1999: Carissa’s Wierd, Ugly But Honest 1996-1999
By Laura Lampton Scott
11 songs, 1 hour.
PT. 1 | SOME PEOPLE ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS
Jenn Champion and Mat Brooke, founders of Carissa’s Wierd, often tell the story of meeting one another as teenagers at a goth club in Tuscon. To be Goth in Arizona must make suffering in the heat its own kind of rebellion, kids wearing all black long sleeves and pants in the desert sun. Mat says, “There were the cool kids at the goth club, the clique, like the really attractive guys and girls who were much more goth than anybody else. Me and Jenn were kind of the goth dorks in the corner, and somehow we just took to each other immediately.” I imagine the room was dark and everyone was underage.
They started a band and named it after a trainhopper they both knew. Carissa was, at the time, pretty weird; I met her once outside of the burrito restaurant in Seattle where I worked with Jenn and Mat. The vowel swap in “wierd” could be an early sign of the the band’s contrarian tendencies.
Jenn and Mat spent the next five years writing and recording the songs that would end up on Ugly But Honest. When the album was released in 2000, it was the culmination of more than half of what would be the band’s lifespan (they were a band for eight years total, 1996-2003). Mat says, “Because it didn’t feel like one cohesive piece of work, we added the time stamp to the title, 1996-1999. It was less a studio album and more a compilation of things that we’d done between those years.” The recordings are a combination of bedroom four tracking and sessions in the well-appointed studio of a member of the band Tool, a friend of one of Carissa’s Wierd’s series of drummers. (“I think we had nine drummers,” Jenn says.)
Jenn and Mat deliver vocals as if they are confessions, the things you have trouble admitting even to yourself, and the lyrics can be infamously hard to interpret within the layers of sound. “Lazy Eyelids” exemplifies this, and while the song creates a kind of lonely longing in my chest to this day, I couldn’t tell you more than a few snatches of the lyrics because the vocal lines are so heavily intertwined. But the violin mourns and the drums insist that whatever this song is about, it is vital.
Sarah Standard’s violin playing wrings out whatever may be left of the listener's heart. Jenn says that when Sarah joined the band, “I think she was like, okay, I think I can do something with this. Let me just sprinkle some more sadness on top.” The crescendo that many of the songs barrel towards is often led not by Jenn and Mat’s guitar and vocals, but by Standard’s violin. Jenn likens Sarah’s classically-trained playing to Steve Shelley’s anchoring of Sonic Youth, “Being like, I am really good at my instrument. You guys go nuts.”
Despite the parts of the album that build to a wall of sound, levels always return to a sensitivity delicate enough to hear fingers sliding on a fretboard or Mat scratching his beard stubble. Mat says, “The sound man would say, ‘Can you sing louder.’ When people say it enough times, it starts to be like, ‘You know what? Good.’ We were like, we’re just going to make it quieter. You tell us to print the lyrics? I actually print the lyrics and then fucking scribble them all out.”
There are songs about endings and regret. “You left me sitting in/the smoking lounge of an airport.” And self-loathing, “I guess I'll make it clear now/we all hate ourselves.”
Unbearable longing, even for death, “Give everyone who's dead a call/Tell them you think you'll be home soon.” Nostalgia, wishing to go back. “Saw someone today who looked exactly like you/It's funny how the years go by.” Drunken mistakes, “If I could just see straight/I’d probably head straight for the door.” And more nostalgia.
For me, Carissa’s Wierd’s Ugly But Honest was the perfect soundtrack for the time. I was around their age, late teens/early twenties, and we were in Seattle just after the era of grunge and near the end of the century. Relating my own experience to the music, as one does, it expressed my longing for connection, my adoration of others, fear of opening up to anyone, the suffering self I subsumed under all the shows and drinking and house parties. An example: a guy I was hooking up with at the time broke it off because we were only physical and “never talked,” and he wouldn’t be the last person with this complaint. I was too scared to let anyone in, afraid of what they would find.
PT. 2 | DRUNK WITH THE ONLY SAINTS I KNOW
While the songs for “Ugly But Honest” were being written and recorded, I worked with Jenn and Mat at a restaurant called Bimbo’s Bitchin Burrito Kitchen on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Bimbo’s had a pink facade and was decorated in all sorts of Mexican-themed kitsch. One of my roommates worked there, and when a new hire fell through, I was squeezed in for an interview with Jeff, the owner. Jeff and his husband, Wade, would go on to open businesses including Rudy’s Barbershop and The Ace Hotel, and some would call them the Capitol Hill mafia.
After last call and herding out the stragglers, staff ended many nights on the barstools of the restaurant’s suddenly quiet bar, The Cha Cha Lounge. In most of the music scene and at the restaurant, drinking felt compulsory and was romanticized. Mat says, “It was, your drinking is your coat of arms. It’s what separates us from the Christians...To hell with the rest of the world, we’re all friends and we’re all drunk and that’s all we need.”
Despite being underage and the boss’s warnings, I joined most of my coworkers in drinking during shifts and after hours. I’d been drinking underage since I was thirteen, so drinking at work seemed natural, if disrespectful of Jeff, who was a pretty good boss. There was a kind of code; I never drank in the bar before it closed. And if the staff was taking a celebratory shot together for whatever reason there was to celebrate that day, I imagined I was discreet, ducking into the back by the dish pit where Jenn usually worked.
“It was a hell of a way to grow up,” Mat says, “I think it sent me on trajectories that my life otherwise would not have ended up on. It was, for lack of a better term, a rock n roll high school.” Among the forty or so dishwashers, cooks, servers, bartenders, and bouncers at Bimbo’s, I was one of about four non-musicians. I hesitate to make a list of bands with members who, at some time, worked at the establishment. I’ll give it a try, with apologies for its inevitable incompleteness: Love As Laughter, 764-HERO, Magic Magicians, Hole, Juned, Murder City Devils, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Tiffany Anders, Scissor Sisters, Visqueen, Fastbacks, The Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses, Grand Archives, S. The last three of those bands included former members of Carissa’s Wierd.
Music aside, I think what really got me about Carissa’s Wierd was Jenn and Mat’s mutual respect and collaboration. Though they didn’t talk about it, I saw a kind of equality in creative work that I’d never witnessed before between two people socialized as male and female. Something about the way Jenn and Mat related and worked together complicated the misogyny inside and outside of me, and it gave me hope for something different to be possible.
Mat says, “Jenn would write about how she was feeling at the moment. At the time, I thought, ‘Man, she is totally depressed and that is awesome.’ I was jealous of how well she could turn a phrase and put under a microscope and dissect her current depression. And I thought, ‘Oh man, I hope someday I can write lyrics that good.’” In the larger music world, Jenn was hearing, “You’re really good at guitar for a girl.” Even now, Jenn consistently references her love of Mat’s work, pointing out that his song, “Blanket Stare,” is her favorite song on Ugly But Honest. She says, “I was such a fan of Mat. Still, if I make something and he says, ‘Oh I listened to your record,’ and I’ll be like, ‘You did?’”
Jenn and Mat’s songwriting process was unique. In addition to being bandmates and coworkers, they were also roommates. Despite all this shared space and time, the two never wrote in the same space and time. Mat says, “It wasn’t like we collaborated by jamming, like I’d sit her down and I’d be like, ‘Check out this riff,” and then we’d both start singing over it. No, one person would record or write their song fully and then present it to the other and the other would then add their layer or their addition.”
Jenn says, “Here’s these two songwriters who are kind of like parallel on a song but we’re never, like, together.” I believe this melody style is called polyphony, or independent countermelodies. But “counter” belies the way the parts of the song compliment each other, seem to almost empathize with each other. The resulting sound compounds the feeling of isolation and intimacy.
When I ask Mat if he could ever write with someone else in this way, he says, “You’d have to invest the confidence in the other that this was a full fifty-fifty writing process. You’d have to trust that what they come to you with, it’s going to be great, and you’re going to be thrilled to add something to it. And the idea of them coming to you with something bad, that possibility can’t exist. And it’s kind of hard to find someone in life, a writing partner, that you can have that much confidence in.”
PT. 3 | TRY NOT TO THINK AND SCARE YOURSELF WITH ALL YOUR THOUGHTS
Jenn says, “I still find it funny when people tell me it’s too sad for them. There’s still a part of me that’s like, ‘What does that mean?’ I’ve come to understand that there is such a thing as palatable sadness. Middle of the road, unoffensive sadness. And then there’s Carissa’s Wierd.”
Exploring sadness was at the core of the band’s work, and it was also a large part of their downfall. There’s a really great Subpop podcast interview with Jenn about the band’s breakup. The episode is hosted by Jenn’s wife and Alissa Atkins (wife of John Atkins, former Cha Cha employee mentioned previously; it always comes back to Bimbo’s, I swear).
Mat says, “Unfortunately I didn’t realize that Jenn was actually really depressed. And the depression wasn’t cool. I’ve talked to her a bunch about that, ‘Maybe you were crying for help as opposed to bragging about how depressed you were,’ Because I’m the kind of guy who likes to brag about how depressed I am. I don’t want any help. I'm on the other side of the spectrum. I reveled in it for the romanticism of it. I find real comfort in melancholy.”
So while the sadness behind Carissa’s Wierd music was a comfort to Mat, the pathos in Jenn’s songwriting came from a place that nearly killed her. Jenn says, “Because of the style of our band, it went with the image of sad, depressed, you know, too much alcohol.” With Jenn’s depression came alcoholism. She was drinking so much that her body began to shut down.
Mat says, “I had no idea. We thought she was doing it on purpose to be cool, ‘Oh, Jenn’s got a whiskey bottle in her sock. She’s being cool again.’ She thought she was hiding it. We just thought she was being salty. I look back on it, and I so regret that I romanticized her depression when it was actually real depression and not popular melancholy.”
In this continuum — drunken bonding and popular melancholy to self-destructive addiction and depression — it’s hard to recognize the difference, or forecast the future, in oneself or in others. You may think you’re in the clear but then your genes are hiding a predisposition, or life throws you something unbearable, or bad, rotten luck. These are diseases with no clear lines of severity, both chronic illnesses requiring lifelong treatment. Luckily, with a lot of work on her mental health and alcoholism recovery, Jenn is sober and manages her depression. (One more plug for that Subpop podcast interview with Jenn.)
I hoped that I fell in Mat’s camp, that I could safely wallow in melancholy and drink whiskey on a porch swing into old age. I spent the 2000’s drinking through New York City, throwing up in the bathrooms of various workplaces that were as friendly as a restaurant job to alcohol abuse: a record label, a resale clothing shop, a magazine that once had a cover image of a line of coke on a mirror. I moved on to workplaces less friendly to my binges but I kept drinking. It took thirteen years after Ugly But Honest came out, many years after Jenn got sober, for my sadness and drinking to become unbearable.
Maybe I had never been okay, even those early years at Bimbo’s. What must it have been like to know me then, I wonder. I’m sure I was a nightmare to live with. Did I ever do the dishes? (Gia, Brandon, Jasmine, Jada, Carlos, I’m sorry.) Was I ever unselfishly kind or helpful? Maybe I could be fun when I was a little drunk, when my fears were quieted. Maybe I hadn’t progressed into the kind of alcoholism that would make me do terrible things to the people I loved. (I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I loved you and didn’t know what I was doing.)
PT. 4 | IT’S 2 A.M. AND I FEEL LIKE / I MIGHT HAVE DONE SOMETHING RIGHT
When I watch the video of myself interviewing Jenn, there is a moment that scares me a bit. I’m asking Jenn about being grateful for the people we have been in the past because our past selves make us who we are today. I can see that my conviction is missing: I’m not yet grateful for who I’ve been, I’m not yet proud of who I’ve become. And there’s a little bit in me that still may not want to be at all. This part of me, the one who is always recovering, continues to identify with the music Carissa’s Wierd made all those years ago, even if the connection is less desperate and aching, because the feelings have lessened, too.
Jenn went on to write and perform as S and then Jenn Champion, most recently releasing a cover/reworking of Weezer’s blue album. She jokes that her recent work maintains a fidelity to her baby goth self, that while her current music is danceable, you can cry and dance at the same time. Mat and one of Carissa’s Wierd’s drummers, Ben Bridwell, went on to form Band of Horses. Ben’s label planned to release the first Iron and Wine recordings and then introduced Iron and Wine to SubPop. Mat moved on from Band of Horses to Grand Archives and has run a very successful string of bars and restaurants (a nod here to Bimbo’s and the Cha Cha fundamentals). Another former drummer, Sera Cahoone, is a stellar singer/songwriter. And again, I’m probably missing some important vectors.
The members of Carissa’s Wierd went on to make very different kinds of music that is often more accessible and definitely remarkable. Subsequently, the band gets called formative or a stepping stone, as if it served to get its members to the next thing. Something about this characterization bothers me, and it’s not just my fidelity to the band. Carissa’s Wierd inspires fan sites and sold out reunion shows, even a kind of awe in its own former members (“Lightning in a bottle,” Mat says). The focus on members’ more recent work seems to minimize what came before. In the same way, I can be dismissive of my former, messier self. I have hated her, been ashamed of her, pretended she was someone she was not. I have put her out of my mind for long periods of time. Would Carissa’s Wierd be valuable without vectors into delicious electro dance nostalgia, an alt country hero, an indie road trip masterpiece like “Sleepdriving”, and nighttime-talk-show-friendly anthemic rock? Absa-fucking-lutely. Would my life, the life of a self-destructive, angry, bitter, sad-as-hell person, be valuable if I’d died driving home after drinking two bottles of wine at a work event? I try to tell myself yes, even then, you mattered.
Jenn says, “When people talk to me about Carissa’s Wierd, it is like they are impacted by it in this way that I feel so lucky to have been a part of. And, you know, that was like 20 years ago. It’s not like we are a band now. It’s like, 20 years later, having a nineteen year old be like, ‘This is my favorite band, I’m so sad. If I play Carissa’s Wierd really loud, my neighbors knock on my door.’ I just think that was a once in a lifetime thing to be part of probably because there was so much sadness and none of us knew the rules of music so we were like, just making it up.
I think the feeling that caused me to cry through one of those Ugly But Honest 20th anniversary shows was gratitude: for what we were and what we have become. Mat and Jenn were just as magical back then as they are now. Jenn is in LA teaching and making music; Mat is running a restaurant and avidly reading in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula. There was magic in all those saints we worked alongside at Bimbo’s. Revisiting Ugly But Honest reminds me that I, too, am of that time and place. It reminds me to love that shitty young person I was for her absolute cluelessness, her accidental cruelty, her self-centered unkindnesses, her deep pain and sadnesses, her bottomless loneliness and music fandom and bravery and passion. Her longing for things she never had. For the things she could not imagine that she would one day have. Even back then, I had more than I ever knew.
Mat says, “Whenever we get to talking, me and Jenn, whether it’s on the phone or we see each other, we’re naturally just back together, there’s a kinship or something, I don’t even know how to describe it but we’re very at ease with each other. It is nice. Maybe sometimes I take it for granted. I should call her more often.”
Does this happen to us all? The realization that the only saints we know, or as close to saints as we will ever know, have been right there with us, wherever we were, not in some imagined better, other place? Maybe, just maybe, accepting that one of those saints with a tilted halo is oneself? In the same way I love Jenn and Mat for who they were and who they have become, I can see the way to loving myself. We can find new and better ways to love one another. We can put away all that regret.
FOR SAM
Laura Lampton Scott is a fiction writer and music fan whose work has appeared in Hobart, Tin House online, and Michigan Quarterly, among other publications. You can find a selection of her incidental playlists here.