by Taylor Ruckle (@taylorruckle)
After we pretend to clink cans together over Zoom, Marissa Paternoster asks me what I’m drinking. It’s a Mountain Dew Rise, and she doesn’t recognize it. “See? I’m off the gas station circuit and now I don’t know about the new Mountain Dews,” she says. Kidding aside, of course, when you’ve spent as much of your life on the road as she has, there’s an extra layer of fear and uncertainty that comes with having to get by in the absence of touring. “I've been able to get through most of this just fine, but you know, I don't have a normative resume,” she says. “I've been in Screaming Females for my entire adult life.”
Recorded from home over the first year of the pandemic, Peace Meter is the latest product of her creative resume, which is second-to-none. Following a combined eleven LPs between Screaming Females and her solo project, Noun, it’s Paternoster’s first release under her own name, and it highlights her skills as a writer of poppy melodies ("I Lost You") and even a balladeer (the acoustic, cello-soaked "Balance Beam"). Peace Meter is gentler and more wistful than the kickass alt-rock Paternoster is known for, focused on programmed beats and dial tones unanswered. Simply put, as the guitarist of Screaming Females, she wears the influence of Siamese Dream on her sleeve, and this is her Adore.
Through her long tenure crisscrossing the globe (raiding untold numbers of gas station coolers along the way) she’s also built up a non-normative professional network of sorts–talented friends like Andy Gibbs, Shanna Polley, and Kate Wakefield, who feature on the record. After the release of Peace Meter, Paternoster spoke to Post-Trash about curating the album’s cast of players and turning to less conventional artistic avenues during the pandemic.
photo credit: Kate Sweeney
Taylor Ruckle: I try to research well when I'm getting ready to talk to an artist, and sometimes something blindsides me right before I get on Zoom--
Marissa Paternoster: Oh no.
I'm looking right now at the Bart of the Month Club tab on your website.
[laughs] Oh, I thought--I was like, "Is there Bart stuff around me?" But there's literally Bart stuff everywhere.
Maybe this is a strange starting point, but tell me about the Bart of the Month Club.
Oh, I'm so happy to talk about Bart of the Month Club. Well, I was left alone in my girlfriend's apartment one day, so I drew some pictures of Bart from memory, for no reason, and they were very bad, but they were also probably some of the best art I've ever made, and then--[laughs] this is such a bad story! I was like, "Would it be a cool idea if I just had a service where I sent 100 hand-drawn pictures of Bart, however I see fit, every month to 100 unique members?" And everyone said, "That's the best idea you've ever had." So I did it.
[laughs] Are you worried that you'll be remembered for the Bart of the Month Club and not for your music?
Probably. I mean, I'm not worried about it. It just seems like an inevitability at this point, that my dedication to Bart art and making sure people who need Bart are getting it at an affordable price--[laughs] you know, I feel like I'll go down in infamy just for leaning on that sword for everyone.
Right, somebody had to.
Yeah, I got this–[holding up a mug shaped like Bart Simpson's head]
Oh my gosh. That's an amazing mug.
Thanks, I love Bart-based art.
I promise the whole interview won't be about this, but I see your video introducing Bart-based art came out--coming up on a year ago now. Have you been keeping that up every month?
Yeah, it's kind of like rolling a ball up a hill in hell. It just--the Barts just never stop. They keep coming. But people need them. People need their monthly Bart, and I understand that, and I am ready and willing to humbly be at their service, so yes, I've drawn thousands and thousands of Bart Simpsons. I mean, the unique nature of how Bart arrives every month--you can obviously see it at our Instagram, but I like to keep it, you know, in the circle. They're different every month, but always absurd and always very poorly drawn.
How long did it take to reach your 100-patron limit?
An obscenely short amount of time. Like, a couple minutes! So, as much as I would like to draw more than 100 Barts per month, I just can't. I definitely have talked to some other artists about outsourcing maybe a couple batches of Bart so that more people could join, but I kinda like just keeping it a small, happy family. It's hard work, but somebody's gotta do it.
Of course. You're a human with human limits, but that's part of what makes the Barts beautiful.
Thanks, I'm gonna quote you on that.
Initially, I was hoping to talk to you about Peace Meter, the album that came out last month.
No, we're just gonna talk about Bart.
Alright, stricken from the record. Forget I even asked about it.
Okay, we can talk about it. Fine. [laughs]
The story of this album as I understand it starts in spring of 2020. You have this tour cut short by COVID, you're in your grandmother's house, and you start working on this batch of songs. Can you walk me through what you remember about that time?
Screaming Females was on a really fun tour with Pup--we've been buddies with them for a while, so we were opening for them on a West Coast tour, and we were having a great time. Obviously COVID was in the news, but I don't think the reality really hit us until we got to Seattle, and some of the venues that Pup was headlining–which could have fit 2000 people and were sold out–were half-full because people were either becoming ill or doing their due diligence and not coming. I can only speak for myself when I say that when I go on tour, I kind of tune out the news, so I don't think I was really privy to how serious it was until I saw these big theaters half empty and I was like, "Oh no, we might not finish this tour."
With that being said, we did most of it, and I think we only missed two shows, but by the time we got to Eugene, Oregon, we had a little meeting, the three of us and our lovely roadie Dawn Riddle, and we decided that Dawn should get sent home because she lived in Oregon. We had a headlining show in LA lined up after the Pup run was done, and at that point, California was putting limits on how many people could congregate in a space. Our show obviously wasn't gonna have more than 1000 people, so we were kind of good to go, but we were like, "That just doesn't seem right," you know?
You don't want to play the technicalities.
Yeah, so we were like, "We gotta get home." We jumped in the rental van, drove, like, 900 miles to LAX, and somehow lucked out on getting on a flight. Thinking of being on an airplane now with no mask is really crazy, but obviously, we had to get home, and nobody knew what was really going on, so we got home--I mean, it was really scary and sad. My family was lucky enough to have a completely empty house 'cause my grandmother had passed away recently, so I just stayed there 'cause I had been in Seattle and Portland and all over the place. I lived with people, so I didn't wanna come home and maybe infect them, or who knows what. I also wanted to be close to my father in case he needed me to go run errands for him or anything like that, so I was just in this big, suburban, empty house.
I had my instrument with me and I had my recording gear and stuff, so I just started writing and recording to pass some time, you know? We all were trying to find little ways to make time pass. I had some ideas, and I wasn't hemming and hawing or spending too much time on them, but I sent one to Andy Gibbs, who plays guitar in Thou--they're a band from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and we've gone on tour with them and been buddies with them for a long time–and he added some percussion to it and some cool, ethereal, soundscape synth stuff, and we were both really stoked on it.
I asked him if he wanted to maybe do a couple more, and then a couple more turned into a couple more, and at the end of the day, we had nine songs, but I also incorporated other musicians that I admired and have played with, one being Shanna Polley, who sings on pretty much every song on the record. She's in a band called Snakeskin from New York, and then Kate Wakefield, who plays in a band called Lung from Cincinnati, plays cello on almost every song except for one.
What was that first song that you sent to Andy?
The first song that Andy got from me is actually the last song on the album, and it's called "Promise." It was super simple. I was and am still very obsessed with Nina Nastasia, and that had just started. She does a lot of--how would I explain it? Some of her earlier work almost sounded like it was singer/songwriter with a little touch of country, and then it kind of turned into chamber music. [laughs] All of her records were recorded by Albini, and they're all absolutely beautiful, and I think that at first, this record was me just trying to emulate her songwriting and, you know, not even coming close. Then once Andy added his two cents to the song, it really changed things, but in a direction that we were both stoked on. It was a fun project.
What elements of songwriting do you mean? What was it you wanted to emulate?
I don't know, I mean, there are a lot of bands that I love and admire that, like, their influences don't necessarily get flushed out in Screaming Females songs, which is fine. You can't do all the things all the time. I really love bands like Low, and Grouper, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Nina Nastasia, so I definitely was thinking about that stuff while writing some of the songs. Never really trying to necessarily copy it, but it was definitely in the back of my mind.
That song touches on a theme that I think recurs throughout, which is space. You know, "You take up space just standing still" is the line in that one, and that comes up on songs like "Black Hole” too. Was that something you noticed as these songs were coming out?
Wow, you've thought about it more than I have, probably. I've talked about this before, about thinking about songwriting as somebody who--I probably identify more as a painter or a draftsman, so I definitely think about positive and negative space when I think about making songs, but I would say that has a lot more to do with the music than the lyrics.
I could tell you about where some of the lyrics come from, but then a lot of them were just–phonetically, I like when things sound right to me. There are a lot of instances in lyric writing, which is something I'm not really keen on doing--it's not, like, my favorite part of making a song--where if the word sounds right, even if it's not necessarily the thought or feeling that I'm trying to put forth in the song, I'll just let it be because that's more important to me, which maybe is an error. I have no idea. When I think about music, I do think about it visually, and maybe that's why the word "space" kept coming up.
But in other words, it's more about satisfying the meter.
For me it is. This record, obviously it's about heartbreak. There's no way to skirt around that. I was trying to be just very blatant and not drown everything in metaphor or be oblique in the way that I tend to be because I don't really wanna talk about my thoughts or my feelings [laughs] or my personal life when it comes to sharing myself with the world. I think the older I get, the more comfortable I am with doing that kind of stuff.
When you started sending songs and getting parts back, how much conversation was there about the way things would develop?
Well, I think this record is a unique reflection of people being in the thick of a pandemic where there were no stakes. We were just enjoying ourselves and having fun making these songs. You know, one good thing I guess about 2020 and 2021 is that everybody has--well, not everybody, but we had these resources where we could just record from home, so there honestly wasn't that much back and forth. I think there were a couple times where Andy and I had some things that we wanted to hear that we weren't necessarily hearing, but when it came down to it, these were already people that I really admired their playing and writing, so they just showed up and did their thing, and whenever I heard what they did, I was like, "Well, that's perfect. That was easy." I also just wonder if it was because of the climate that we were all existing in where there were no plans to put this out. We were just vibing. [laughs]
Do you have a favorite moment from that process, or a particular part that really wowed you?
I distinctly remember Andy sending back the little beat that he made for "Promise,” 'cause there was so little happening in the song. It's a very sparse guitar and then these drum beats that are very separated from each other–to bring up space again, there's a lot of space in that song–and in that moment, since it was the first thing I got back, it struck me that, "Oh, this might turn into a whole album, and isn't that exciting?"
And then the first time I got Kate's cello parts back for that same song, I was just like, "Oh, that's beautiful. I can't wait to hear her playing on absolutely everything." Same thing for Shanna's vocals. I have been friends with Shanna for almost a decade, and she just sings like a bird. Everything she sings is so beautiful and her band is amazing. I've never curated a team of players--I hate using that word, "curating," but that's kinda what happened. But you know, they're also my friends and my companions and peers, so I wasn't necessarily surprised when these people I love and admire came back with amazing parts. I was like, "Oh, yeah, of course they did." [laughs] "Cool, good job guys."
One place on this record where the use of space feels extra intentional is the beginning. "White Dove" opens with the drum machine pulse, and then the acoustic guitar kicks in, and then the vocals. It feels like this way of easing you in and showing you what this record is going to be about. What can you tell me about how that song came together?
I don't remember much about that song, to be honest. It's, like, two chords, which was kind of the way that I would attack every song, is send Andy the bare minimum amount of elements that I could, and we would build it from there. Because with remote digital recording, those things are possible, and it just gave everybody the room and flexibility to throw their spices into the pot or whatever. It's an E and an A, basically. I just sent him that with probably one vocal, and we built it from there.
I guess in the same way that the guitar is kind of mantra-like and just happens over and over again, the same thing happened with the vocals. The whole MO that Andy and I had discussed was just, a lot of these songs would build into these really textured landscapes, but you'd have to wait for it. It wasn't gonna happen all at once. I think that was the only big picture moment that we discussed when it came to this becoming a record. Because like I said, we never had intention for it to become a record, but it did.
When did that turn, momentum-wise? When did you make that decision that this actually was a record?
Once we had five songs done, we were like, "Well, might as well get close to an LP length." I guess in my mind, I was like, "Well, I have to have ten songs. Surely you can't have less than ten songs for a record," not remembering that what really matters is probably the length of it. When we finished the last song, obviously COVID wasn't turning around in any major way, but there was a dip in cases, so people were returning to work in some semblance of what might be a quote-unquote normal life, and it just seemed like the record was well-rounded and really didn't need another song. Everybody was happy with what we had and the contributions that they made, so we just kinda called it.
Joe [Steinhardt], who runs Don Giovanni Records, is one of my best friends, and I think if I handed him something that was god-awful, he would probably be like, "Marissa, I'm not putting this out," but I sent him a couple songs that we had been working on, and he already was kinda like, "Yeah, of course I'm gonna put this out." That was well over a year ago at this point because the turnaround for vinyl is insane right now, which I'm sure you're privy to. So yeah, the actual making of this record is well over a year ago. Feels like a distant memory at this point.
At what point did you decide that you wanted this to be a Marissa Paternoster album and not a Noun album?
Joe actually recommended it, and I was really hesitant to do it under my name. I mean, I wrote the bare bones of the songs, but the songs wouldn't exist in the capacity they do without Andy, Shanna, and Kate. I just hate having my name out there because I feel like it's an inaccurate representation of what's actually on the record, but with that being said, I do understand that Googling or searching for a band called Noun on the internet is really, really hard. It seems to confuse people, and when we were getting ready to make this record a palpable, real thing that people were gonna buy, Joe suggested that, and it just makes sense.
I want people to have the record in their hands. I want them to listen to it. I want them to come to shows that we play, and if calling my project Noun makes it hard for them to find tickets or find the record, then I'll call it Marissa Paternoster. It's fine. I've been making music under the moniker Noun since I was a child, so there was definitely a little bit of sadness in having it come to an end, but it's not necessarily going to come to an end. I can put things out under that name any time I see fit, but I do understand that searching for things called Noun, it's like, impossible.
Where did the title Peace Meter come from?
This is probably a callback to what I was talking about--when the meter sounds good. I just thought those two words sounded nice together, like "cellar door" or whatever. I feel like it's a very soft pairing of words for what is a very--woeful, would that be a good term? [laughs] Wistful record. A very soft title for a wistful record. I think I just wrote it down in a sketch pad one day, and then saw it again at some point while we were wrapping things up, and I was like, "That's a nice title. Slap that on there."
A lot of the writing that's been done about this record has focused on the role that guitar plays in your work, and the role that it doesn't play on this record. Do you ever feel pigeonholed, being written about primarily as a guitarist, or like people talk about guitar at the expense of other elements?
I mean, I don't really care. The fact that people are even listening to the music that I put out is already something that I could have never anticipated or expected, and I'm very grateful for, so if people wanna focus on my guitar-playing, that's totally fine, and I'm really flattered. And if they wanna talk about my songwriting instead, that's fine, and I'm really flattered. [laughs] I realize that having someone be kind and generous enough to put out your records and promote your music is such a gift, and I know there are a lot of people who have music at home that they wish they could put out in the world, and I just feel really grateful that anyone's paying attention to me at all in that capacity.
Songwriting is definitely the thing that I care about the most and I'm most focused on. I don't know if I ever thought that I would get this much attention as a guitarist, but I did. [laughs] Whatever a music journalist or a listener chooses to focus on that helps them feel connected to the music is cool with me.
You've put out a couple of music videos around this record–you did one for "White Dove" which is very striking, with you just walking towards the camera. How did that concept get to be, and what was it like filming that?
Joe did that one. He also is pretty much my neighbor. He lives a couple blocks away, and he's my best friend, but he asked me if he could do it, and I said, "Sure, you can do whatever you want, within reason.” [laughs] He flew the idea by me, and I was like, "If you wanna make that happen, let's do it." True story, we shot it in, like, ten minutes, and then we ate Taco Bell in his car, and then I went home.
We did something that I've just always wanted to do where you play the song at, like, 1.5 speed faster than it's recorded, and then when you slow it back down, your mouth is still synced up to the music, but obviously your body and everything is moving slower. It's in a ton of videos. I guess what would be the most iconic--what's that band, The Verve? "Bittersweet Symphony"? Yeah, like that. [laughs] It was on VH1 a lot in the morning in the early aughts when I was a tiny one. You would have to call Joe and ask him to conceptualize that video for you, 'cause I never really knew what he was getting at, but I always wanted to try that filming technique. Joe actually was like, "We might have to do it again, 'cause I'm not sure if this is gonna work. I've never done it before." But we did it, and it came out okay. It was as simple as that.
It feels very apropos. The setting, first of all, because this is an album that talks about loss on some level, and then also the warping of time.
I think when Joe first flew the idea by me, I was like, "You know, sad lady in a graveyard, that might be a little bit like Photo I in college," but there's nothing necessarily wrong with leaning into that, I don't think. I guess there's a reason why so many people resonate with that imagery, and the song certainly lent itself to that. I probably would have tended to lean toward something that was a lot more abstract and less accessible. With this record, I was obviously really focused on collaborating with people that I admire and trust, so if Joe seemed excited about that idea, I was just gonna jump on board with him, even if I was a little bit hesitant.
There's a great quote from you that I read in praise of Kate Wakefield on this record, about how you think one of the marks of a true musician is knowing when to sit out. How much did that restraint inform the way you worked on this record?
I think again, because the stakes were so low, it just made it a lot easier to sign off on letting other people let their light shine, or whatever. Also because I've just surrounded myself with artists and musicians over the past 15, 16 years of being in Screaming Females, I've obviously been lucky enough to meet a lot of people who are super talented, and I've always wanted to have opportunities to make things with them. As much as COVID has sucked, which is saying the least, it did give me the opportunity and space to reach out to these people and be like, "Hey, do you wanna play a little bit on this track?" Which is something I wouldn't have necessarily had the time to do in the past.
I think also as I've grown older, as an artist and musician, practicing restraint is a really important mark of somebody who is actively paying attention to something being made. If you are going to just kind of barf all over a project because you wanna be seen, or you just absolutely feel the urgency to be heard, but you're not actually adding anything constructive to the work, then maybe you aren't doing it for the right reasons. With that being said, as a younger musician and artist, I understand that feeling of urgency, and wanting to be in front and have people notice you, so I'm not saying that it's wrong in any way, but I'm definitely more inclined to let other people make a song be the best that it can be as I've grown older.
A function of maturing as a musician, then.
Exactly--I'm able to say that I can practice that restraint because in the past there have been so many instances where I have not. There have been so many instances where I've overplayed on something and I look back on it now, and I'm like, "Jesus, Marissa, why didn't you just calm down?" But obviously, I didn't have the capacity or knowledge to know how to do that yet.
Have you had the opportunity to play any of these new songs live?
Yeah, so I've been playing with Angie Boylan, who's a drummer in Brooklyn. She's in a band called Freezing Cold, and then we met each other in 2007, probably, when she played drums in a band called Cheeky who were an absolutely beloved kinda pop punk, power pop band. They were like Screaming Females' first best band friend, you know? We did a couple weekends together, 'cause I think a lot of us were still in school, and then we did a two-week tour together, something like that, and we’ve been friends ever since. She's one of the greatest musicians I've ever seen. Whenever anyone sees her play drums, they're just absolutely blown away, and on top of her being an amazing player, she's just an absolutely wonderful person to be around.
And then Shanna, who sings on the record--Shanna's, like, irritatingly talented. [laughs] She's in a band called Snakeskin, and she plays guitar in that band, but she's a trained pianist, so in lieu of having her play the bass, I just suggested to her, "Well, maybe you could play keys if we play shows as Noun with Angie, because then it'll give you more octave ranges and tonal options to choose from, and we can just kind of carry on as a three-piece.”
They were both into the idea, and Angie and Shanna had both known each other from just being Brooklyn-based musicians, so every week I'd go up to Brooklyn from Philadelphia and have--we still call it Noun practice, 'cause it's weird to call it Marissa Paternoster practice. [laughs] We've only played two shows, and we have some stuff lined up, fingers crossed, but we definitely are looking to play more. It's another instance where I got to recruit two people that are just so good at what they do, and I admire them so much, and I just love being around them, too, so it's a good vibe band for sure.
Aside from the music, how have you been spending your time? Have you taken up any pandemic hobbies?
Most of my time has been spent working on this graphic novel with Joe. He wrote it, and I am illustrating it, and right now we're on page 192, so I have been doing that almost full-time, and then–it sounds silly, but Bart of the Month Club takes up some time too.
Oh, I can imagine.
I've been drawing a lot of Bart, and I also have been exploring my visual art and what opportunities that might afford me while I haven't been touring as much, 'cause I've been on tour basically for the past 15 years, so I've been sitting at home and drawing a lot. I did a couple print editions, and I have a show, actually, opening in Philly this Friday [January 7], which I'm sure will also be weird because of COVID, but it's at Commonweal Gallery, and it's one of the first proper gallery shows that I've ever had because I've never really had time to explore showing my art in spaces or submitting to residency programs, applying for grants, stuff like that. I've definitely been looking into that stuff and participating in that more during COVID.
I hadn't heard about the graphic novel. I'm gonna have to check into that when we're done here.
Yeah, it's called Merriment, and I have never drawn a graphic novel before. I've drawn a lot of comics, and so--[laughs] Joe and I definitely underestimated how long it would take, even though I was pretty sure it was gonna take a couple years. I think we're about two years in. Obviously it's super time-consuming, and we still have a ways to go, but it's gonna get done. I'm not gonna give up on page 192, that's for sure. I mean, I can't believe that I drew this many pages. It's astonishing even to me. So the short answer to your question is I've been sitting on my ass a lot. Like, just sitting.
[laughs] But with implements in hand!
Yeah, I've been sitting on my butt a lot and having my hand hurt real bad. That's basically been my COVID experience.
Do you have any musical or artistic New Year's resolutions?
Nah, I don't do resolutions. I know I'm not gonna actually stick to it, and then I'll just get bummed out. And I'm already bummed out all the time, so I don't really need to add to the bummed out pile. [laughs] I'm just trying to keep chuggin' along and remaining cautiously optimistic that I'll be able to play shows and go on tour and see the people that I admire and love again, because it's hard having your whole reality ripped away from you, which I know is everyone's experience. It's not just unique to me, but you know, cheers to all of us.