Text me when you’re done: Carissa’s Wierd

I remember every man I ever loved or had believed I could love by their favorite music: my secondary school boyfriend, who tried to duet Jay Chou’s Coral Sea with me at karaoke; an ex who was the reason that, for five years in my twenties, I would walk out of any restaurant that played alt-J; my former long-term partner, who has perfect pitch and, when we met, had Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis as his cover photo—an album I eventually bought him, from Amoeba Records in San Francisco. Whenever I fall for someone, I want to absorb them fully into myself. I want to move through the world the way I imagine they would, and that means finding out what they listen to as they leave the flat and power walk to work, or turn up to drown out the droning sounds of their colleagues, or hum along to as they rinse the dishes free of soap suds.

It was my father, an audiophile and lifelong music fan, who trained up my tolerance for meandering, ten-minute long tracks. He was also the one who first taught me how to communicate through songs. These days, it is the only topic of conversation I have left with him: when we talk about music, we don’t say things like why did you scream at me so much as a child or you never come home for dinner anymore. We confine ourselves to the safe realm of, which is your favorite Fleetwood Mac album and since you’re in England now here’s a playlist of four hundred new wave songs. Music becomes the only means through which we are able to stay in touch, and the substitute for all the things we are unable to say: I miss you.

In 2022, I moved to London from Hong Kong and  lived alone in an apartment that bordered a cemetery. That year, on my daily walks through Hampstead Heath, music became the companion to my solitude; I’d put on the collaborative playlist my friends back home and I made titled “imaginary roadtrip,” and pretend I was still in their company. In How Music Works, David Byrne writes that with the invention of portable listening devices:

We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same.

I want this access to their movies, but I also want my own movie to be seen. Here is a playlist. This was the song that was playing as my bus drove through the tundra of Iceland in pursuit of the aurora. This is the soundtrack for when I’m sitting alone at the park watching the blossoms litter my path pink. This is what I listen to when I’m thinking of you.

*

I’m at a gig in a record store on Brick Lane, hoping to feel something, anything. I know the words to the songs, but there is a thick wall between myself and the world; I dance along but don’t seem to be able to feel my body. Maybe it’s the aftermath of the protests or the pandemic, or maybe it’s my antidepressants, I don’t know, but I’ve been in this anesthetic state for years now, only minimally aware of my surroundings.

 It is here, unexpectedly, that I meet you. I am in the queue to get my vinyl signed when you come up to me, yelling over the thudding post-show playlist. We switch to Cantonese, and suddenly our conversation is private, known only to the two of us in a sea of strangers. A Mexican restaurant is still open at the faint junction of the dim street; our tacos are soggy and limp, and there is a tinge of rust to the agua fresca. When we finish our food, you reach over and rub sauce off the corner of my mouth. The closeness of the act startles me; I have not been touched this way for years.

We exchange phone numbers, and say goodbye when the train pulls into my station. When I come out of the underground station and my signal is revived, you’ve already sent me ten texts. I forgot that you’re a girl—let me know when you’re home, you say. Another is a voice message about Charlie Kaufman’s latest movie. Your voice is boyish but deep. I play it two more times as I walk home, already afraid of forgetting what you sound like.

Before long, we’re trading long lists of everything we consumed during the early days of the pandemic. You introduce me to Low Roar and Ultraísta, and I make you listen to The Evpatoria Report and Ichiko Aoba. We both love Mount Eerie and A Crow Looked at Me, the album Phil Elverum wrote after his wife Geneviève had died. When I take a day trip to Cambridge, you send me two albums, one for the morning train (Gem Club’s In Roses) and another for the evening train back to London (The Clientele’s Suburban Light). Soon we cross over to the intimate territory of saying goodnight.

*

I first learned about the band Carissa’s Wierd through a Facebook group for slowcore and sadcore lovers, which, for musical genres most people had either never heard of or say don’t exist at all, has a surprising 6,800 members. A user had posted the song “Fluorescent Lights,” and I liked it enough to then seek out the band’s best-of compilation, They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave: Songs 1996–2003. Over the next few days I listened to all their albums, ordered the vinyl of their rereleases on Bandcamp, and within weeks I was telling everyone that they were my favorite band, even though they had broken up in 2003, when I was ten years old.

 Carissa’s Wierd is primarily the project of Mat Brooke and Jenn Champion, who had met when they were both teenage “goth dorks” in Tucson. The pair would go on to produce quiet, intimate lo-fi songs with lyrics that cut like a small wound on the roof of your mouth. The two are a tight unit, with the kind of chemistry that gestures towards the hours they must have spent playing music with each other in their bedrooms (though they apparently wrote their parts in songs separately, stacking a new layer on top of the other’s). The strings of a third band member, Sarah Standard, further inject the songs with a mournful longing that breaks your heart. Carissa’s Wierd music is often called fragile and confessional and just so, so sad.  

In some live performances, Brooke and Champion voices are overpowered by their instruments, and you can barely make out what they’re saying. And maybe they didn’t want you to in the first place. Their words read like the shy yearnings of a teenage girl, diary pages in which one writes about all the things they are too embarrassed to say out loud. In “Die,” Champion repeats the word over and over again in the chorus, before singing, resignedly, I never asked to be here. Brooke says, in “The Color That Your Eyes Changed With the Color of Your Hair,” for the next fifty years I could still write you love songs. Sometimes their song titles read like stories that documented ephemeral moments in life: A Ghost of a Dead Hummingbird Flying Around the Room, or Halfway Spoken Heart that Feels Comfort in Everything Until it Disappears, or The Part About the Vine That’s Growing through the Window and Reaching Towards My Bed.

The songs of Carissa’s Wierd are a portal to the sadness I had tried to drown out with medication. I can dip into the freezing pool for the duration of the song, let the cold hit my nervous system, then climb out afresh, the world full of wonder again.

*

I take a train up to your gloomy English city where it hails all year round, because I want to be with you. In your empty apartment, we watch a video of Mac DeMarco playing the guitar in a dog park in Paris, show each other our bookmarked KEXP performances. I learn that you’re on a quest to see all the Mahler symphonies. Your love for music is technical, while mine is corporeal: I love post-punk for its unfiltered, frenetic energy, the catharsis that split my insides open, but you can’t stand most punk music and its often barebone musicality.

There is now a crack blossoming in the wall between me and the world: the music is coming through again. I feel more alive than I have in years, purely off the adrenaline rush of our rapid-fire exchange of songs.

“Tell me everything,” you say. “I want to know everything about you.”

Finally, I think to myself, here is somebody who wants to see my movie.

*

The Carissa that is the band’s namesake is a train-hopper and a “gutter punk” who was an acquaintance of Brooke and Champion’s from high school. She would “randomly show up in our lives” and “there was something mystical about her,” the pair has said. She isn’t just weird—she’s wierd, a manic pixie dream girl that inspired an entire band.

Carissa’s Wierd broke up when Champion’s depression and alcoholism became so debilitating that she could not perform. About that time, Brooke said,

I look back on it, and I so regret that I romanticized her depression when it was actually real depression and not popular melancholy.

Depression can be alluring from a distance: when one can admire it from afar without inhabiting it. As a child who did not yet understand melancholia, and only knew it vicariously through art, I had loved the way sad songs made me feel, the romantic abyss of other people’s emotions I could be privy to as a voyeur. And then I realized that my suicidal thoughts do not just lurk idly in the background—they could sometimes jump out at me at four in the morning—and that to actively avoid death by my own hands could be an around-the-clock job.

I was first put on antidepressants in my early twenties, and now, eight years on, I can no longer separate that part of myself that is medicated and carries an official license to occasionally check out from life from my identity as a writer. There are times when I feel I don’t know how to write about anything else. To put vulnerability on public display means that there are strangers who send me lengthy, heartfelt messages about their own experiences, but also that there are those who assume they already know what I am like from the first-person nonfiction narrator I have conjured out of a mess of memories and molded into a coherent human being for consumption.

In the Carissa’s Wierd song “(March 19th 1983) It Was Probably Green,” the band writes about coping with the aftermath of someone’s death and realizing they knew nothing about her, so they decided to believe that her favorite color was probably green.

For a long time, I thought I’d be dead before I reached thirty.

You write me a letter, just over a week after we meet. You tell me that you’re confident you’ll be able to handle my emotions. You say that you’ll heal and improve me. I want it to be true, so I believe you. I fall deeper into the song.

*

While Carissa’s Wierd has an undisputed cult following, there is scant evidence of them on the internet outside of their discography—almost no interviews, a handful of poorly recorded, not-soundboard quality live performances, and blogs written by fans who still have not gotten over the fact that the band never managed to become commercially successful. One fan wrote that he had included a song by the band on every mixtape he made for friends, “played them constantly at events, always hoping that someone would come and ask what was playing,” and even contacted their PR person hoping that the band would perform at his college. Another fan had once written a letter to the Seattle-based The Stranger, to complain that the publication had plugged the band 38 times: “[T]his situation is clearly unacceptable. Carissa's Wierd is still nowhere near as famous as they deserve to be. The Stranger is just going to have to try harder in the future.”

 And so, for my part, I take over deejaying duties at holiday parties and play their decidedly non-festive songs to guests who have never heard of them, post their songs on Instagram, send links to their music to every new person I meet. How many Carissa’s Wierd fans have sent songs to their loved ones as coded cries for help? Some days are better than others, I wanted to tell my ex-partner during one of my pandemic-time insomniac spirals. Instead I played that song in the living room, from their record Ugly But Honest. Last fall, when I first arrived in London after we had separated, I listened to “September Come Take This Heart Away” over and over, thinking, I hope that nothing will remind you of me.

How could my ex not have known that I was depressed, I thought, when during those two years of partial lockdown all I could listen to was Grouper, Phoebe Bridgers, and Carissa’s Wierd. I had been playing their songs at the flat we shared together day after day, hoping to bury my emotions underneath layers of ambient soundscapes and lyrics that doubled as distress signals. Next time, I promised myself, I’ll find somebody who wants to know what’s on my playlist.

And so when I meet you, I say, This is my favorite band. It’s called Carissa’s Weird. But soon enough you’re no longer listening.

*

I’m on the gray sofa in your apartment, my body tense and curled like a question mark. I must know that this isn’t going to last, because I’m already archiving every part of you: the curve of your shoulders when you’re dancing to music in your seat, the hair follicles dotting your thighs, the splash of hair above your lip. The thrust of your fingers into me.

I play you my favorite Carissa’s Wierd song: “So You Wanna Be a Superhero.” Jenn Champion’s delicate, girlish voice over simple but somber guitar chords, singing about being awake in the dead of the night and utterly unsure if she still wants to live. You wave a hand to tell me to stop; that’s enough. You say that I often share these songs with strong intros, but then you never like the verses or the sound of their voices.

You tell me that my mental state and my misery are a result of my unhealthy habits, and I tell you that there are days when I find it difficult to get out of bed. You say that this is a question of logic, and I cry out of frustration, trembling on the couch. I just want to be understood. You do not come over and comfort me. Later, you tell me you know you only had to give me a hug and I would have been ok, but you don’t want me to think I’m right.

Carissa’s Wierd songs do not always make an impact upon first listen. Their lyrics are narratively dense, embodied, at times long-winded; they require multiple careful listens to fully decipher. You have to be dedicated to listening, to understanding, or the full spectrum of shades of blue embedded within their songs will not reveal themselves. “Too much time in one day / Too much time to occupy / With boring thoughts / And boring moods / And boring bedtimes.” Let me count down the hours and get through this day and go to sleep without leaving this world altogether. I want to tell you that I’m familiar, too familiar, with this feeling; that Carissa’s Wierd songs are very real portraits of what it’s like to be depressed, that depression is not an aesthetic project.

I want you to listen to their songs, to me. You had made out as though you would, but you only want to fall head-first into your projection of the sad girl; you want to hear the intro, and not the song.

Months after we stop speaking, I run into you at a gig again. I don’t think you saw me, but my body goes into shock, and I escape into the bathroom to throw up.

Another season has since passed. I watch the holly berries ripen in anticipation of winter as I take another slow stroll through the park. I make a commitment to live, for myself and for the people I love. I try to write more about joy. I stay close to the people who have treated my heart with tenderness and care. What I hadn’t realized before was that as much as Carissa’s Wierd was about sadness, it was also about survival: their songs hold space for the blue within themselves and in the world, refusing to shy away from pain; they exist as an assertion, as evidence of life: I’m still here, despite.

When Carissa’s Wierd broke up, Champion made a solo record and eventually checked herself into rehab. Brooke went on to play in Band of Horses with former Carissa’s Wierd member Ben Bridwell, and another member, Sera Cahoone, became a successful solo artist. Over the past decade, Carissa’s Wierd played a handful of reunion shows, and in 2011 they released two new songs, “Tucson” and “Meredith and Iris.” The latter ends with a smudge of hope that was absent from many of their old songs: And oh we will rise / oh we will rise.