Total Wife on Reinvention, Revenge, and Radical DIY
Born of a tongue-in-cheek act of defiance, Total Wife has grown into one of the most uncompromisingly inventive forces in Nashville’s underground.
What started as a joke name — a spin on a Foals reference and a touch of high school band drama — has become a vessel for radical collaboration, unshakable DIY spirit, and music that lingers in the space between vulnerability and abrasion. Across self-recorded projects and through their collective Ivy Eat Home, the duo of Ash Richter and Luna Kupper have built not just a band, but a community — one that thrives on self-reliance, generosity, and the refusal to wait for permission.
Their forthcoming record, Come Back Down, out September 19th via Julia’s War Recordings, marks the latest step in that evolution, trading veiled metaphor for startling honesty, and harnessing the liminal glow between dream logic and waking life.
From curating all-ages shows at their space Ryman 2 to releasing work completely on their own terms, Total Wife have turned limitations into breakthroughs, crafting songs that are as emotionally direct as they are sonically immersive. In an era that is increasingly defined by corporatization, their work stands as proof that intimacy, ingenuity, and conviction still cut through the noise — and that community can be every bit as radical as sound.
KP: I have to start with the name — I can’t help but ask of its origin.
AR: Originally I was in a high school band with our current bass player, Ryan, playing teen centers in Connecticut. After I graduated, they kicked me and one other kid out and went in a different direction, calling themselves “Total Life” after the Foals record Total Life Forever. Perhaps out of spite — or a stroke of genius — the guy that got kicked out with me started a joke Facebook page for a band called “Total Wife.” This coincided with meeting Luna, and we have been writing together under that name ever since taking over the page.
KP: I vote that it was more a stroke of genius. [Laughs]. Without knowing that, “Total Wife” immediately evokes ideas about gender, domesticity, and role-play. Do you find that those ideas show up in your work at all?
AR: It makes sense to me that your mind might go there — and we have considered these contexts because the imagery is there for sure — but it’s not, like, our thesis statement for the band. And it totally wasn’t in the conversation when we named it either.
LK: Yeah, it’s funny because it came about as nonsense, so I always thought of it like this weird void of a title, but over time I noticed that people immediately contextualize those words in their heads a certain way when we tell them our band name.
KP: It’s certainly evocative! But I love knowing that it came from a bit of revenge.
You have a fervent passion for sticking to your DIY roots, an ethos that feels deeply embedded in Total Wife, from releasing your own tapes to curating your visual universe. What keeps you committed to doing it all yourselves in a world that is becoming increasingly corporatized? What are both the creative freedoms and limitations that come with building an ecosystem like your label and collective, Ivy Eat Home?
LK: Doing things ourselves has always been an accessibility thing, like, let’s see what we can do with what we have because I’m not sure what other option there is. I grew up skateboarding all the time, and I feel like it’s the same mentality — it’s all up to you and your friends to make something happen by pooling resources together and creating your own world. That feels pretty engrained into my thought process at this point. The only limitations are time and money; otherwise, the freedoms go as far as you and your friends can imagine.
AR: For one thing, it sounds like an oversimplification — but DIY has forced us to actually learn how to do everything ourselves — working from this self-conceptualized idea of being an artist and not really knowing what all goes into it until you are into it.
Learning to write songs, learning to record them, learning how to release them, and how to promote them — these are all technically tasks that can be divided up to save time, but the main thing that we are limited by is time. Even more so than money, although these are almost low key the same — if I had more money, I could work my day job less, complete projects quicker, etc.
Ivy Eat Home is the culmination of us learning to do all of this. It’s a platform to promote other artists’ work that interests us using the resources that we have worked to build up.
KP: In keeping with that approach, hosting shows in your space, Ryman 2, flips the power dynamic between artist and venue. How does that intimacy affect the performance and the audience experience? And what was it that drew you to both incubating and honing such a space?
AR: The Ryman 2 started out as a one-off show that we wanted to play after getting really hyped up on our first tour — we wanted to keep the momentum going. Then it kind of took on this new life as our favorite bands from other cities started asking for help booking in Nashville, which can be really difficult because of simply how many shows are happening here on any given night.
LK: I end up having so much fun setting those shows up and thinking of all of the ways that it can be as comfortable and functional as possible for whoever’s playing. I love being able to extend that offer to friends on tour who just need a decent place to play. Having good sound, paying the touring band out all the door money, offering the space to crash after the show, or anything like that. Plus, it’s a chance to create an immersive experience for people attending by always having video projections, installations, and other visual art at every show. It really means a lot to see tons of kids show up needing another all-ages space to hang out that isn’t boring or sketchy.
KP: You’re releasing your new album, Come Back Down, on September 19th via Julia’s War Recordings. Congratulations! What can you reveal to us about it? And how do you feel it differs from your previous releases, either sonically or thematically?
AR: Thank you! To me, it doesn’t feel super different. I’ve been getting into more personal writing over the past few years as I’ve been reflecting on life and what’s led me to this point. As a young songwriter I often struggled with getting my point across with lyrics, often using several layers of metaphor to veil what I really wanted to say. Now I really don’t feel concerned with just saying what I mean.
LK: I’ll probably forever be trying to express the same thing, but it feels maybe less abstract now. Part of this is from trying to make the whole album kind of come from itself with how I tried building all of the sounds, but also from constantly reminding myself to do try stuff that would make me feel as excited as when I first started recording years ago. I feel like these things helped me stick to whatever original intent each song or idea had more so than past albums.
“Truthfully, my younger self always wanted to be accepted for who I was… I really do have a community around me now that gives me that, which is why I felt so inclined to start working through some of those feelings of rejection that were holding me back.”
KP: You said that Come Back Down was born in the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, which is a fascinating concept. Can you expand on that?
LK: Ideas come easily between sleep/wake because they’re uninhibited — like a dream — but still based in reality. It feels insane when you’re mid-conversation and your words, thoughts, feelings, and vision start blending together. All of my friends tell me that I fall asleep really easily and suddenly, so maybe that’s why I draw a lot from it conceptually.
I’ve also noticed that when I’m accidentally falling asleep while mixing, everything starts sounding really concrete and objective, like you can see it in the room with you or something. I’m usually jolted awake when the playback of a track ends and just keep working on it.
KP: Selling all of your synths before starting the album created an enforced constraint. I love that bold kind of action — lack always breeds creativity. Did that limitation lead to unexpected breakthroughs in your process?
LK: It definitely helped me focus and not overcomplicate anything. But mostly having to build synth sounds out of samples from the track itself made me feel like the sounds that I was making were really my own. Having to listen for frequencies in vocals and guitars to find parts of the sound that I was trying to build instead of knobs on a synthesizer ended up being really fun. I also really just needed to pay rent, so it helped with that.
KP: Ash, you’ve said that this is the most straightforward you’ve ever been lyrically. What shifted in you to allow for that level of directness?
AR: Honestly, feeling a bit more confident in myself as a writer. I’ve had a whole journey with it for sure — I spent many years drowning my feelings in imagery, seeking external validation for it, and feeling wholly misunderstood and misrepresented by myself. That really pushed me to find a way to express myself more clearly.
KP: I loved the lyricism in “still asleep.” “Thank the full moon, my heart is overflowing… Is there such thing as too happy?” Ash, you spoke about thinking back to her childhood for this record, which was a time marked for you by “solitude and natural play — climbing trees, making mud pies, getting lost in the woods.” What specifically about that time felt resonant or necessary to return to? Do you think the way that you connected to nature as a child helped shape how you access emotion or memory now as an artist?
AR: I experienced a lot of rejection over the course of my life, so self-isolation was kind of a coping mechanism for that. Being out in nature has always been a way to deepen my thoughts, and I always did a lot of creating in those environments because I was comfortable and fortunate enough to access materials like a video camera, instruments, notebooks, and pens.
Truthfully, my younger self always wanted to be accepted for who I was — those same things about myself that weren’t accepted by my peers growing up. I really do have a community around me now that gives me that, which is why I felt so inclined to start working through some of those feelings of rejection that were holding me back.
KP: Your latest single, “second spring,” was written over several years, with Ash starting the lyrics in 2020 and Luna helping finish them later on through music. What does that kind of slow, collaborative lyric process look like in practice? What inspired its writing in general?
AR: So “second spring” is a continuation of this long-format poem that I wrote during 2020 when we were all isolating, and I was still working food service. I’m really into rhythm and rhyming patterns in writing — it gets a lot of words out of me. Part of this poem fit in perfectly in our song “Reveal Sky” — which is off our self-titled album that we wrote, recorded, and released over the pandemic — and the rest kind of sat until Luna wrote the chords for “second spring,” which felt like the right time to look at that poem again.
The lyric writing process feels new with every song I write. Sometimes they come first, and a poem is distilled into a song, or it’s like doing sudoku to try to calculate what they can fit into. Sometimes the song comes first, and it’s like a full composition or a couple of chords.
KP: It starts, “Hard to remember, but flowers still bloom with or without you.” That is a heavy, beautiful line. Do you see it as comforting or fatalistic? Is there a particular emotional state or memory that sparked it?
AR: That line can read a couple of ways: like I am speaking to someone who has left my life, or a reminder to myself that the planets still turn without me. Either way, it’s a meditation to be in the moment. I see it as both comforting and fatalistic. I still remember that first spring of 2020 and the cherry blossoms blooming, the air perfumed — the most beautiful season in Nashville — and basically just being stuck inside. In “second spring” and “Reveal Sky,” I am meditating on how my imagination and memory aren’t enough — it’s almost incomparable to real-life experiences, but it just might have to be if that’s all we have.
KP: What advice would you lend to women who wish to pursue music today? What have your pursuits so far taught you about yourselves?
AR: I wish that someone told me when I was younger to stop worrying about who’s younger, hotter, or cooler, because when I was in my early twenties, I feel like I wasted a lot of time feeling too self-conscious to really try. I would advise young women to focus on what they’re making, to really be critical of what they like and why, to read, and to immerse themselves in what they’re passionate about.
LK: I would say to love each other and hold each other up. Also, you can totally do the thing that you want to do :) And you are literally so talented! Love u xox.
KP: What do you feel makes a provocative woman?
AR: I think I’m getting too heady about what “provocative” means, because it’s defined socially, which makes it feel entangled with the patriarchy. Like, I feel like it doesn’t actually take that much to be provocative — people just want to find something to be mad about sometimes.
LK: We live in a reaction-based culture now where everyone shares their opinions for better or worse, so yeah, pretty much anything.
Photography: Sean Booz
