound. And then I was a big choir kid growing up, so I was in choir outside of school. I did all-state, I did all national, I did region, I was just very, very into choir.”
However, early piano lessons — her parents’ idea — did not keep her engaged. “I could not pay attention and sit still for that long,” she says. “I remember sitting with my teacher, and she had two cats and I would just get up and go pet the cats. It was just a waste of my parents’ money.”
She moved to vocal lessons after she became obsessed with “Annie.” “I wanted to be Annie so badly,” Beatrix recalls. “I was like, ‘Mom, take me to an audition, please,’ and she didn’t do that. But I begged for voice lessons and I started when I was 8.”
The pandemic hit during the middle of her senior year of college. She moved back home to New Jersey, and with not much to do, started learning guitar — she could already play piano. She moved to LA in 2022, where she started writing her own songs.
Asked if her early love for classical music and her academic training have shaped her sound, she says:
“I’m influenced by everything I’ve ever heard in my whole life, you know? But I think you can trace it. You know, ‘Cats’ was the first kind of dark inkling of something that I was attracted to in music and classical music, a lot of it. Also I’m Jewish, so I grew up going to synagogue and a lot of that music is very somber, so I think that has had an influence in some of some of what I’m drawn to in music.”
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