Trinity Ace

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Just after turning 18, Trinity Gardner took a month-long road trip with her estranged father to meet her paternal side of the family for the first time. They drove across the American West, cutting through red canyons from Texas to Colorado, meeting family she never knew existed. Learning to Be a Cowboy on the Horse that Broke My Arm, her debut EP and first photography book, sprung from the need to process the experience. 

Back in San Francisco, Gardner formed a band, fronting as singer and lyricist for a six-piece orchestral ensemble. Together they bend experimental rock, Americana, and folk into a six-track reckoning with forgiveness, building new relationships on muddy ground, and the spirituality that comes as a gift of grief.

Gardner’s training as a fine artist alongside her intellectual training at Stanford equipped her to critically examine the frontier mythos she encountered on the road. Frontier mythology, Gardner suggests, manipulates Americans into a kind of slow death. It cunningly recasts back-breaking labor and the masculine imperative of self-sufficiency as honor and independence. She is not unsympathetic to its pull, as she witnessed first hand how its promise can offer identity and purpose. But it is ultimately a top-down affective tool, deployed to coerce labor and obscure power in times of contingency and crisis.

No image captures this more perfectly than the one embedded in the EP’s title. Gardner’s grandfather was bucked from his horse at the age of seven. Without money for medical expenses, he wrapped his arm himself and let it heal frozen in the shape of a 90° crowbar—a deformity he would carry for the rest of his life. Despite this, he rode that same horse every day until it died and worked every day on the ranch until he did, at age 96, where the epitaph read: “The Last of the Real Cowboys.” 

The EP is the aftermath of, in her words, “choosing to embrace something that hurt you. Choosing to forgive.” This confessional quality is something she gravitates toward in other musicians: Whether it’s Jeff Mangum, David Berman, or Leonard Cohen, she cites a kinship with frontmen who are uninhibited, raw, and honest. Gardner renders this openness in visceral terms: in the piercing of her spine in “Pierce”, driving nails into her hands in “Talisman” or hands dragging across blood-wet concrete in “Battle Cry.”

Gardner is immersed in the indie music scene spilling out of San Francisco’s Richmond District. Along with Trinity Ace, Double Helix Peace Treaty and Poor Image prove that the city’s fog is far from sedating — it seems to insulate them from outside conventions, creating conditions in which new sounds can run free. Reflecting on countercultural 1960s, a time that is popularly lamented due to the changing economic conditions of San Francisco, Gardner believes that magic still brims from the city. “I feel it most when I’m walking in the park. I think it’s, quite literally, a natural magic…it still proliferates. People are charged by it.”