Last April, Carissa Johnson recalls, “We’re the last band of the last show of the Rumble.” A couple weeks earlier, the Andover punk rocker—accompanied by The Cure Alls featuring lead guitarist Steph Curran and drummer Nick Hall—had been one of 24 bands competing in Boston’s annual Rock ‘N’ Roll Rumble. By April 21, they’d made it down to the last three bands.

“We were in our third song, all of a sudden the lights came on and the amps stopped working and the mics went off,” recalls Johnson, who celebrates the release of her third album, “Talk Talk Talk,” accompanied by Curran and Hall, on March 10 with an album release show at Great Scott in Boston that night.

“The fire alarm got pulled,” Johnson says. The few hundred folks at the show at Once in Somerville had to evacuate for about 20 minutes. “It’s raining out,” she says. “It’s the worst thing that can happen, but now it’s like, ‘0h, man, I’ve got to figure this out on the spot.’”

Johnson says she’d not been sure about entering the Rumble in the first place, being skeptical of music competitions. “I honestly didn’t expect to make it through the first round,” she says. Plus, “There’s that whole thing of the Rumble curse. If you win, you’re just going to be forgotten about.” Then again, the last women to win were Amanda Palmer with The Dresden Dolls in 2003 and Aimee Mann with ‘Til Tuesday in 1983. “These are two of my favorites and I’m like I want to be the next female to win this.”

“The whole place refilled with people and as everyone was coming in we started over the song we left off on,” Johnson says. “That was the part of the set where our energy was ramping up and all of a sudden it got shut down. And then as we all got back in the energy just built up to double what it was before.”

She said something like, “What’s rock and roll without a little bit of fire and spontaneity.” They played the title track of her 2015 album “For Now” and got people singing along “For now! For now!” When it was over, the band had bested 23 other bands and won.

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‘I Don’t Know Myself’
Johnson lives in Andover, Massachusetts, where she grew up. Now 24, she’s been playing music around Boston since her mid teens.

After winning the Rock ‘N’ Roll Rumble, she and The Cure-Alls played the Boston Music Awards at the House of Blues and First Night Boston in December. Following Saturday’s album debut show, the group has performances lined up at Thunder Road in Somerville on March 26, Koto in Salem on April 6, and at Once in Somerville on May 19.

Still, Boston has “become smaller over time. It seemed like this huge thing to be playing in Cambridge or be playing in Boston. There’s so much in the city that I want to do, but I’ve gotten to feeling a little claustrophobic,” she says. “Sometimes I just feel like I want something bigger to reach for, somewhere else to go. I know I have this tendency to run away from things.”

“Talk Talk Talk” is filled with lyrics that can sound like defiance in the face of breakups.

“Shatter then gather yourself / You’re looking for what’s already found,” she sings on “Shatter.” “…I won’t cry anymore over you / Don’t you cry over me.”

Carissa Johnson plays at the 2017 Boston Music Awards. (Greg Cook)
Carissa Johnson plays at the 2017 Boston Music Awards. (Greg Cook)

“Why do you always come back to me / After my years of crying / I’ll never put you on the back burn / I promise, I mean it now better than I ever have before,” she sings on “Two Weeks.” “..Headfirst into unknown / I don’t wanna live life / With a chain and ball / Everbody seems to know me so well / I don’t know myself / At all.”

“Talk Talk Talk," the new album by Carissa Johnson and The Cure-Alls. (Courtesy)
“Talk Talk Talk,” the new album by Carissa Johnson and The Cure-Alls. (Courtesy)

“Two Weeks,” Johnson says, “was about giving two weeks to your job and doing what you like. It’s like talking to your lover and saying you have another love and it’s the music and I’ve got to do this.”

The songs “I Always Will” and “You Lost You,” she says, are “about a friendship falling apart.” But except for maybe the song “Cardinal” (“Feels like you’d like to forget my name”), she says, its “not really about anything romantic.”

“Most of it is about figuring out if I should stay or if I should run away,” Johnson says. “Overall it’s about feeling a little stuck or feeling a little upset with everything that’s going on around me and wanting to change it.”

Johnson mulls running away, she says, “to find myself because I don’t feel like what’s going on here all the time is me. Or to get my music heard more I’ve got to go elsewhere. Or just to break out of here and go everywhere.”

“I’ve never felt so sick of being young,” she sings on “Home.” “I’ve got so much more to give but sometimes I don’t know how.”

‘Feeling What I’m Feeling’
Johnson says she played more than 150 shows across nearly 30 states in 2017. “Sometimes I’m playing to literally no one. I went from playing a sold-out Viper Room in California to literally nobody in Joshua Tree the next day.”

These were mostly solo acoustic shows, which can give her songs a melancholy singer-songwriter vibe. “It’s more like folk punk a little bit, but not really. It’s more like punk acoustic rock,” says says.

The same songs, when she’s joined by Curran and Hall, can become defiant anthems about heartbreak, about struggling to figure out who she is, what she wants, where she’s going. They’re about struggling to make it as a musician in the face of haters and critics. “These sad songs, but they can come across as happy, uplifting rock songs.”

Curran and Hall, “they really made these songs something else,” Johnson says.
“If I had to choose, I’d choose the band, just because of the power behind that. I feel like I like to lift my head around and play with more force.”

“I’m definitely influenced by ‘70s New York punk,” Johnson says. The Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Jam, The Runaways, Blonde, Talking Heads. She’s adopted a classic punk look—black, denim, patches, pins, playing her bass with the wide-legged stance of Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone.

“I got into that type of music right when I started playing bars and playing out. … I’m like, ‘I’m going to become that,’” she says. “Listening to that music, I’m like, ‘Finally someone is feeling what I’m feeling.’”


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Carissa Johnson plays at the 2017 Boston Music Awards. (Greg Cook)
Carissa Johnson plays at the 2017 Boston Music Awards. (Greg Cook)
Categories: Music