“Boring boy, don’t hurt yourself”: The feminist punk of Daddy Issues
[Photo credit: Kelsey Hall]
Daddy Issues, made up of Jenna Moynihan, Jenna Mitchell and Emily Maxwell, are equal parts “fuck you forever” (the searing opening line from first single “In Your Head”) and falling in love. Doses of the realities of womanhood—heartbreak, sexual assault, band boys that don’t know when to shut up—strike mercilessly in each song like adrenaline shots to the heart a la Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.
Yes, they’re a punk rock band—and a great one at that—and yes, they’re made up of all women, but you can’t put them in a Bikini Kill-stamped box, and their upcoming debut album Deep Dream won’t let you. There’s an unflinching complexity to them that “girl bands” are so infrequently afforded, wherein they get to write songs about surviving sexual assault, but they also get to write songs inspired by viral videos. And why shouldn’t they?
The Nashville-based band spoke to us about every side of being a musician (woman or otherwise) right as they started their most recent run with Diet Cig. It’s a candid look from the inside; after all, thinkpieces about the abysmal state of gender parity in the scene are often the stories of outsiders looking in. Daddy Issues are the real thing, and they have no plans of quieting down any time soon.
Tell that classic story of how you got the name.
JENNA MOYNIHAN: I was at a show at an old DIY punk venue called the Owl Farm, and I was in the bathroom and I saw “daddy issues” written on the wall and I thought it was probably a cool all-female punk band or something. I went home and Googled it and it didn't exist, so we just got the idea to start a band ourselves.
Is there any truth to the story that when you started it was your first times picking up instruments?
JENNA MITCHELL: I had played violin when I was a kid and then I kind of fooled around on bass in high school and almost accidentally took it to college—like, “I'm going to a music college, may as well bring an instrument, I guess.” I didn't really touch it for years and then Jenna came home and was like, “Let's play a song!”
EMILY MAXWELL: I didn't play drums at all. I had taken two or three drum lessons when I was younger and then was like “I'm bored,” so I stopped. I just happened to be in the room with [Moynihan and Mitchell] and they were like, “Do you want to play drums?” and I was like, “I guess,” so I learned to play just by being in the band.
It feels like there's all this talk about punk music—and also music in general—and especially the scene in Nashville being this boys’ club. Is it frustrating hearing that and also being like, “Hey, I exist!”?
MOYNIHAN: I don't think so—it's not difficult to hear to me, just because it's partially true. I think it was really hard at first, even though there have been really important female musicians and bands before we formed. But I think over the past couple years we've really found our place in the scene and I think people really recognize us more than they ever have. And it feels kinda good to have proven something to ourselves and to the community.
I imagine it's difficult to toe the line as a female musician between really wearing being a woman and being like, “Yes! We are women in a band! We are out here in this scene that's entirely men!” but also having to be like, “We're just a band and we don't want you to see us as a 'girl band.'” Do you fight between that distinction sometimes?
MAXWELL: I do a lot because I feel very conflicted by it. I don't necessarily like people describing us as “all-girl punk band” because “all-girl” is not really a description of our sound. But at the same time, I do kind of like the inspirational aspect of it—maybe for other people, knowing that women are playing and especially in a city like Nashville, where there aren't a ton of women in bands.
MOYNIHAN: Well, they're starting to pick up now, they're just not “cool.” There's a ton of women playing music but it takes a while for someone to be in plain sight for everyone to see in Nashville, I guess. I also feel like it does kind of bother us being described as a “girl band.” People always think it bothers us, or me, when they compare us to other female musicians, but that doesn't bother me at all, because it's an honor.
[Photo credit: Kelsey Hall]
In pop punk, there’s a sort of “Paramore effect” where any female-fronted band gets compared to Paramore. With this genre, do people really tend to throw Kathleen Hanna and Carrie Brownstein at you and be like, “Oh, you sound just like them,” and your response is “Well, I think you're just saying that because they’re feminists…”?
MOYNIHAN: Yeah, they’ll just pull out any female punk band they've ever seen on TV or something.
MAXWELL: They'll be like Bratmobile or Bikini Kill or Sleater-Kinney. Yeah, anything like that that has a woman in it.
“In Your Head,” the first single off the new record, opens pretty boldly with the line “fuck you forever.” How do you feel that the reception has been to that song?
MOYNIHAN: It's been really positive. I mean, everyone's been saying that it's good, but I don't like…check the internet that much…
MITCHELL: People seem to really like it and relate to it, and that's always really cool when you put out a song of yours and people are like, “Oh my God, I love this so much, I really feel in-tune with this song and the lyrics you've written.” So, I've been feeling a lot of that and it feels really, really good.
There’s this scene you describe in the song that starts off seeming kind of trite where you're talking shit about other women, but it turns around and becomes so empowered, where you say, “You're delusional/you're a pet fish/assume I tell myself that chick with you is an ugly bitch.” I love this picture of talking about how the guy would assume you're thinking horrible things about the other woman.
MOYNIHAN: I'm glad you got the lyric because someone wrote something up about the song and they said the line was like, the opposite of what I meant when I wrote it. They said “I'm telling myself that the girl you're with is an ugly bitch” or something and it was like the complete opposite of the meaning of the line, and that line that they wrote about it [is] something that we would never say. But yeah, that was actually specifically one thing I read on the internet about the song and I was like, “Oh noooo, they don't understand what I mean!”
And I feel like that idea is the entire message of “Boring Girl” and I would love to hear you guys talk about that song, because that last line—“Boring boy/Don’t hurt yourself/I don’t think they have guitars in Hell”—I think I'm gonna get it tattooed on me.
MAXWELL: That was actually a joke I made to Jenna and we were just playing in our old living room and it just stuck.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah, we were really not gonna use that, but then the more we played it, we were kind of all like, “This is funny and awesome.”
MITCHELL: I just wanna say that I lobbied for that line so hard!
MAXWELL: It's just true, like any ex-boyfriend, like band dude you have or whatever.
MOYNIHAN: It's about dating a musician and when their music career is “better than yours” or something, or just when they kind of make you feel like they're doing cooler stuff than you all the time.
MITCHELL: It's just kind of like when you're going out on the road and you mention it and they're just kind of like, “Oh? The road?”
MAXWELL: And they're just like, “That's so cute! You've never done that before! I've done that, like, sooo much.”
MOYNIHAN: And then also having like, three girlfriends. It's kind of the same thing as like, assume I would tell myself that your girlfriend's ugly or something? It's kind of like, feeling for the other woman in the song, too. Like he's also treating her the same way and it's not her fault, it's his.
[Photo credit: Kelsey Hall]
Band dudes—like, not all dudes in bands, obviously—can be so fucking evil. I feel like every interaction I have with them is just hell!
MOYNIHAN: It is.
MAXWELL: It took some time. Trial and error.
MITCHELL: So much trial and error for me, even. It's crazy.
Whenever I have to interview a dude from a band that is clearly way too cocky, I'll be talking about it to my friends in advance like, “I have to interview A Man today.”
MAXWELL: I used to work at a music magazine also and it was very different to do those interviews than talking to someone who understands me.
MITCHELL: They all think what they do is just so important, that they're all saving the world and it's just kinda like, “Hey, we're all trying to achieve the same goal here together!”
The other day I was going to like this small show on campus at this coffeeshop. Keep in mind I was the only person there other than the baristas, so I feel like the band should have been at least a little happy to have me. But I was talking to the singer and I was like, “Who do you guys sound like?” And he was like, “Oh, I don't know, like, do you like, know music?” and I was like “What?” I was like, “Take off your fucking beanie, dude!”
MAXWELL: You can hear the beanie in the story.
MITCHELL: Did you see that Hard Times article like “Man Automatically Turns Into Neutral Milk Hotel Expert When Talking To A Woman”?
Oh my God, no! But I just let it happen. I was like, “Yeah, I write for a music outlet,” and he just started quizzing me about bands. He literally asked if I knew Brand New.
MOYNIHAN: Who did he think he sounded like? Did he slip that in?
Nope, he never even told me. He just quizzed me and then went back to drinking his beers with his band friends. I was like, “Why are you a nightmare?”
MAXWELL: Seriously! That's like, everything that's wrong with men in the music industry!
MOYNIHAN: And women do that too; it's just people trying to be cool. And hearing other bands say that they don't want to compared to anybody.
MITCHELL: Sorry about that guy.
I want to talk about the song “Dog Years.” The instrumentation is very dark and kind of stormy.
MAXWELL: It's actually funny because we started writing it after I saw this Vine—I don't know if you've seen it, it's a raccoon that has a piece of cotton candy and runs over to this water bowl and all the cotton candy dissolves.
Oh yeah, I know exactly which one you’re talking about!
MAXWELL: Yeah, I saw that and I was watching TV and then I was kind of like, just noodling around on guitar and I saw it and I like paused my show and I was like “Jenna! This is the saddest video I've ever seen in my life!” And we both were like “wow, what a metaphor. That's how we feel, all the time.” And then she played that dark guitar thing—that's just like, when you dissolve cotton candy.
That's awesome. I had no idea it was about that little raccoon! I just watched that video like two days ago. Although, I feel like the end result is not about the raccoon, but…the inspiration.
MITCHELL: There's like a long one, too, where he drops it like three or four times.
MAXWELL: He just keeps getting more and bringing it back….he figures it out, but….yeah.
[Photo credit: Kelsey Hall]
You’ve written some songs that are really, really meaningful, especially for your female audience. Do you already have fans coming up to you and saying that this stuff is really resonating with them?
MAXWELL: I see it quite a bit at shows—a lot of young girls coming up and just saying they decided to learn to play guitar because they wanted to learn one of our songs or things like that. We recently put out a new single called “I'm Not” that was about a lot of things, but we wrote it around this abuse that I endured when I was younger or—survived, I guess I should say—and I've gotten a lot of messages on our Tumblr and stuff like that saying, “Thank you for writing this.” It's about surviving something and having your trauma dismissed by friends and family and having someone say, “Oh well, this person—maybe they did sexually assault you or something, but they're really nice or a really good football player or whatever, so we're just gonna forget that that happened and you can just go on with your life.” We've gotten a lot of messages from people saying that really helped them, and it's been really nice to know that we've been helping some other women in some way, hopefully.
Putting that song out is very brave because it's not just a song about just pain, I think it's very explicit and it kind of takes people aback a little bit.
MAXWELL: Yeah, it can be scary to do but I think it was important.
MOYNIHAN: We wanted to write it also so that anyone could relate to it, too. It's for everyone, you know, guys and girls, too, not just women—anyone who has gone through something like that and was made to feel not good enough by somebody else.
I do want to hear about the process of how that song specifically came to be, because I feel like it’s already having a big effect on people.
MAXWELL: That issue of abuse is something I've been working on and dealing with for the past five or six years, just in terms of trying to process all of this stuff. I would talk to Jenna about it a lot. She would always hear me saying, “Oh, I have to, go do this thing,” because I'm not allowed to stand up for myself and say, “I don't want to,” because I'm not, you know, as good of a person as him. And we kind of got the idea from there to write the song. It started out as a different song and we've worked on it a lot since we first wrote.
MOYNIHAN: I mean it's kind of just exactly what Emily said. But I think the guitar is bright and kind of happy and it kind of sounds…it doesn't sound as bad as the topic is, I guess? And I think that was a goal, of mine at least, with just making it accessible to other people. Like, an opportunity like this, we could put it out and talk about what we really wanted to talk about.
MAXWELL: And in putting it out, I was very nervous to do it, because it was not something I talked about with more than very few close friends and my brother and very little with my parents. It was scary to put that out into the world because I was worried like, “Oh, this is going to make everybody I ever know or ever meet look at me as like…'Oh, that's Emily, she was abused.'” But part of my decision to put it out in a single like this is that I kind of started thinking, after a while, like where I was feeling so alone all the time, I eventually got out of my own bubble and was like, “Oh, I bet there are a ton of other people also sitting around feeling this exact same way that I am and they could probably use a song like this.” Because, when I was trying to process all this stuff, there weren't really any songs about that that I could find. I listened to like…”Roar” by Katy Perry or “Brave” by Sara Bareilles or something and those are awesome, great songs, but nothing really touched on that topic. There may be songs out there, I just couldn't find anything. So we wrote one.
I think it's fantastic that it's a song that really is about that, because I feel like it's one more layer that people can really connect to. But now that this is out there, it's something that you're gonna get a lot of questions about. Or, at the very least, people coming up to you, saying, “This song specifically means a lot to me because I was assaulted too.” Is that something that you're afraid of because now it's going to just keep opening up old wounds over and over again?
MAXWELL: Well, I tweeted something about that—like, if anyone wants to come up to me at a show or if anybody's been through abuse or assault and wants to talk to me about it, I'm here to listen because I was very lucky to have good friends that would listen to me, you know? And not everybody has that. I am afraid of the questions about it, but I told our publicist that if we do an interview and someone asks me a rude question about it, I'm just going to leave or…I don't know. It's a tough topic to discuss and people can definitely do it the wrong way and I'm not sure how it's gonna go, but I guess we'll see.
I feel like you're writing songs that have this really strong feminist-leaning message, but then you're putting them out into the ether of a pretty male-dominated, white cisgender male-dominated field. Is that scary at all?
MAXWELL: I think I was nervous about it just because sexual abuse and assault are dismissed so often and so publicly—like Brock Turner and pretty much any popular case of assault or rape, especially with younger girls. I was kind of nervous that people would take it and not only dismiss what we were saying, but almost kind of think what we were saying was “Oh well, your band's called Daddy Issues, so of course,” you know? But it hasn't been that way luckily, so far. And I think that no matter what, even if people were going to react poorly, we'd just say, “We want to play anyway.”
MOYNIHAN: The point is that we're not afraid and that's why we're doing it. Even though that was a specific situation where it's scary because a certain type of person is gonna think, “Oh well, of course your dad did.” Well, that's not even true, that's not really what it's about but yeah, I don't think we're afraid at all, I think that was probably really the only time. We're gonna keep trying to do stuff like that, and the more you do stuff like that the less afraid you get. That's the point of writing songs and doing things like that—for personal gain and for hopefully other women and hopefully men, too, to understand.
MAXWELL: Hopefully we can try to change that fear of men by having them hear a song like that and having them be like, “Oh, do we make people feel this way? Maybe we should stop doing that.”
I'm glad you’re doing this stuff right off the bat because I feel like right now with women who have been in the scene for a while, whenever they try to open their mouth about any feminist issue, it's just all backlash.
MOYNIHAN: A lot of female musicians we know that are working on projects or writing are telling us, “Oh yeah, I'm writing stuff that's really personal or about issues personal to women.” And so I think there's gonna be a lot more in the future of stuff like this, hopefully, more popular music, not just punk music that you can find in a basement somewhere. alt
Deep Dream is out May 19 on Infinity Cat.
