When I first heard Daddy Issues’ album, Can We Still Hang, I thought these would have been the girls I smoked cigarettes with in my high school bathroom. Their grungy and gritty realness not only transported me back to my teenage bedroom scattered with my angsty poetry and walls covered with my brother’s old CD longboxes, but their music still speaks to my inner nonconformist wild child of today. They triumphantly merge the sultry badassness of Kim Gordon, catchy choruses of Veruca Salt, and mysterious darkness of L.A. Witch.
This will be their first time at Bragg Jam. Since forming in 2014, the grunge pop trio have already made a mark on their hometown of Nashville. However, Jenna Moynihan (singer, guitarist), Emily Maxwell (drums) and Jenna Mitchell (bass) had no idea that the band, which started as a joke, would lead them to performing at SXSW or that they would already be in the works on their second album release on Infinity Cat Recordings, also home to Diarrhea Planet, JEFF The Brotherhood, and Natural Child.
Emily spoke with me about the band’s beginnings on Twitter and the grit of being a few ladies in the Nashville music scene. I learned what makes their music so honest and also heard a story about some confiscated shoes in Kentucky.
I hear that Daddy Issues started out of posts on a Twitter account. Can you explain this for me?
Basically, Jenna and Jenna were working together and they thought, being in the Nashville music scene, how many people they could get to follow a Twitter account for a fake band called Daddy Issues. And that’s just kinda how it started. They were just tweets and like dumb stuff. And you know it became real.
So…it started out as a fake band?
Yeah, I mean it was all like a joke at first. And then it slowly became more and more real as we kept playing and writing and everything.
Did you did you guys expect that to happen?
No, not really. I mean I didn’t play drums before we started the band and Jenna Mitchell hadn’t been playing bass for that long. She played violin in high school, but she didn’t ever seriously practice the bass or anything. So we were just fooling around and having fun. It was never like, “oh, we’re going to be the next big serious band in Nashville.” It was just kind of like we’re playing instruments together and learning how to play and writing songs. And then it just kind of blew up. Blew up in our faces I guess [laughs].
How would you describe your music and who are some of your greatest influences?
We kind of call it grunge pop because we do have a lot of poppy choruses and stuff, but there’s still a lot of heavy guitar. And in terms of influences, we all are influenced by a lot of really different things. So I don’t want to leave anybody out speaking for all three of us. I listen to a lot of 80s Britpop like the Smiths, the Cure, Stone Roses. I also listen to a lot of postmodern alt-rock kind of stuff. Jenna [Mitchell], I know she always says for bass she really likes New Order and Joy Division and stuff like that. All three of us generally like a lot of 80s to 90s music, songwriters like Fiona Apple and Juliana Hatfield. I feel like I’m always leaving somebody off, but that’s kind of a good generalization.
I’m glad you brought that up because I feel like there is a 90s grunge/punk sound to your music. Is this something you guys were going for, or did the music just grow into that sound?
It honestly just grew into that. We didn’t start – I mean we were not ever trying to [do] a certain song that sounds like Nirvana or this song that sort of sounds like Soundgarden. We never had that in mind. We just wrote like messing around on the instruments and that’s just what came out. None of us really were listening to any grunge before that. I guess. or at the time when we were writing the songs for this album. We got into it more as we started playing music. [Our music] came more on our own naturally… I think it was just the emotion we were feeling when we were writing the song and that kind of eternal darkness reflected out into the darkness, or the heaviness of the music.
Do you think you have any hurdles in the music industry being an all girl band?
Kind of an interesting question, because yes and no. I think that women definitely don’t have as much respect as male musicians do. I think it’s a lot harder to get people to take you seriously. I think it’s a lot harder to get people to focus on your music over who you are and your gender. Which, unless it’s something that you are specifically singing about within the context of your song, it’s mostly irrelevant.
We definitely have experienced some of that, somewhat in the way fans interact with us and somewhat in the way people like sound guys or whoever at shows interact with us. Definitely in the sense of not being treated like we know what we’re doing as much as an all male band we may be playing with.
Nashville is known as the music city but more obviously for the country genre. However, there have been some really great and more diversified music coming out of your hometown. How do you think your band is part of the changing music atmosphere in Nashville, and what do you see for your city’s music scene over the next couple of years?
For us, I think the biggest kind of positive we’ve seen, or at least within our own attitudes about our music scene, is that we hope we kind of opened up [a conversation]. We’re not the first all female rock band from Nashville by any means. There was a band called Heavy Cream that was female fronted and Thelma and the Sleaze. I hope that we opened up the conversation for women in Nashville to realize that you don’t have to be a virtuoso guitarist or something to start a band. As I said earlier, I didn’t play an instrument before we started playing music together. I just learned and we played because it was fun. If you want to play music and you have something to say I think anybody should be able to and should do it. Hopefully, that was our contribution to the scene… people were really supportive and friendly and helpful because we were just three people who were having fun playing music. People saw that and wanted to encourage that.
We have a lot of bands that are pretty strong, and the support within the community is strong as well. Nashville’s really been growing a lot in the last couple of years. We have so many great rock bands. A couple of bands on our own label are JEFF the Brotherhood and Diarrhea Planet and Music Band. JEFF the Brotherhood has already had a lot of success and they’re excellent. Diarrhea Planet just released an awesome album and they’re definitely headed for great success. And Music Band is incredible as well and I think a really good representation of the Nashville rock sound. I’m hoping, and thinking, that people are going to catch on and help our rock scene become even greater than what it is.
Did you guys have a vision of how you wanted your album Can We Still Hang to sound or a theme you guys wanted to get across to your listeners?
No, we didn’t. We’d been thinking about recording an EP or something. Our friend Jacob who engineered the record and recorded it had offered to help us do it at his house. So we just decided like, “oh we’ll just record a few songs so we’ll have some recorded music.” And then we got the offer to do the Infinity Cat Cassette Series. Casey Weissbuch got involved and came and helped produce it. And I think Casey had more of a vision for the sound and what he wanted the album to be than we did necessarily. We’d recorded two songs before that but this was our first experience recording something longer. We just wanted it to reflect us and Casey did as well. I think it was more Casey’s producing that gave it that sound than necessarily our input.
You said you guys wanted the album to be mainly a reflection of you. So how do you think it reflects your band?
I think it just has an element of rawness that’s very real about us and is still very real about us. Because we’re still learning how to play our instruments. I think it has a rawness that was very accurate of the time when it was recorded, and I think it kind of sounds like a lot of young punk bands. It was recorded in a very tiny room and I think it sounds like that. In a sense, it captured what we probably were like at that time. And I think it’s honest in that way.
I really love the grimy, sludge sound of the song “Ugly When I Cry” and the lyrics’ ideal of women having a much deeper side than society’s sweet and frilly facade of women. What does this song mean to you and how does your music speak to the girl of today?
I think our songs reflect us in that they are extremely personal. Everything that we’re writing is coming from a very personal perspective, you know whatever line about us being depressed or feeling insecure about your body or whatever it may be. [It’s not just a] societal observation that we’re making or pulling in. It’s something that we’re actually feeling and just voicing through song.
I think in terms of relating to girls, we’ve been really lucky in the last decade or so in that women have had, not necessarily a safe space, but a safe-er space to voice their thoughts and feelings in a way where people are not immediately dismissive of them. But I think we are just trying to write songs about how we feel. I think what we’ve [encountered] from fans is that people appreciate and relate to that. There’s a very special feeling that comes along with hearing a song that you can identify with. So, comforting. And so refreshing to feel like you have a friend out there who’s thinking the same thing you’re thinking even if it’s kind of crazy. So I think that’s where our music comes into play. Younger girls are able to share what we’re seeing and feel a sort of kinship. Hopefully [we’re] providing, in some sense, an ally too. Girls out there who are just trying to figure out the world like we are.
Tell me about the most memorable experience you’ve had as a band.
We had a lot of great times with our friends in White Reaper. We had one really crazy show with them in Louisville that almost ended with an arrest. It’s a very long story, but some shoes were stolen, some clothes were thrown in the trash by the police. It was a wild night so that’s a story we’ve been telling for a while now.
But we also recorded a split with them last September up in Chicago and the two days we spent there were really awesome and really fun. I think that’s been one of our highlights so far. And just doing South by Southwest every year together has been really fun. It’s such a crazy, wild, unpredictable week that you’re just running around everywhere trying to stay hydrated and get drunk at the same time and see as many bands as you can.
What’s up with the story about the clothes and the shoes and the police?
I had had a root canal the day of the first show on the first day of tour. So, I was asleep in the car through all of this. But I was awoken at six o’clock by the Jennas jumping in the car and locking the doors and telling me that they had been out talking to this guy who they didn’t know very well. He told them that he had a pool everybody could to go. So they went.
I guess the guy didn’t live at the complex where the pool was, so they had snuck in and the police were called. I think everybody got away before [the police] got there except for two people. So they were questioned, but they were released. But even though no charges were pressed or anything, they took Jenna Moynihan’s shoes as evidence. We’ve tried many times to recover them from the Louisville Police Department but they’ve never given them back. And the clothes – Jenna Mitchell had taken her clothes off because she was swimming obviously. And instead of letting her pick them up or taking them as evidence or anything they just threw them in the trash. It was a really weird, really weird experience.
So what’s coming up for the band in the future?
We are finishing up an album right now. Jake Orrall from JEFF the Brotherhood is producing it. We have a couple festivals this summer. Everything’s kind of kicking off with Wrecking Ball which is in Atlanta August 13th and 14th. I’m really, really stoked to be there. And then we just announced today that we’re touring in October with Tacocat from Seattle. So just doing a lot of touring this fall and winter; our album’s going to be coming out sometime in that zone. And then who knows from there.
Check out Daddy Issues’ album Can We Still Hang before they get to Bragg Jam:
