“That’s so cheesy. I hate that.” That’s what Emily Snow thought about her stage name, Snow Wife, when her best friend and producer, Sam Catalano, a.k.a. Slush Puppy, suggested she use it as her artist name—a play on fairy-tale princess Snow White with a domesticated twist.
It got mixed reactions from friends who heard it at a party. So she decided to use it.
“We wanted something that sounded familiar and recognizable and memorable,” she tells me from her car—which is parked near a tree under a clear, blue L.A. sky—over Zoom. “I think that that story is so silly, but I think that it also captures the essence of the project so well. We’ve always aimed to create things that people have a reaction to. Whether they love it or they hate it…I like when people have opinions about art. And I like making art that is open to opinion and could upset some people.”
Before she started making music, Snow Wife was a dancer; had been her whole life, and she moved to L.A. to pursue her dream of doing it professionally. In L.A., she began writing songs in her bedroom, liking the process so much she decided to become a singer-songwriter instead.
“I never thought I would be a songwriter. And then I just had a lot of alone time whenever I moved to L.A., so I think it just came from there.”
Snow Wife exploded into the music scene in 2023 when her breakout single “American Horror Show,” which garnered 55 million Spotify streams and paved the way for her debut EP, Queen Degenerate later that year. She released three singles in 2024—“Wet Dream,” “Pool,” and “Crazy”—and now, she’s back with a new song, “What Do Girls Do,” a synth-heavy anthem about queerness and what it means to identify as a woman.
What inspired “What Do Girls Do”?
I think throughout my life, my queerness has been so fluid. I think I’m still processing what it means to me. In an obvious way, “What Do Girls Do” is a song about being a lesbian. So it’s essentially making fun of the age-old heterosexual question of lesbian relationships, what do girls do during sex? It’s a commentary about what it means to even be a woman. So you could view it through the lens of so many perspectives; a trans woman, or what does it mean to be a woman as an androgynous person? That’s what I love about the title of the song. Obviously in the lyrics I go into me being with a girl in the context of a cis-woman relationship. But I think at large, the song is just supposed to be about femininity. And it can be for somebody that’s questioning their femininity, like, let’s say like a cis man in his bedroom, maybe putting on makeup or living a certain fantasy of what girls do.
It seems like it’s a pretty personal song for you.
To me, it’s just questioning what even is womanhood and how does it look to every person. And as for me, I’m in a relationship with an androgynous person. What is womanhood to them? I’ve been so inspired by my girlfriend, just, like, learning about what womanhood has meant to her through different sections of their life, you know?
Your mom died when you were young. How did that impact your songwriting?
She had cancer when I was young, and then she actually ended up surviving that, and then she ended up passing away a few years later from a heart attack and a stroke. I was 10, so I was a baby. I think that whenever people grow up without parents, it becomes a really interesting life cycle. And so I think that a lot of my life has been dedicated to studying that and studying my behavior and growing up, if that makes sense. And I think I’m very fortunate to be blessed with self-awareness, and I think that I’ve been blessed to be so introspective. There’s something so biological about a woman’s attachment to her mother. So in a lame way, I could say, “Oh, it made me the person I am today.” But I think in general, whenever there’s a lack of a parent-child relationship at all, it makes someone very interesting. I think that it blessed me with empathy. And it’s blessed me with a deep interest for life and a deep interest for human connection and understanding and a curiosity for understanding how people work. I think that I’ve used songwriting so far as a way…to connect with people. I went from hating myself and being super suicidal and having zero self-worth into completely changing my life and loving myself. I haven’t really touched on those things yet. I think I will when I’m a bit older and I’m ready to teach people those kinds of stories. But as far as right now, I think so far I’ve used music very much as an escapism thing. And I think that I’ve used Snow Wife as a catalyst for change.
What do you hope people will take away from the song when they listen to it?
I hope that people appreciate femininity and I think that we’re living in a time where lesbianism and queerness—and it always has been fetishized—have become very popular, which is such an amazing thing because obviously that’s never happened before. I just want us to continue to appreciate romance and the emotional bonds that you create. I think that’s why I love to love women because genuinely, the emotional bond that a woman makes with another woman is something that’s deeper than anything I’ve found. That’s coming from someone who’s been in relationships with all types of gender-identifying people. The song to me feels like how it felt when I first started developing crushes on girls. That’s such an intense thing. And it’s such a beautiful thing. Women have just such an innate understanding of each other. Not to say that straight relationships are not deep. But I think that it’s just a different type of love.
You’ve mentioned that “I write songs the way I imagine the dances look.” Is that true for this song?
Honestly, no, which is interesting. I did have so much of my identity wrapped into being a dancer—not that I’m ever letting that go. I’m always going to make music for dance just because I love dance, but I think that I almost used it as a crutch for a very long time in my songwriting. And now I’m learning to use it when I want to, but I don’t always have to. And it doesn’t need to be a crutch. So this is one of the first songs that I actually wrote without dance in mind.
What’s on the horizon for 2025?
I have been working on a project that I feel like is the first project that actually represents me as an artist, which obviously sounds cheesy. But I think I came into music so quickly, and though I love Queen Degenerate and it’s so special to me, I think that it captures so much of my high school self and it captures so much of my child self…a lot of the music that I grew up on is in Queen Degenerate. “American Horror Show” was one of the first songs I ever even wrote. So I was literally just starting to figure out. And now that I’ve had another year of experience, I’ve been curating what represents me as a songwriter. I’m just so excited for people to understand me in that way.
