PODCASTS
Explore our Spinnaker Radio podcasts archives— a collection of lively conversations with bands, artists, professors and more. Our dedicated staff and volunteers work hard to bring you engaging content that reflects the spirit of our station. From discussions about music to insightful conversations, this content displays what makes Spinnaker Radio special. Promoting diverse voices is important to us because we are dedicated to diversity.
Weekly Shows
CASS CONVERSATIONS
The CASS Champions discuss subjects centered around their well-being, and their college and personal experiences.
Nest News
An audio version of Spinnaker TV’s longest running live show, Nest News, consisting of weekly news updates, sports and weather, every Friday @ 3pm!
Huddle Up U
Join Jacob Justice, Johvan Merilus, and Ethan Howick as they discuss everything related to college sports!
Momentum Motor- sport Meeting
New to NASCAR? Want to get invested? Each week, host Wyatt Thompson provides all the news you need on the latest NASCAR, Indycar, F1 happenings, jam packed with exclusive reviews, driver analyses and so much more!
CASS Conversations Ep. 4 on Spotify
The CASS Champions give advice to incoming freshmen and talk about their post-graduation plans, summer, and music.
CASS Conversations Ep. 3 on Spotify
The CASS Champions discuss the importance of community and share tips they would give their younger selves.
Exclusive Interviews
by Jack Griffis
“Everyone Asked About You,” by Everyone Asked About You, on their album Everyone Asked About You, is probably my favorite emo song of all time, closely followed by American Football’s “Stay Home,” and Everyone Asked About You’s “Across Puddles.” I wrote the first part of that one cause I thought it’d be funny. But in all seriousness, EAAY is one of the hidden greats of the second wave emo scene, bringing Twee, small town earnest emotion to the slowly drifting Emo iceberg, as their two vocalists infuse each poetic syllable with waves of melancholy, nostalgia, and 90s teenage music-scene drama. Numero reviving the band, repressing their albums, and creating the compilation Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts, was an utter godsend after listening to kinda cruddy MP3’s of their first S/T off youtube and praying for a way to add it to my Spotify bummer playlist. I am of course, proud in my unyielding Neo-Hipster tendencies to proclaim I liked them before Numero picked them up, but at the same time I’m so joyful they have a wider outlet to reach people and start touring again that I can forget my childish territorial claims. If only they would come to Florida instead of just bouncing around the west coast.
Formed in 1997, EAAY was an Arkansas flash, there, and gone two years later. During that time they would record two EP’s and a full length album (which would not be released till 2012), play a handful of shows, and disappear forever– remembered only by avid Sophie’s Floorboard users and some scene locals. And so they sat dormant for a while, existing primarily online through youtube rips of their albums that were uploaded 11 years ago (the person who uploaded it has now edited the description stating that Numero picked up EAAY, excitedly claiming “good news!” which is a touch heartwarming that they remembered it after all these years. Once a emo always a emo). I was introduced to them in roughly the beginning of my senior year of high school, late 2021, by my buddy Liam who sent me a link to that very youtube video. I would spend that semester listening to their S/T EP over and over again, lying on my bed, just staring at the ceiling with the sort of youthful misery common those who have become 17 and felt (very rightly so) that the world is in fact very very cruel, and very very strange. Eventually, I’d discover that their later album was in fact on spotify (although the rest of their work wasn’t) and listen to that album in a similar manner– over and over, particularly the song “Taxi.” I didn’t think it was as good as the earlier S/T, but it was still in their neighborhood of style and fit well into the whole “awkward, sad teenage boy” thing I had going on (and I now know that said album, Let’s Be Enemies, actually rips just as hard as their first S/T). And so it went– Let’s Be Enemies got taken off spotify eventually, and so I was relegated to listening once more on youtube. And so it went– until suddenly, out of the blue in 2023, Numero announced they had nabbed up EAAY and would be releasing their collected work– and eventually, I was lucky enough to get a Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts cassette in the mail a year or so later. I was in love with the band, in love with their sound, in love with the sort of contemplative melancholy they drew out of me.
Such obscurity as their early years made it so they were somewhat exempt from the harsh criticism of early online musical outlets, and their belated release of a compilation made it so they once again flew under the radar– but the court of public opinion generally seems to ring in their favor. From a relatively even-minded SputnikMusic 3.5, to a 3.83 on RYM that comes with a fair smattering of five star reviews talking about the emotional rawness as the album (reviews I’m inclined to agree with). The general consensus from pre-Numero reviews is that they did solid work, with real heart, and disappeared before perhaps they could’ve made it big on an indie label. Such is the tale of a thousand other 90s emo bands. So why did EAAY endure over almost 30 years, through old youtube rips, to forum discussions in 2012, to now in their revival under Numero?
Why? Because EAAY’s sound is unique, beautiful, and a crossroads for the beginning of touchy-feely indie songwriting, the rising wave of tweeness that first rose with Pop-Punk (before falling away, very rapidly), second-wave Emo moving from its hardcore roots, and this rising sense of melancholy, a sort of post-modern teenage malaise that accompanied the end of the millennium. It was a natural fit for my time as an overly sensitive teenager, and even better for my growing into a more respectively cynical and melancholic adult. Like Carissa’s Wierd, there wont be another EAAY– But, they may release more music, even putting out an EP earlier this year. We won’t be focusing on that however– we’ll be turning our heads their compilation of earlier work, Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts, and the music contained within (mainly so I can classify it as “one album” for the sake of my criteria of choosing two songs from an album to review.)
"Everyone Asked About You": The Self Titled Song From Their Self Titled Album
The final track to an outstanding opening salvo of an EP- “Everyone Asked About You” is a twinkly, yet still focused and intense ending track that calls together the S/T EP’s themes- youth, loneliness, love, the awkwardness and miscommunication that is part of being a human being. It’s raw, fitting for a small time EP, with lots of that warm tape-recording sound present over the recording.
Opening up with some raw, restrained screamo-riffs, before returning to the wind-chime guitar so associated with Midwest emo, “everyone asked about you” is the perspective of a youth at a party wondering about her counterpart: where is he? No one’s heard from him for days, weeks, what feels like months- at that party, that show, he said he’d be there, but he never was. It was not common practice to take a computer out of your pocket and pester someone over 5 different apps if they didn’t show up- they just didn’t show up at all, and no one knew why until they did decide to show. There’s a certain melancholy, a breakup perhaps fast approaching, punctuated by increasing gaps of silence. This is the nexus of the Teenage angst at the heart of the the EP, a great focusing crystal that brings the feelings of loneliness and uncertainty together into one overpowering shout- “EVERYONE ASKED ABOUT YOU” cries singer Hannah Vogan, fighting with her guitar to be heard. It’s abrasive almost, sounding on the verge of tears, yet every subtlety is washed away by the years of compression and cheap studio recording system into a perfect Lo-Fi mixture of melancholy. “Each moment passed slowly and cruelly” is a bit of simplistic yet heavy emo poetry, turned into a haymaker of a line by Vogan’s passionate and somber-twee shouting.
The song to me is an ever present reminder of just how ephemeral the burning passions of our youth can be, just how quickly flames can be snuffed out– in the back of my mind, I’ve always held that the subject of Vogan’s singing died in a car crash that evening, and everyone mills about, unsure where he is, never knowing the terrible truth. It’s never mentioned in the song, there’s no verbal evidence of any to note on the interpretation, but for some reason it feels like such a tragic sort of song– even if the reason for the subject’s absence is as mundane as a breakup (also unspoken, but with somewhat more evidence to support it), there’s a depressive absence that hangs over the entire track like a ghost, an unseen figure, someone forever gone, not just from the party, but from the life of the singer itself. Maybe the subject left town and didn’t tell anyone, moved out of their cheap apartment to find greener pastures. Maybe the subject died. Maybe there’s a breakup fast approaching on the horizon, a train that neither wants to admit, that’ll crash between them and detonate like a 90mph emotional atom bomb. It’s a anthem for youth, not the rose-tinted memories of parties and skipping classes, but the dark spaces between those fervent bursts of joy, the equally fervent lows and sudden, unexplained endings to friendships and relationships that never give resolve or closure to either party, because at the end of the day both are just teenagers– flawed, emotional, unable to communicate the feelings they wish so desperately to communicate. Surely, why the subject of “Everyone Asked About You” is absent from the party is unimportant to the structure of the actual song, but the mysterious, open-ended nature of the absence is what gives the song such a heart-striking tone. Plenty of people, offline and on, have left, without a word– the dead of night. Suddenly text messages just stop going through, DM’s don’t send, you don’t see them around anymore. Baker act. Moving quietly. Hospitalization. Dead parent. Social Scandal. Maybe, like Colm in the Banshees of Inisherin, they just didn’t plain like me anymore. But whatever the case, someone is gone, and everyone asked about them. And yet no one could come up with an answer.
Somehow, the specific memory I associate with “Everyone Asked About You,” isn’t of mourning the still living, missing an absentee, or anything of that nature. It’s bouncing back after a miserable year. My first semester of college was spent moving in and out between my house and dorm, seeing doctor after doctor for health issues, psychological woes and struggling through every day. It was one of the hottest autumns in my recent memory, and the dread about the climate was palpable, weighing on me and dragging me into depths of misery previously unplumbed. The entire world was bleak and pointless on a scale I had yet to comprehend at 18 years old, in a way that was pushing me to almost completely detach from going to classes, seeing my family, or talking to my friends. Yet somewhere along late November, I suddenly began to pick up the pieces of my life. I passed my classes well enough, got back in contact with the people who hadn’t heard from me for a while, and got a little spring back in my step. Admittedly I had already burnt up the semester in a haze of different medicines and their side effects, wasted days lying in bed so sick from panic I couldn’t move, and classes skipped in the name of going in and out of sleep on any number of prescription sedatives because it was less painful than being awake. But there was still hope for me, hope that maybe next semester I might bounce back. I remember feeling that hope in a very palpable way, one early December evening, right before the semester had ended.
It was 40 degrees out, raining, that cold sort of heavy rain that’ll get down through your clothes and give you the shivers, but if you’ve got a decent rain jacket on it just feels like you’re just getting peppered with little dots of concentrated freeze. I had to make a both-ways journey home to get some documents I had forgotten at my parents house, and on the way back, through the night and the thick rain, I saw the red neon sign of the local publix-attached Chinese place I had hit up countless times throughout high school, and even more when I first started driving around the summer of 2022. I hadn’t eaten there since college started. The inside looked warm, appealing– a cashier sat idly by and looked out at our shared, chill-soaked world, waiting for any sort of business before they could finally close in two hours. For once, I felt decent enough to eat some restaurant food, and the heat of Orange Chicken was alluring under such inclement conditions. I ordered, waited around for a while, before driving back on the emptied out 9B, unbothered by the downpour as there was no real risk with few other drivers out on the road. The thermostat read 42, 41, then dropped to 40, and for a brief moment I felt peace– a false peace of course, its not like a low evening temperature meant much had changed and the world had suddenly amended itself, but still it was peace that was rare in those days. Parking my car, I got the steaming hot chicken out and covered it with my body to prevent it from getting rained on too hard, and popped my headphones on. Numero had just finished publishing the entire first EP on spotify, so I didn’t have to fiddle with youtube and keep my phone on in my pocket. I just slid it in my jacket, and let the twinkly guitars of “Everyone Asked About You” run through, hearing faintly the tapping of rain on my jacket hood, and then eventually the roof of my dorm. Outside the window streetlights danced under the torrent, and I watched as headlights passed by, obscured under darkness and rain. The world remained a cruel, bleak place, yet inside my dorm, there was hot chicken, solitude from my roommate, and a window to some strange roadside beauty. For a brief moment, there was peace, and “Everyone Asked About You” was its soundtrack.
Thank You For Showing Me This Song and Walking Me Across The Water
The full length album Let’s Be Enemies, later compiled into Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts, has two tracks that I think would’ve been perfect ending notes, beautiful and tear-jerking such that they would’ve been the slam dunk to a (recently unearthed) hidden gem of an emo album. The first is the magnificent “Taxi,” a song built on the small tragedy of goodbyes that comes very early on in the album, and “Across Puddles,” the antepenultimate track that feels equally predisposed to a farewell. Bearing a much more spiritual feeling than the prior Taxi (with the line “walking me across the water” feeling almost as though a veiled reference to the exploits of Jesus), “Across Puddles” strikes a chord as miserable, teary-eyed farewell between two people, one of whom will fare much worse after the split. It sounds amazing on Cassette, and sometimes can still bring a tear to my eye when I’m in a certain mood.
Combining the atmospheric, two-tone guitar they’ve refined throughout the rest of the album with a simplistic but still heavy-hearted drum backing, and a maraca that gives the entire track a rhythmic chest, alongside the always ecstatic bass work of Matt Bradley that fences in the sound and gives it a real narrative. Sonically my favorite off of Lets Be Enemies, right next to Taxi. There’s a real journeyful sense of sorrow that calls to mind an image of two people walking together, step by step, before parting– a parting that wounds both deeply, but one more so than the other. It’s a heaviness that sticks with the drum section, in its sluggishness and bass-heavy nature. There is a distance that will never, ever be bridged after this parting, emphasized by the dissonant radio static intercut with reversed and chopped recordings of songs from earlier in the album. It all seems so faint, so distorted by time and distance, just like the relationship between the two figures within the song.
To me, the song is and always will feel akin to an admission of death or the more mundane realization that you may never bounce back when certain people leave your life. “Thank you for holding my hand/ and walking me across the water/ But now/ I’m alone, struggling for air,” calls to mind a vision of a struggling body, drowning within the water. I would not go so far to call this a suicide note of a song, but rather finding that someone critical to your life, a pillar of your being, has walked away, that you collapse without them. There’s no blame, no pointing the finger and stating their absence lead to this– but you both know their presence was what was keeping you above the water. Like “Everyone Asked About You,” “Across Puddles” is made open-ended and almost ethereal by the mysterious nature of the two figures– there’s less elaboration between them even in the former; no party mentioned, no prior commitments, simply the image of two figures walking across water, and one falling beneath the waves. It’s a powerful symbol of the crippling weight of loneliness, of the pain that the absence of certain people in our life puts on us. Even sans the imagery of a large body of water, “Across Puddles” makes frequent usage of water as some kind of metaphor for distance– it opens with “I didn’t realize/ it was raining till you walked away,” itself a powerful piece of imagery, reminiscent of noir films and the splitting of two tragic hearts. One must remain behind, alone, standing under the rain as it soaks through clothes and gets in the eyes, intermixing with tears as the one who leaves retreats into the cover of fog and mist.
I find myself not returning to perhaps a specific memory in regards to “Across Puddles,” rather, like the distorted howling at the end of the song, it is a greatly mixed composite of disparate sections of memories, combined together into a howling mass of what no longer is. I think of when Kyle and I stopped hanging out in 4th grade. When I stopped hearing over email from someone I knew in elementary school. When I kept thinking that I had the number of my best friend’s mom from elementary school, and that surely, when he moved away in 6th grade I’d reach out through her and get his contact info– but never did, and kept thinking about it years afterward as the years passed and the gap became more impenetrable, and now, with his somewhat generic name, he is impossible to find. The old online groups that I was part of that just gradually disintegrated. The friend group in the first half of high school I’m no longer connected with, that I spent so many hours out by rivers, at our bud’s house, out by firepits, when the weather could still feel cold out into spring. I still get a sting of burning on my face when I remember certain faces, remember the person I was when those faces were still acquainted with me. Thank you for holding my hand, and carrying me through these years, everyone I’ve ever known; but now I’m alone, struggling for air. Although my plea may never reach a single soul, I still think of those I knew in glowing terms.
This has been Twin Falls: Music and Memories, and I’ve enjoyed going over one of my favorite emo bands. I’ll see you next week with another review, and I hope you have a good weekend. And as always, catch my radio show Jacksonville Vice, airing on Spinnaker Radio, 95.5 FM WSKR, 11 AM every Monday.
More Posts for Show: Jacksonville Vice
Blood, Guts and Broken Walls at orlando's S.P.O.T
I decided to digress on my standard format of reviews (which will be returning with full length articles next week!) and instead follow down another path, influenced by the saint of all Gonzo journalists, Hunter S. Thompson, and recount my tale of debauchery and concert-going this weekend. Through an odd series of coincidences involving a digital friend who lives on a boat, I got in touch with one of the members of Orlando based HxC band HRTDEMON on a random discord server some months ago (unknowingly– I wasn’t on some underground fame seeking journalism quest so much as my buddy Mikey invited me to a cesspool with a title I hesitate to repeat in writing). Neither of us knew anything about the other, but when Lia started talking about Society of the Spectacle, I knew we were gonna be fast friends. Frantic conversations about grindcore, bad life decisions, critical theory, and all manner of nightmares from the mind of two absolute punk-theory-losers, she introduced me to all her Orlando buddies on yet another Discord server– deeper the rabbit hole goes. Here I met the rest of the band, and a bunch of other Orlando (and outlying area) based punks, miscreants, and transgender-riffwarriors who I’m proud to call friends. I had been in mosh and show retirement since I had been struck low by a mysterious stomach illness in January that’s left me much weaker than I used to be, and much more susceptible to pain with longer recovery times, and frankly I’m still not up to snuff. But when I heard from Reya that at the S.P.O.T “they kill each other” in the pits, I smelled blood in the water and I wanted in. HRTDEMON dropped out, but I was still in– I love crowdkilling. I love mass pit violence. I will always be the kind of guy to defend hardcore moshing that gets people hit and enrages the spirit. It’s cleansing, it’s like a caveman pre-war rush that brushes the rust off the soul and really gets some energy out. My first hardcore pit had me reeling in pain for 3 days afterward– but it was my best. After nearly a year out of the wanton violence of hardcore, I needed a fix, and I needed it bad.
So I traveled to Orlando, savoring every moment of the I4 pilgrimage with the calmest smooth jazz I could put to muster. I figured I wanted to keep my ears as unfatigued as possible before I was in. 2 and a half hours of miserable straight line driving and absurd toll booth charges that hit me like a highwayman. But eventually I grabbed my friend Hannah and headed down to the S.P.O.T for a night of bloodshed and some solid central FL thrashing. We got there early, met up with my buddy Reya at the door, and hung around for a while in that way people unfamiliar with anyone at a scene do: standing awkwardly in a corner, occasionally talking between ourselves, and remarking on when they were gonna finally start up. FISTMEETFACE, the first band, describing themselves as “BLACKWATER VIOLENCE,” took a bit to get going, but admittedly thats what everyone expects at a show. Punctuality isn’t a word any of us know, and frankly that sort of thing is for the better. But when they did start– man, did things get alive. Off the top of my head, by the end of the first song I had landed on my leg funny doing spin kicks, and screwed with my right arms socket by slamming into someone. Within 30 seconds I was already panting and trying to catch my breath, and getting beaten around wherever the wind took me. I wasn’t in Jax anymore. The people here played hard, and they played for keeps. So I got back in, swinging my arms and legs like a mad man, shoving anyone who got too close, and getting slammed in the head a few times. At one point I caught a heel kick square on the nose and could’ve sworn I was bleeding like a stuck pig– but I wasn’t, so I kept going. After about 3 songs I was so winded I was gonna throw up, so I went into the bathroom, put my head up against the wall, and tried not to think about how loud my heartbeat was in my own skull. I was outta practice. I was a weak old man trying to come back to the field in a sport that had moved on without him. More importantly I was a heavyset, asthmatic man who hadn’t regularly exercised since he was 16 somehow expecting that intense cardiovascular-endurance heavy, irregular motion based dancing would not tire him out simply because it wasn’t called exercise. So I sat there for a while. Trying not to puke my guts out, and taking drinks from the sink when I could. Eventually I slumped against a wall, head in hands. I made a miserable sight– skin so red from overheating, hair fried from sweat, just shaking and wheezing like some industrial tomato. People walked by and asked if I was good– I had to reiterate, yeah I’m fine, just really out of shape. It’s a testament to the good hearted nature of most of these punks that they saw someone lookin screwed 40 ways to Sunday, and made sure he wasn’t OD’ing or having a heart attack or something. Even (who I assume to be) one of the proprietors of the venue, walking by, asked if I was alright and said “yeah, its all that volcanic ash comin from Mexico. Makes it hard to breathe.” I’m not sure how correct that is, but he seemed like a solid sort of fellow.
I contemplated for a while. Was I too old for hardcore (20)? Too old to mosh? Too old to fight it out and get slugged in the face? Too fat and out of shape for the game? Should I retire permanently and resign myself to listening to Yacht Rock and simply nodding my head at the outer edges of a venue when I went to shows? Much to consider. In the meantime of my asthmatic-melancholy however, a small crowd had formed outside the bathroom; by no means a line waiting for a spot, but people like me, who had already found their energy reserves exhausted. We chatted for a bit– a fair few were from Daytona, complaining about how cruddy their scene was, how aggressive the cops were to any sort of live music that didn’t take place in a stadium. One, a man who had just been kicked in the groin, was from Port St. Lucie. I talked about Jax and how many Riverside Arts Market shows had been busted up for lack of proper permit, and the closing of archetype (not knowing that two days after I came home, I’d hear Rain Dogs was closing too). All of us agreed though– the Orlando scene was hard, and we were all envious. After a while of standing and chatting I figured that I had paid my 5$ (a reduced price if you were moshing) and I was gonna get its worth in bruises and blood. I think (although I was uncertain) FISTMEETSFACE was still playing by the time I got out, and I remember walking with some kinda aggression in my heart, each step thudding and purposeful, through the narrow hallway that lead out into the main chamber of the S.P.O.T, and crashing like a hurricane into the great spasming mob. I wasn’t too old or out of shape– no one was. We were there for pain and swinging limbs, no matter if we could two step for 30 seconds or 300.
Intermission, some good conversation, people milling about. I’m getting more and more exhausted and already I can feel the pain of repeated blows settling into my bones. But it’s all worth it– that rush I missed so badly is back, and I am at a perfect crossroads of thinking “I’m gonna hurt so bad in the morning,” and “Why don’t I do this more often?” a contradictory joy that I’m sure is known to many. I met another man named Jack, a writer from Port St. Lucie (the same who had been kicked quite unfortunately earlier in this article) who, besides our shared name, I found I had a surprising amount in common with. I was never a social butterfly when it came to shows as a 16 year old when I first started going, but now I found myself in constant good company, laughs and smiles in abundance.
NOHEARTLEFT came next, and I was refreshed enough to throw myself back into harms way. The pit was nice and warmed up from the first band, and suddenly people were getting a lot more confident jumping off the stage into the crowd, slamming into the walls of the venue, and doing these odd acrobatic-esque cartwheel kicks into the outer walls of people. I was back in, slamming, biting at the air, catching stray limbs and spin kicks in the stomach not even flinching. At one point I accidentally shoved someone crashing into the outer wall of people too hard, sending them flying across the pit where about halfway to the other edge they fell to the ground. Part of the hazard, sure, but I still felt like some piece of crap– A mustached gentlemen reminiscent of Earl Hickey but with long hair and glasses brought me over by the shoulder to apologize (As I was too shameful to cross it on my own) where I was assured no real damage had been sustained. We met up afterwards and he didn’t seem too upset, and was glad I wasn’t hesitant to apologize– like I said, the occasional over-forceful tumble was part of the hazards of the hobby. But I digress, NOHEEARTLEFT themselves were a force to be reckoned with– their drummer was an utter barbarian on the bass drum, and the rest of the band was absolutely no slump. As Reya put it at the end of the night(paraphrased through the haze of exhaustion and head-blows that influences my memory) “A lot of bands come through here thanking us for letting them play, and they don’t seem to think that within 5 years they’ll be touring up and down the east coast… There’s a lot of outstanding talent.” I can’t agree more, and NOHEARTLEFT I hope is one of those very bands that terrorizes the venues of Atlanta, Charleston, DC, New York, Newark, and Boston. An absolutely brutal band that got the crowd fighting like someone had laced the air with the adrenochrome of A Clockwork Orange.
Up next was andwhentheskywasopened, one of those bands that proves my motto that the only decent metalcore bands are Earth Crisis, and every local band with a good pit. Metalcore isn’t meant to be seen in some glossy high production value music video, or a warped tour stage, or a coworkers iphone. It’s meant to be experienced via knuckles to your skull in a sweaty venue. People threw down for andwhentheskywasopened. One might expect the spontaneous explosions of energy that a pit demands might lessen as a show goes on, as more people leave, and get exhausted like I was. But the exhaustion of the pit is something mystical– for all the fatigue you experience, all the breath out of your lungs, all the people leaving, it seems that everyone only hardens their resolve of fighting and thrashing. Like the last soldiers condemned to death in a trench, they fight like hell. The crowd on the outskirts more and more became a target for the rotating gyre of spin-kicking sprinters who ran through them like a racetrack. The band relished in it. They gave a murderous energy to each chord, each beat, each scream, that inflamed all of our hearts and seemed to set the entire venue ablaze. What a brutal set– unfortunately, I can’t remember the lyrics or names amid all the haze, but if you ever get the chance to see them live, take it, and you’ll see what I mean. I think (although I’m not sure) it was their set that I got kicked in the groin and spent a good few minutes in the hallway screamin like I’d been shot.
After a few songs, a few more times of catching my breath, AWTSWO’s set ended and I sat outside and caught up with Reya and Hannah for a while. Made a few friends along the way that came through the doors, and hit my inhaler to maybe see if I could get some kinda breath back in my lungs. No avail, but it was worth a shot. When I came back to the impromptu gatherings outside the venue and was chatting with Reya, I heard the proprietor get on stage and shout “IF I FIND OUT WHO DID IT…” before the threat was muffled behind the door. According to Reya someone had punched a hole in the bathroom wall, ensuring its closure. This was devastating news to me– I got free refills of water from the sink and also in general lollygagged in there cause it was the coldest place in the venue, and now suddenly I was relegated to having to sit outside in the 80 degree Orlando night, which admittedly was surprisingly pleasant– I wasn’t besieged by mosquitos like I normally was at this kind of show (which I’ll chalk up to the “incense” that was being lit by countless patrons), and the conversation was good. There’s this prevailing reactionary view of punks and punk culture that its a bunch of asocial miscreants who all wanna cut each other’s guts out at the slightest provocation, some funnyhouse mirror of the Hells Angels mixed in with teenage angst and dyed hair; its not really the case. Admittedly, it’s not as though we’re a bunch of peaceniks, as evidenced by the fact that there was essentially a bounty put on the head of whoever punched the wall given out by the proprietor– but after the 15 minutes of circular thrashing hate, everyone’s pretty chill. I was asking around about late night burger spots cause I promised my buddy I was staying with some hamburgers as compensation and people were tossing out reccomendations as they would in any normal sort of social scene. General conversation about the mysterious wall-puncher was abound. Hannah and I sat on some greasy patch of asphalt and she discussed the complexities of Orlando rave culture (which I had never experienced) while I had somehow wandered onto the topic of English Highwaymen. Ever a novice to the Orlando scene, I sat on the outskirts of circles trying to find a “in” to conversation, trying to catch a little air, make a few friends, and in general just hung around on the outside. The “door” (a short entrance hall to the main venue) had a huge fan and my other friend, Reya in it, so after a while we just bummed around in there and waited for the soundchecks to pass and caught some cool air.
Second Impact was some insane hardcore that made good use not only of the stage, but everywhere outside. One vocalist writhed in agony on the floor, appeared dead for brief moments, while the other would hold the mic directly to his face with the rage of a wounded bull, (clamblunt on instagram capture some outstanding photos of their performance, and of all the other bands.) The entire crowd was alight as two stepping and hurricane limbs overtook the floor, encouraged by both vocalists. Even beyond the very physical nature of their show, their musical ability was profound; their usage of breakdowns was as precise and violent as a mad surgeon armed with scalpel, each member working the crowd into a frenzy with their particular skillset. Needless to say I took a few heavy blows in the pit during this one, but we all kept on fighting and pushing– the music was too good not too. The best bands can make you fight on in the pit past the point of exhaustion or overwhelming pain, and already two inhaler hits down and still feeling the strain of the blood in my skull, Second Impact kept me in.
Another intermission passed that I spent laying on concrete trying to reach some level of blood pressure stability while I chatted up with my buddies.
Fingerswoventogether was a screamo/skramz outfit that really impressed me with their opening proclamation that the first song didn’t have a moshing section (but we found a way) and their complete indifference to us represented by their backs being turned for the entire show. It was a good bit, and trust me when I say these things weren’t just flash either– It was some real heavy stuff they were putting out that night, and I enjoyed every second. The hate and melancholy a solid Skramz band can put out is really something to be astonished with– theres a real spark of emotion within each moment that burns on like a blue sun of straight despondency, and overcasts sorrow against the sea of flailing limbs and bruises. All this to say, I really liked their stuff and hope perhaps I can see them again sometime. It’s a conclusion I come too on pretty much every punk band I see live– there’s rarely, if ever been one I walked away from and thought “man, that sucked.”
Backslide was the final band, and man did they put on a hell of a concluding show. I had exhausted myself so much that I mainly stood on the outskirts of the crowd for the better part of the show, but during their final song, I started going in to make sure I squeezed every last drop of hitting and getting hit before I had to go. At one point I had grown so fervent I slugged out a marital-arts dummy that someone brought on wheels to the show, and jumped back into some guys swinging arms. Once more backslide proved that Metalcore isn’t all overproduced garbage but instead a brutal mix of some of the best hard genres out there. It was a perfect end to a night of utter brutality, screaming, and swinging. I watched my buddy Reya go all in on the moshing, breaking away from her post to give the crowds that night absolute hell– it was a sight to behold. I think (but I’m not sure) I got slugged in the skull one last time– and if I did it was all worth it. I couldn’t believe it when the song ended and the crowd slowed, we all stared at each other, a mass of camo and black T-shirts, covered in bruises, some blood, all dazed, coated in sweat, hair fried from pulling, sweating and headbanging– pain fell general all cross the crowd, and we looked to each other with warm smiles and fist-bumps. One fellow commented to me that he “didn’t know what the hell you were doing, but it was hard!” as Reya had put it, my lack of coordination and rhythm, whether applied to two-stepping, swinging arms, or spin-kicking had resulted in me going “ignorant in the pit,” nothing but pure motion as I tried to estimate how to use my limbs like great bludgeons against myself and others. We were all out of sorts, and even walking to my car I felt pain along my entire body that I knew, though intense now, would be so, so much worse come morning. I looked at my prescription strength Ibuprofen that night, knowing good well it wouldn’t be enough for the pain I was gonna grapple with. There was still some night-work to be done; I had to drop off a friend, and grab burgers for another who was letting me stay the night at his apartment as compensation for staying up so late on my account (Fat Shack is very good for late night burgers, if any of you were wondering), and in general just make sure I didn’t pass out from exhaustion on the road. All three I accomplished magnificently, though the late-night UCF frats at Fat Shack looked at my beaten, homemade Jean shorts wearing self with an odd sort of eye– but to hell with the squares, I had fun.
All in all, the sensational and explosive violence of the Hardcore scene hangs over Orlando like some vengeful phantom– at the crossroads of every band heading south to Miami and Tampa, and all the talent from Miami and Tampa heading north to Atlanta and beyond, Orlando is like a trading post in an apocalyptic world thats grown into a thriving, rough and tumble sort of city, coated in gritty shades of pitblood and denim. The moshers there fight hard and without the kind of restraint you’ll find in any pit around Jax, and frankly, that made my trip down there all the better. Should you ever get the chance, and you’ve got a mug that can take a hit, I can’t recommend going down to S.P.O.T enough– I enjoyed my trip down there for sure.
by Jack Griffis
Spinnaker Radio DJ, Host of Jacksonville Vice
Note From Author: Heads up! I’ve got a sinus infection this week, which means another 1 song mini-article as I’d still like to write with the energy I have. Additionally, this week I’m beginning a new project to broaden my horizons. I’ve gotten 86 albums, ranging the gamut from Christian industrial, Japanese noise rock, avant garde medieval compositions, and good ol’ 90s alt rock, all downloaded onto an old Ipod Nano. Their common factor? I’ve never listened to any of them. For 90%, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the band. I’ve deleted all my streaming apps. I’ll be listening to two of these albums a day, compiling my thoughts on each, and publishing a mega article near the end of the fall semester. Be on the lookout for it!
Big news for those of you who loved the indie kick I’ve been on as of late, because we’re going to one of the first indie albums that settled in my mind, and has still kicked around however many years later from its introduction. We’re taking a step back from Jack Stauber’s endlessly inventive synths and acoustics, and stepping back into charted territories of electric guitars, soft-singing male vocalists, and meat and potatoes (but the exceptional kind of meat and potatoes– 5 sticks of butter, Alaskan Golds, and the finest Wagyu, treated with kisses and grass grown over 1000 years until its moment of death) 90s alternative rock. Charmingly catchy poetics, head-bobbing guitar work, and a kind-hearted sincerity mark one of the great achievements of the 90s alt scene: Built To Spills’ There’s Nothing Wrong With Love.
Formed in Boise, Idaho, like the previously discussed Carissa’s Wierd, Built To Spill brought a particularly west-coast indie sensibility to the outer sphere of the Mormon Belt, centered around the vocal and guitar talents of their only permanent member, Doug Martsch. The band centers around his exceptional skills, and like a postmodern Steely Dan, he makes use of a rotating cast of musicians that, far from making each album a sea of confusion, only further harmonize their shared skills into something wonderful. This is only amplified on 1994’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love: Drummer Andy Capp, and bassist Brett Nelson formed a triple threat with Martsch, a veritable armada of musical talent that would cause There’s Nothing Wrong With Love to become a smash hit, propelling Built To Spill into a household name of Indie music, and like an atom bomb of heart-string playing vulnerability, forever altered the cynicism of the genre.
I’m not alone in my near-worship of this album: the notoriously sharp tongued critics of early Pitchfork gave it a 9.3/10, with other reviews bouncing between 3.5’s to a perfect 5/5. It’s beloved, a watershed moment that changed the genre, and permanently branded its brand of smile inducing lyricism into my heart.
I was lucky enough to see Built To Spill play live at Jackrabbits during my Freshman year at UNF, and its an experience I’ll never forget. 90 degree, overcrowded room, 5$ waters, atrocious bathrooms, and yet Doug Martsch’s beautiful voice cut through all the muddle. They didn’t exclusively play tracks off of There’s Nothing Wrong With Love of course, but each one they did play gave so much life to already evocative tracks. I’ll never forget smashing an All Star Plate at Waffle House at 1AM with my buddy Nathan after the concert ended, and then passing out in a sweaty mess on my dorm bed once I finally got back to UNF. This album has stuck with me since I was 14, and 6 years on I hope to listen to it for 6 more, and so on after that. Strap in, and get ready for one of my favorite indie albums ever.
Wicked Stab of Nostalgia Without Context: “Twin Falls,” 7 Years On
Sharp-eyed readers will notice that although I mention first being exposed to this album “6 years ago,” the anachronistic caption above makes note that it was in fact 7 since I was first exposed to the less than two minute ballad that is “Twin Falls.” There’s a simple explanation for that– my first exposure to Built To Spill didn’t come from Built To Spill themselves, but from a cover of “Twin Falls” on the Ben Folds Five album Naked Baby Photos, where they perform a live version with Ben Fold’s outstanding pianowork taking the place of Doug Martsch’s guitar (Coincidentally, I saw Ben Folds live in Savannah over the summer during their paper airplane tour, and prayed with all my might for Ben to grab my airplane and play Twin Falls. It didn’t happen). I first listened to that album at 13, courtesy of my friend Nathan, who was pretty much the sole reason for me learning so much about 90s alt rock, and is also the reason I saw so many sick concerts. We had no access to youtube or any other sort of music playing sites while at the after school program, so to alleviate the malaise of waiting 4 hours for your parents to pick you up, he ripped all the 90s CDs his dad owned onto a flashdrive, and gave me a copy of the files to enjoy on the computer’s in built music software. Frankly thats the only reason those hours were tolerable– but I digress. For a year I labored under the illusion that “Twin Falls” was Ben Fold’s own original composition, and frankly was upset he never made any more songs in its evocative, brief, and melancholic style– a short, punchy tune that called to mind a life that the listener had never lived, yet struck a chord as though it did.
Imagine my surprise when a year later, I decided to actually look up “Twin Falls” and found out that it was in fact made by a band called Built To Spill, and the album that “Twin Falls” came off of was quite well regarded. I Youtube2Mp3’d the entire album (that being in those dark ages between the fall of the Napster Empire (which I was not around to see) and my parents letting me have a Spotify account– I was a musical visigoth scraping crappy 192 kbps MP3’s off the walls of a long gone empire at that point) and organized it on my Itunes into a playlist so it appeared to be an actual album. I gave their “Twin Falls” a listen, found it just as satisfactory as the Ben Folds Five cover, and then decided “eh, what the heck, give the album a listen.” I state a lot that so-and-so was the best choice I could’ve made for my taste in music, or that whatever album changed my tastes or something– but I really mean it. But “Twin Falls” always stuck out to me. Maybe it was the nostalgia. Maybe it was my tendency to like the somber more than the joyous when it came to music. Or maybe it was just a darn good song. Whatever the case, I latched onto this one.
Feeling like a snippet of a scatter brained conversation heard in a bar put to music more than a proper song, Doug Martsch walks the fine line of “spoken-word/singing” here with his naturally butter-smooth voice, fluctuating between highs and lows in each word in a way that manages not to come off as whiny or childish sounding. It’s a journey, a heartbreaking tale that most of us know– someone with dreams, with hopes, aspirations, who has to settle down at a young age in the small town they were born in (of course with Jacksonville, it’s not a small town geographically by any means– but in terms of the bleakness of living here, I’d rank us about the same as a Post-Soviet city in the far eastern holds.) because of an accident, or because of an ailing parent, or any number of reasons. Naturally they fade from our memory, spare a few keen screenshots of the time we knew them that play across our minds in the dead of night. Even if you never knew that experience, the keenness of the lyrics reach out to you so much that it feels as though you’re in Twin Falls, or maybe some place thousands of miles away, reflecting on that same archetypal stay-behind.
Going with the generally accepted idea of There’s Nothing Wrong With Love being about the aches and pains of a mildly troubled youth paints an evocative picture of an American interstate emigree not just remembering a girl from his youth, but a world left behind. The imagery of locations is vivid– the cafeteria at Harrison elementary, games of Seven Up, the summer of 1983; although not present for these things, they are conjured as vividly as our own memories. “Last I heard, she had twins, or maybe three…” is such a fitting last remark on someone you knew and have no way of knowing where they stand now. In the times before Facebook, before cheap long distance calling, for a vast majority of those who left their hometown, the world left behind was consigned entirely to disintegrating memories. There’s something melancholic about this disintegration– maybe the protagonist of “Twin Falls” was in love with this girl he left behind. Maybe he hated her. More than likely he felt ambivalent. Whatever the case– those fleeting moment, the cafeteria, games of seven up, uncertain knowledge of the fact she had children, form the mosaic of the song. These recollections fly in by night after the troubled youth that guides There’s Nothing Wrong With Love– those troubled last gasps of teenager-dom are long over, and all that remains are the memories of a small Idaho town.
My own perception of the song is often tinged by those memories of middle school. A constant ever present sense of growing older, yet still feeling oddly between worlds– stuck between the stage of playing seven up and getting out “before I got too old.” Already at a young age, for different reasons than those I possess now, I wanted to get out, somewhere, before I was anchored to North Florida. The feeling only grew more pertinent into the next year– awkward, gangly, out of place in my high school, with no ability to make new friends or to talk to the people I wanted to talk too, I felt more than ever a drive to make haste like “Twin Falls” protagonist.
But for a brief moment, this song, and There’s Nothing Wrong With Love as a whole did not represent utter alienation from my peers– it represented connection. As clear as day, such that I can see this memory almost from third person when listening to the album, I remember working on the first ever Pathfinder Tabletop RPG campaign I ever played with friends (for those unaware, Pathfinder is essentially the “pen-and-paper” style Roleplaying game where you and some friends pretend to be knights and stuff, popularized by Dungeons and Dragons) at my old wooden desk while songs like “Cleo” and “Twin Falls” played. For a brief moment before the two seniors we had in our campaign graduated, there was a brief little light this album represented; whenever I had it on, I was writing, coming up with new and more perilous dungeons, fascinating magical rewards to give to my players, and a cavalcade of hilarious characters. I miss that campaign, even though we were all sort of bumbling about. I miss our imaginative games of bloodthirsty knights and musket toting bounty hunters– and like the mysterious subject of “Twin Falls,” often those knights come across my memories when I lay awake at night. I don’t know where Liam or Aaron went, or any other host of people I knew in high school who I just never kept in touch with after COVID, but sometimes I still remember the time I accidentally fried some noble’s brain using lightning from my hands, and we all had to skip town. The last full campaign I was ever a player of ended when COVID killed it, and I memorialize that one just as much. For me “Twin Falls” is not just an anthem of geographical memories left to waste in the dustbin upon an egress, but an anthem of youthful joys left behind in the face of a miserable four years in high school, joys stripped away as people moved and COVID altered the social landscape, and trying to find my personal footing in college.
This has been a shorter article of Twin Falls: Music and Memories, examining the song that my blog actually takes its name from! As always, look forward to 11:00am Monday for Jacksonville Vice, where I’ll be DJ’ing, and next Friday for a much longer article when my health is in better straits.
POP HOUR WITH DJ COCO
- Mondays at 12pm
- Pop, EDM, Indie
An hour to dive deeper into pop and electronic music deep cuts!
Carissa’s Wierd And Their Beautiful Misery: Songs About Leaving
by Jack Griffis
Last week’s album overview was about the feelings of dissociation and isolation hidden under a thin layer of outstanding tech-influenced art punk with The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I. This week, were taking a look at an album that does away with any notions of hiding the true melancholia of your lyrics at all, and instead embraces gloom with violin in hand. I of course refer to Carrisa’s Wierd’s final album, Songs About Leaving, one of the greatest slowcore albums of all time and one of my favorite albums to boot.
Carissa’s Wierd (purposely misspelled) were formed in Tucson in 1995 by two teenagers, Mat Brooke and Jenn Champion with very rudimentary equipment, and as much as “spectacular success” can be applied to the small labels and tiny venues of the indie scene, they very much were a spectacular success. Over the course of their careers they released four albums and a handful of compilations and singles, before breaking up to form separate projects in 2003. Frankly, I wish they had stuck around, or at the very least stuck with a record label that would repress their vinyls (because currently they cost 150$ on discogs), but I suppose four unique and emotionally poignant albums is better than a lifetime of mediocrity following their great successes. My buddy Andy put it best when he said its better they don’t burn out and become another case of Weezer-itis. Still, I long for the unique stylings of Carissa’s Wierd, when no other band can scratch the same itch for melancholic Americana-tinged indie music that seems to speak to every soft misery you’ve had to endure. Carissa’s Wierd is funeral music for the living it feels like, not gothic, but rather with a downtrodden folk influence that memorializes waking life and longs for the peace of sleep. And that downtrodden nature is what makes their final album so special– a finale for a band built on the feeling of the living end, a walking death that seems to stick to you no matter where you walk. Its bittersweet, in an odd way, but I suppose all bittersweet things are.
Songs About Leaving would be released on August 6th, 2002, one year before the band’s parting. It was a critical success upon release, scoring solidly on Allmusic, Pitchfork, and SputnikMusic, the latter two giving it a 8.0/10 and 4.5/5 respectively, with Pitchfork remarking that Songs About Leaving was “all the more devastating for being the band’s final act,” a sentiment I find myself sharing every time I give Carissa’s Wierd’s discography another listen, and upon the conclusion of “(March 19th 1983) It Was Probably Green” wishing in vain that there was more. But I suppose that’s the trouble of being conditioned by an infinite slough of streaming sites giving us more seasons to shows no one asked for, more TV show reboots, more Star Wars movies, more MCU “movies” (if they can be called that), the prevalence of the short form video on Instagram Reels and TikTok, and God knows how many other forms of instant gratification– when we’ve got an ending to something beloved, we are never satisfied, never able to take it as a definite ending. But I digress.
My first interaction with Carissa’s Wierd would’ve been roughly when I was 12 or 13 years old while I was on this huge kick of watching student animations or short form animation work– once I had cleared through the large catalog of CalArts student archives (which sadly hasn’t been updated in years the last time I checked), I stumbled upon a Spanish animation, the name of which has escaped me for years now. All I particularly remember is a very tired looking man wandering through his day to day 9-5 grind, with various mundane objects such as street lights and elevators being composed entirely of human beings forced into drudgery and labor unthinkable to us. Everyone was downtrodden and formed entirely of all too pale flesh, and the world around these characters was composed of a limited palette of beiges and browns. It was a bleak, bummer animation that still kinda kicks around my mind when I think about working a 9-5. But what’s important about it was the background track, a track that came from this very album: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero.” A decade and a half since the bands parting, their waves of melancholy and fuzzy vocals were reaching out to a barely-teenager who frankly, just couldn’t get what they were putting down. It would take a few years, but I’d find them again listening to Duster back in 2019 (which I can proudly say I got into them before they became a darling of TikTok some years later), and suddenly the time was ripe to get into Carissa’s Wierd, Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon, and the wonderfully depressive world of Slowcore. I’d listen to “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” and “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave” on loop, but given a few more years, I eventually gave the entire record a spin. It’s one of the best musical decisions I’ve ever made. Songs About Leaving is a weight on your chest that keeps on growing heavier with age, a fine wine of melancholia that eats at you with a delightfully corrosive sadness, a sadness exemplified from every note of its instrumentals, to every line in the poetry composing its lyrics. There will never be another Songs About Leaving, which is both a sadness in its own right, and a testament to the once-in-a-lifetime talent of Carissa’s Wierd. Without further ado, I’d like to talk about two songs that exemplify that talent: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” and “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave”.
Full of What’s Not Real And Full of Empty Tears: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero”
Sung in the form of a spoken word, “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” comes across as a poetry recitation from inside a dark apartment, the last gasps for air of someone at the end of their rope. Its sound is possessed by this feeling of personal collapse greatly– the vocals are muted, muffled even, sung under a thick fog of despair that struggles to rise over the strumming guitar drowning in eerie reverb that haunts the song. The vocals fluctuate in the song, wavering between something akin to a sob and the muted tone of someone so dejected as to be almost dead in their speech. It’s haunting, the cries of a living ghost, the lyrics containing a desolation not out of place in a suicide note– “So You Wanna be a Superhero” is Carrisa’s Wierd at their darkest, most beaten down.
Carissa’s Wierd, like many indie bands of their ilk, seems to be possessed of a spirit of mystery that compels them to rarely, if ever give an interpretation for their music. To be frank, for something as emotionally charged and poetic as their verses, I think that instinct is for the best. However, in the realm of musical journalism and analysis, I do wish I had the unique input of Jenn Champion and Mat Brooke regarding their haunting lyrics to integrate with my own writing on the subject– but oh well, we are bereft of their literary talents in regards to the origins of their tracks. However, in the case of “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” what is being discussed isn’t exactly abstract– very clearly this is the chronicle of someone in the chokehold of depression, reduced to very little but isolation and anhedonia, unable to stand such a desolate existence as they reckon with a spiritual hollowness.
The opening lines are stage-setters for the entire song, providing a potent musical image–although we are not told of the subjects circumstances, or given very much information about their life, opening with “There’s banging on the wall/It’s 5 am, I’ve got no sleep at all” gives us a potent image of a beleaguered insomniac, wasting away in bed as the world outside grows in irritating and mind-corroding noise. When listening, there’s a feeling of peering into a life of suffering, a squalid apartment and its anguished dweller, staring at the ceiling with a dead expression. The moaning, dejected voice of Jenn Champion struggles to break through the song, and past the first line, seems only to sink deeper into a soul-consuming malaise, incapable of escape from the internal circumstances that lurk throughout the song. For the protagonist, all of life seems to be a struggle through a mixture of apathetic melancholy and total soul crushing misery– “Too much time in one day/Too much time to occupy/With boring thoughts/And boring moods/And boring bedtimes” speaks to a feeling of utter emptiness, incapable of filling the day with activities that can provide solace from the depressive state that eats at the subject of the song, incapable of finding any joy in life itself– and so everything becomes crushed under a haze of gray, with no joy to be found that could perhaps alleviate this. What drives this home is the following line, “It’s all a joke/It’s all been wrote down by someone who’s probably dead.” There is no comfort to be found in life, no empathy among the living, and so the subject turns her eyes towards the ground– that those who have suffered their fate have long since died, more than likely by their own hand. It is a devastating sentiment of being incurable, that the subject has reached a terminal state of emptiness and lack of interest in life, a living death that only waits for the paradox of her heartbeat to stop.
Rather than dying away in the outro, the songs strumming begins to reach a feverish tempo alongside Jenn Champion’s voice ascending to an apex, a twisted and melancholia-warped shout wherein the only “hope” the song can offer is found– in the phantasms of sleep, the subject dreams of a world in which she may escape her chains of suffocating anhedonia, and perhaps prove some unknown point to her pitiers. She cries out, “ My dreams are full of what’s not real/I’ll fly away and save the world /I’ll make you proud someday/I just won’t be around to see your face,” to a subject “out of frame” as it were. The “superhero” referenced in the songs title is a misguided fantasy of the subject, that perhaps some miraculous strength that will rescue her from her quiet and unending torment, that perhaps she will be able to crawl out of the haze that chokes her life away into a series of late, sleepless nights, and unchanging, miserable days. And yet, even in this fantasy, the presence of death lingers– she won’t be around to see her observer’s pride, and will only meet the fate of death that followed her emotional peers(as noted in the line “It’s all been wrote down by someone who’s probably dead.”). In her only brief moment of hope, the subject still seems incapable of escaping the conclusion that death will take her, the end result of the depressive disease that has stolen all her vitality. The fantasy of sleep provides her only exodus, and yet as she lays awake at 5AM, it seems the solace of dreams grows ever scarcer, and the shape of death grows nearer as morale dies away.
I’m never so bold as to proclaim that my peers were the “best minds of a generation,” as Ginsberg did, but I have seen them consumed by an addictive kind of digital isolation and melancholy that has ruined them for years, the same as he saw his peers destroyed by the influence of heroin. Urged on into their patterns of digital self destruction by years of isolation, first sparked by COVID, then continued out of apathy, they fell deeper and deeper into a pit of online anhedonia– constantly logging in, playing the same games that brought them no happiness, gambling what money they had on cases and online currencies, locked into a cycle of apathetic rage at their circumstances, a faint hope that things might get better, and the complete lack of energy to escape this skinner-box turned skinner-home. It wasn’t their fault. Circumstances as they were, plenty of us sought refuge online– its a time honored tradition, even pre-COVID. Some of us just never escaped that isolation I suppose. I bring none of this up to do an exploitationist “tell all” on those who are stuck behind the screen, but rather to say that 20 years after its release, the tale within “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” still rings true for a generation lost in cyberspace, stuck within digitally-assisted depressive boredom. Only in sleep do some find respite, and others, not at all.
Trying To Find Love Between The Lines: They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave
“They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave,” fittingly titled for the album Songs About Leaving opens on a much more minimalistic tone compared to its sibling songs. Beginning on a simple piano and guitar melody, the song lingers in this quiet space for a while before gradually a violin and quietly grooving drums enter the mix, resting with each other as the song picks up in speed to the strumming of an electric guitar. The violin’s tone, already somber, throws itself deeper into melancholy as the song hangs in the air, bereft of vocals for a while. Suddenly, Mat Brooke’s voice enters and the entire song begins to grow in speed and intensity, rivaling Mat’s voice as he struggles for control auditorily, ultimately exploding into a medley of instruments at full tilt. Taking the same stylistic cues as “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” Brooke’s voice primarily remains in the form of spoken prose, but his vocals experience a kind of dissonance that surrounds the listener, adding to the overwhelming feeling that takes hold at the songs swelling within the second minute. “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave,” features all the hallmarks of a great Carissa’s Wierd song, accompanied by the downright solemn violin and downbeat drums that dances with the vocals, and a reverberated guitar that bears heavy musical omens of exhaustion in the face of unending personal sorrow. The pseudo-Americana that Brooks and Champion have incorporated into the band’s wider sound is evident here, living within the folkish rhythms of the drums and the southern gloom of the violin. Electric and acoustic coexist in their suffering, two burnouts sharing a cigarette outside a bus station. To complete this grand work of indie melancholia, Brook’s and Champion’s outstanding lyricism is found in abundance. As I said prior, it seems to almost be THE Carissa’s Wierd song, incorporating all of their stylings and themes into one beautiful mixture of tears and memories of lives no longer lived in.
As “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” and the rest of their discography, Carissa’s Wierd have an unspoken loathing of speaking on their songs or providing much interpretation (though I imagine if I had a vinyl of Songs About Leaving, the price of which I’ve whinged about previously in this article, its liner notes would be of some use in this matter). And this loathing extends to “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave.” Nonetheless, the imagery in the song is compelling such that I find that an official “interpretation” would either be useless, or actively detrimental to the song.
The morning opens upon the song as the music swells, regret and despondency dripping off each line as Brooks sings “Not another sunrise, another dry stale taste in your mouth/You walked away from waking up inside of that house,” all seem to speak of a journey, far from what was once home– a refusal to deal with a situation that was draining you of life, another morning spent in regret. At the apex of the song’s introduction, the subject can no longer bear it, and must leave the house– not a home, but “that house,” a place of anguish not fitting of being a home.
The residents of this house are only spoken of vaguely, their emotions taking center stage– “they’ll only miss you when you leave” is spoken only once in the song, but is given great emphasis, overtaking all other sounds. The house is an entity of draining interpersonal strife, and the residents are cruel not in a fantastical sense, but in the sense that their love only extends to when the subject of the song is no longer present. The reality of the song’s subject is not palatable to them– only the idea, only the unseen subject which receives those “postcards with misshapen hearts besides the names.” And within these postcards, these scant messages that carry the subject’s name they “rearranged, analyzed the words/Tried to find something between the lines that wasn’t there,” perhaps searching for love lost or professed, yet never truly there.
One derives the feeling of perhaps an unwanted child, or a relationship that can only be feigned as love when the two are not in each other’s presence, or perhaps a friendship that has withered to very little over the years. Laying within a familiar yet unfamiliar place, a house in which one can find no shelter, the subject awaits a sunrise to give them cue to leave, an action capable of reigniting the feeling of “missing” each other between the two parties. It is a hollow love, one spoken of in letters and phone calls, yet not truly there, kept up for appearances or because the two are unsure what would happen if their neutrality or outright disdain was properly spoken. The final lines of the song “The storm will slowly close in on me/When it’s time to leave” repeated till the instruments finally die away, does not signal one of these incomplete goodbyes, but rather the crushing grip of pretending, the inevitable collapse of the two-sided farce. As the years of only finding comfort when the other is gone begin to take their toll, the storm closes in on the little seclusion and solace one can find, and eventually, that storm destroys the years of falsehoods each party has built. When it’s time to leave, all this will be over, and perhaps both parties of the song will find some peace.
I’ve sat through my fair share of forced smiles and hang-outs at the twilight of a friendship we knew we should’ve both left behind long ago. I’ve had nothing to talk about with people who I’ve known for years. Suddenly Halo split screen and red-40 infused concoctions of soda aren’t enough to keep everyone together. There comes an unfortunate weight of realizing the people you grew up with, who were there for the most formative moments of your youth, more than likely anticipate and enjoy your exit more than they do your entrance. “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave” cries out to me as an anthem for those who know such things can go on forever, that they can’t lie to each other for much longer. As the passionate flame of youthful friendships subsides into the “once every month if we can” of adulthood, and communications grow more distant, and suddenly you just don’t know what to say to each other while sitting on a couch in a stranger’s home. For one brief moment, the illusion of young adulthood, the feeling of invincibility and a great abundance of raucousness and companionship is broken, and you suddenly feel very, very old. The storm comes, you will send your last text to those you once held close to your chest, and it will be your time to leave. Such is life.
This has been Twin Falls: Music and Memories, and it’s been a pleasure to write on one of the greatest t. I’ll see you next week with another review, and I hope you have a good weekend. And as always, catch my radio show Jacksonville Vice, airing on Spinnaker Radio, 95.5 FM WSKR, 11 AM every Monday (except for next Monday, September 2nd due to Labor Day).
Carissa’s Wierd And Their Beautiful Misery: Songs About Leaving
by Jack Griffis
Last week’s album overview was about the feelings of dissociation and isolation hidden under a thin layer of outstanding tech-influenced art punk with The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I. This week, were taking a look at an album that does away with any notions of hiding the true melancholia of your lyrics at all, and instead embraces gloom with violin in hand. I of course refer to Carrisa’s Wierd’s final album, Songs About Leaving, one of the greatest slowcore albums of all time and one of my favorite albums to boot.
Carissa’s Wierd (purposely misspelled) were formed in Tucson in 1995 by two teenagers, Mat Brooke and Jenn Champion with very rudimentary equipment, and as much as “spectacular success” can be applied to the small labels and tiny venues of the indie scene, they very much were a spectacular success. Over the course of their careers they released four albums and a handful of compilations and singles, before breaking up to form separate projects in 2003. Frankly, I wish they had stuck around, or at the very least stuck with a record label that would repress their vinyls (because currently they cost 150$ on discogs), but I suppose four unique and emotionally poignant albums is better than a lifetime of mediocrity following their great successes. My buddy Andy put it best when he said its better they don’t burn out and become another case of Weezer-itis. Still, I long for the unique stylings of Carissa’s Wierd, when no other band can scratch the same itch for melancholic Americana-tinged indie music that seems to speak to every soft misery you’ve had to endure. Carissa’s Wierd is funeral music for the living it feels like, not gothic, but rather with a downtrodden folk influence that memorializes waking life and longs for the peace of sleep. And that downtrodden nature is what makes their final album so special– a finale for a band built on the feeling of the living end, a walking death that seems to stick to you no matter where you walk. Its bittersweet, in an odd way, but I suppose all bittersweet things are.
Songs About Leaving would be released on August 6th, 2002, one year before the band’s parting. It was a critical success upon release, scoring solidly on Allmusic, Pitchfork, and SputnikMusic, the latter two giving it a 8.0/10 and 4.5/5 respectively, with Pitchfork remarking that Songs About Leaving was “all the more devastating for being the band’s final act,” a sentiment I find myself sharing every time I give Carissa’s Wierd’s discography another listen, and upon the conclusion of “(March 19th 1983) It Was Probably Green” wishing in vain that there was more. But I suppose that’s the trouble of being conditioned by an infinite slough of streaming sites giving us more seasons to shows no one asked for, more TV show reboots, more Star Wars movies, more MCU “movies” (if they can be called that), the prevalence of the short form video on Instagram Reels and TikTok, and God knows how many other forms of instant gratification– when we’ve got an ending to something beloved, we are never satisfied, never able to take it as a definite ending. But I digress.
My first interaction with Carissa’s Wierd would’ve been roughly when I was 12 or 13 years old while I was on this huge kick of watching student animations or short form animation work– once I had cleared through the large catalog of CalArts student archives (which sadly hasn’t been updated in years the last time I checked), I stumbled upon a Spanish animation, the name of which has escaped me for years now. All I particularly remember is a very tired looking man wandering through his day to day 9-5 grind, with various mundane objects such as street lights and elevators being composed entirely of human beings forced into drudgery and labor unthinkable to us. Everyone was downtrodden and formed entirely of all too pale flesh, and the world around these characters was composed of a limited palette of beiges and browns. It was a bleak, bummer animation that still kinda kicks around my mind when I think about working a 9-5. But what’s important about it was the background track, a track that came from this very album: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero.” A decade and a half since the bands parting, their waves of melancholy and fuzzy vocals were reaching out to a barely-teenager who frankly, just couldn’t get what they were putting down. It would take a few years, but I’d find them again listening to Duster back in 2019 (which I can proudly say I got into them before they became a darling of TikTok some years later), and suddenly the time was ripe to get into Carissa’s Wierd, Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon, and the wonderfully depressive world of Slowcore. I’d listen to “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” and “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave” on loop, but given a few more years, I eventually gave the entire record a spin. It’s one of the best musical decisions I’ve ever made. Songs About Leaving is a weight on your chest that keeps on growing heavier with age, a fine wine of melancholia that eats at you with a delightfully corrosive sadness, a sadness exemplified from every note of its instrumentals, to every line in the poetry composing its lyrics. There will never be another Songs About Leaving, which is both a sadness in its own right, and a testament to the once-in-a-lifetime talent of Carissa’s Wierd. Without further ado, I’d like to talk about two songs that exemplify that talent: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” and “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave”.
Full of What’s Not Real And Full of Empty Tears: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero”
Sung in the form of a spoken word, “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” comes across as a poetry recitation from inside a dark apartment, the last gasps for air of someone at the end of their rope. Its sound is possessed by this feeling of personal collapse greatly– the vocals are muted, muffled even, sung under a thick fog of despair that struggles to rise over the strumming guitar drowning in eerie reverb that haunts the song. The vocals fluctuate in the song, wavering between something akin to a sob and the muted tone of someone so dejected as to be almost dead in their speech. It’s haunting, the cries of a living ghost, the lyrics containing a desolation not out of place in a suicide note– “So You Wanna be a Superhero” is Carrisa’s Wierd at their darkest, most beaten down.
Carissa’s Wierd, like many indie bands of their ilk, seems to be possessed of a spirit of mystery that compels them to rarely, if ever give an interpretation for their music. To be frank, for something as emotionally charged and poetic as their verses, I think that instinct is for the best. However, in the realm of musical journalism and analysis, I do wish I had the unique input of Jenn Champion and Mat Brooke regarding their haunting lyrics to integrate with my own writing on the subject– but oh well, we are bereft of their literary talents in regards to the origins of their tracks. However, in the case of “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” what is being discussed isn’t exactly abstract– very clearly this is the chronicle of someone in the chokehold of depression, reduced to very little but isolation and anhedonia, unable to stand such a desolate existence as they reckon with a spiritual hollowness.
The opening lines are stage-setters for the entire song, providing a potent musical image–although we are not told of the subjects circumstances, or given very much information about their life, opening with “There’s banging on the wall/It’s 5 am, I’ve got no sleep at all” gives us a potent image of a beleaguered insomniac, wasting away in bed as the world outside grows in irritating and mind-corroding noise. When listening, there’s a feeling of peering into a life of suffering, a squalid apartment and its anguished dweller, staring at the ceiling with a dead expression. The moaning, dejected voice of Jenn Champion struggles to break through the song, and past the first line, seems only to sink deeper into a soul-consuming malaise, incapable of escape from the internal circumstances that lurk throughout the song. For the protagonist, all of life seems to be a struggle through a mixture of apathetic melancholy and total soul crushing misery– “Too much time in one day/Too much time to occupy/With boring thoughts/And boring moods/And boring bedtimes” speaks to a feeling of utter emptiness, incapable of filling the day with activities that can provide solace from the depressive state that eats at the subject of the song, incapable of finding any joy in life itself– and so everything becomes crushed under a haze of gray, with no joy to be found that could perhaps alleviate this. What drives this home is the following line, “It’s all a joke/It’s all been wrote down by someone who’s probably dead.” There is no comfort to be found in life, no empathy among the living, and so the subject turns her eyes towards the ground– that those who have suffered their fate have long since died, more than likely by their own hand. It is a devastating sentiment of being incurable, that the subject has reached a terminal state of emptiness and lack of interest in life, a living death that only waits for the paradox of her heartbeat to stop.
Rather than dying away in the outro, the songs strumming begins to reach a feverish tempo alongside Jenn Champion’s voice ascending to an apex, a twisted and melancholia-warped shout wherein the only “hope” the song can offer is found– in the phantasms of sleep, the subject dreams of a world in which she may escape her chains of suffocating anhedonia, and perhaps prove some unknown point to her pitiers. She cries out, “ My dreams are full of what’s not real/I’ll fly away and save the world /I’ll make you proud someday/I just won’t be around to see your face,” to a subject “out of frame” as it were. The “superhero” referenced in the songs title is a misguided fantasy of the subject, that perhaps some miraculous strength that will rescue her from her quiet and unending torment, that perhaps she will be able to crawl out of the haze that chokes her life away into a series of late, sleepless nights, and unchanging, miserable days. And yet, even in this fantasy, the presence of death lingers– she won’t be around to see her observer’s pride, and will only meet the fate of death that followed her emotional peers(as noted in the line “It’s all been wrote down by someone who’s probably dead.”). In her only brief moment of hope, the subject still seems incapable of escaping the conclusion that death will take her, the end result of the depressive disease that has stolen all her vitality. The fantasy of sleep provides her only exodus, and yet as she lays awake at 5AM, it seems the solace of dreams grows ever scarcer, and the shape of death grows nearer as morale dies away.
I’m never so bold as to proclaim that my peers were the “best minds of a generation,” as Ginsberg did, but I have seen them consumed by an addictive kind of digital isolation and melancholy that has ruined them for years, the same as he saw his peers destroyed by the influence of heroin. Urged on into their patterns of digital self destruction by years of isolation, first sparked by COVID, then continued out of apathy, they fell deeper and deeper into a pit of online anhedonia– constantly logging in, playing the same games that brought them no happiness, gambling what money they had on cases and online currencies, locked into a cycle of apathetic rage at their circumstances, a faint hope that things might get better, and the complete lack of energy to escape this skinner-box turned skinner-home. It wasn’t their fault. Circumstances as they were, plenty of us sought refuge online– its a time honored tradition, even pre-COVID. Some of us just never escaped that isolation I suppose. I bring none of this up to do an exploitationist “tell all” on those who are stuck behind the screen, but rather to say that 20 years after its release, the tale within “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” still rings true for a generation lost in cyberspace, stuck within digitally-assisted depressive boredom. Only in sleep do some find respite, and others, not at all.
Trying To Find Love Between The Lines: They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave
“They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave,” fittingly titled for the album Songs About Leaving opens on a much more minimalistic tone compared to its sibling songs. Beginning on a simple piano and guitar melody, the song lingers in this quiet space for a while before gradually a violin and quietly grooving drums enter the mix, resting with each other as the song picks up in speed to the strumming of an electric guitar. The violin’s tone, already somber, throws itself deeper into melancholy as the song hangs in the air, bereft of vocals for a while. Suddenly, Mat Brooke’s voice enters and the entire song begins to grow in speed and intensity, rivaling Mat’s voice as he struggles for control auditorily, ultimately exploding into a medley of instruments at full tilt. Taking the same stylistic cues as “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” Brooke’s voice primarily remains in the form of spoken prose, but his vocals experience a kind of dissonance that surrounds the listener, adding to the overwhelming feeling that takes hold at the songs swelling within the second minute. “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave,” features all the hallmarks of a great Carissa’s Wierd song, accompanied by the downright solemn violin and downbeat drums that dances with the vocals, and a reverberated guitar that bears heavy musical omens of exhaustion in the face of unending personal sorrow. The pseudo-Americana that Brooks and Champion have incorporated into the band’s wider sound is evident here, living within the folkish rhythms of the drums and the southern gloom of the violin. Electric and acoustic coexist in their suffering, two burnouts sharing a cigarette outside a bus station. To complete this grand work of indie melancholia, Brook’s and Champion’s outstanding lyricism is found in abundance. As I said prior, it seems to almost be THE Carissa’s Wierd song, incorporating all of their stylings and themes into one beautiful mixture of tears and memories of lives no longer lived in.
As “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” and the rest of their discography, Carissa’s Wierd have an unspoken loathing of speaking on their songs or providing much interpretation (though I imagine if I had a vinyl of Songs About Leaving, the price of which I’ve whinged about previously in this article, its liner notes would be of some use in this matter). And this loathing extends to “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave.” Nonetheless, the imagery in the song is compelling such that I find that an official “interpretation” would either be useless, or actively detrimental to the song.
The morning opens upon the song as the music swells, regret and despondency dripping off each line as Brooks sings “Not another sunrise, another dry stale taste in your mouth/You walked away from waking up inside of that house,” all seem to speak of a journey, far from what was once home– a refusal to deal with a situation that was draining you of life, another morning spent in regret. At the apex of the song’s introduction, the subject can no longer bear it, and must leave the house– not a home, but “that house,” a place of anguish not fitting of being a home.
The residents of this house are only spoken of vaguely, their emotions taking center stage– “they’ll only miss you when you leave” is spoken only once in the song, but is given great emphasis, overtaking all other sounds. The house is an entity of draining interpersonal strife, and the residents are cruel not in a fantastical sense, but in the sense that their love only extends to when the subject of the song is no longer present. The reality of the song’s subject is not palatable to them– only the idea, only the unseen subject which receives those “postcards with misshapen hearts besides the names.” And within these postcards, these scant messages that carry the subject’s name they “rearranged, analyzed the words/Tried to find something between the lines that wasn’t there,” perhaps searching for love lost or professed, yet never truly there.
One derives the feeling of perhaps an unwanted child, or a relationship that can only be feigned as love when the two are not in each other’s presence, or perhaps a friendship that has withered to very little over the years. Laying within a familiar yet unfamiliar place, a house in which one can find no shelter, the subject awaits a sunrise to give them cue to leave, an action capable of reigniting the feeling of “missing” each other between the two parties. It is a hollow love, one spoken of in letters and phone calls, yet not truly there, kept up for appearances or because the two are unsure what would happen if their neutrality or outright disdain was properly spoken. The final lines of the song “The storm will slowly close in on me/When it’s time to leave” repeated till the instruments finally die away, does not signal one of these incomplete goodbyes, but rather the crushing grip of pretending, the inevitable collapse of the two-sided farce. As the years of only finding comfort when the other is gone begin to take their toll, the storm closes in on the little seclusion and solace one can find, and eventually, that storm destroys the years of falsehoods each party has built. When it’s time to leave, all this will be over, and perhaps both parties of the song will find some peace.
I’ve sat through my fair share of forced smiles and hang-outs at the twilight of a friendship we knew we should’ve both left behind long ago. I’ve had nothing to talk about with people who I’ve known for years. Suddenly Halo split screen and red-40 infused concoctions of soda aren’t enough to keep everyone together. There comes an unfortunate weight of realizing the people you grew up with, who were there for the most formative moments of your youth, more than likely anticipate and enjoy your exit more than they do your entrance. “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave” cries out to me as an anthem for those who know such things can go on forever, that they can’t lie to each other for much longer. As the passionate flame of youthful friendships subsides into the “once every month if we can” of adulthood, and communications grow more distant, and suddenly you just don’t know what to say to each other while sitting on a couch in a stranger’s home. For one brief moment, the illusion of young adulthood, the feeling of invincibility and a great abundance of raucousness and companionship is broken, and you suddenly feel very, very old. The storm comes, you will send your last text to those you once held close to your chest, and it will be your time to leave. Such is life.
This has been Twin Falls: Music and Memories, and it’s been a pleasure to write on one of the greatest t. I’ll see you next week with another review, and I hope you have a good weekend. And as always, catch my radio show Jacksonville Vice, airing on Spinnaker Radio, 95.5 FM WSKR, 11 AM every Monday (except for next Monday, September 2nd due to Labor Day).