I would have asked her about the extreme contrast – size of body vs. size of stage presence – except I was afraid that she gets it enough that it might just piss her off (I’m already afraid I’ll be hearing from Danzig.)

Mould seems like a fair point of comparison to Paternoster – out, queer, a hell of a guitarist, and the leader of a guitar-driven punk trio whose lyrics tend to the more personal than political, not that they’re always disconnected. Plus, judging from the enthusiastic ravings of the First Nations kid from Kelowna (or was it Kamloops?) who stood front-and-center next to me at the Screaming Females’ recent show at Vancouver’s Rickshaw Theatre – the venue with the most heart in Vancouver, a former Shaw Brothers movie theatre in Chinatown run by Mo Tarmohamed – to a young generation of music fans, seeing Screaming Females is every bit as exciting to kids today as seeing Hüsker Dü would have been for me in my 20s. The kid had a buddy with him who’d come all the way from Edmonton, too – about a 12 hour drive from Vancouver – which said kid told me about three times, shaking my hand too vigorously and yelling in my ear things like, “I can’t believe we’re gonna see Screaming Females! I came all the way from Kelowna [Kamloops?]. He’s here from Edmonton!” (The trio, hailing from the New Brunswick that is in New Jersey, as opposed to the one on Canada’s East Coast, do not get up this way very often, last having played Vancouver in 2015, when touring with Garbage.

An original version of this article appeared on my blog, Alienated in Vancouver, where I made much of the fact that Screaming Females sound like the whole “year that punk broke” never happened, despite the fact that they would have been kindergarten age back then. Screaming Females sound like the punk rock I was listening to pre-Nevermind (if I’d realized they sometimes cover “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in their sets, I would have asked about it, but I only found out that detail from photographer Bob Hanham afterwards). It does my heart good, and you figure Kurt himself would have been relieved to know that maybe punk didn’t break in 1991 after all?

I saw Nirvana back in 1991, mind you. I enjoyed Screaming Females more.

Marissa: When speaking of our formative times in New Brunswick, it’s seldom that we cite a particular sound. All of the bands sounded radically different, but regardless of all that, there was a healthy music & arts scene we were lucky enough to participate in. The Ergs, Hunchback and Seasick are just a few of the bands we played with regularly in New Brunswick.

Mo: What were your parents listening to when you were growing up? Any influences by process of osmosis? (Mo: “My daughter, who is about the same age as Marissa, picked up a lot of her musical taste while being held ‘captive’ in the backseat of my car on long family road trips listening to the stuff I played. Now as an independent grown adult with freewill, she, more often than not, still listens to: Elvis Costello, The Jam, The The, Selectors, Madness, The Clash, Sugar, XTC, Pixies, Bowie and even Steely Dan (side note: she couldn’t quite glom onto Pere Ubu – oh well).”

Marissa: My father loves music, he always had something on around the house. He doesn’t collect records or anything, but he’s never really stopped listening to contemporary pop and rock music. Growing up we listened to a lot of The Clash and The Beatles, Green Day, Nirvana, etc. He’d always take me along to the record store with him and let me grab something for myself when I began to express an interest in music.

Marissa: We never discussed what sort of music we were gonna play. Sure, we are fans of a lot of music that was popular in the early 90’s, but we celebrate a lot of music from a vast pool of genres across a wide swath of time. We certainly never established our band with any intent to make money. We are very lucky to have Screaming Females be our “job” and I’d say that we’re just so grateful to have created a healthy, sustainable model in an effort to be able to play music until the very end. It’s rough out here for DIY musicians, so we don’t take anything for granted.

Marissa: Yeah, I used the shit out of Napster, but even in tandem with my peak Napster use I was going to the record store as much as possible. I just so happened to be in my early teens at Napster’s peak, so I was ravenous for music 24/7. We didn’t have a very fast modem at my parent’s house, so I wouldn’t say Napster had a big role in forming my taste – I primarily used the internet to read about bands who were participating in the music I was interested in, and it they sounded interesting enough to me, I’d grab the record.

Marissa: Billy Corgan’s guitar playing was (obviously) a huge influence on me. Nothing mattered more to me than the Smashing Pumpkins, and Siamese Dream still stands as one of my all-time favorites. Once I discovered Sleater-Kinney, I dug deep into whatever Kill Rock Stars and K Records had to offer me, and both of their respective rosters made a point of representing queer artists. Beat Happening, Peaches, Huggy Bear, Gravy Train, Unwound – I was into all that stuff, it changed my life.

Allan: Mo and I both hear some classic rock in your guitar playing, but in a somewhat nebulous way – I can’t put a finger on who I’m reminded of, but… I know growing up in the suburbs means you don’t necessarily have access to the really cool stuff, so you make do. Was there stuff you were really into early on that may be kind of embarrassing now? (Erin of Alien Boys and the Rebel Spell once fessed up that growing up suburban, pre-internet, meant she didn’t KNOW her punk guitarists early on so Slash and Angus had a big impact on her, which her bandmates at the time – the Rebel Spell – all got a kick out of hearing; but I mean, I had AC/DC records when I was 14… I get her point…).

Marissa: Classic rock was on in my house all the time. Like I mentioned previously, my dad listened to a lot of The Clash, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello. It might have been impossible to have it not affect me and my playing, it was all around me in my formative years.

Marissa: Mike, Jarrett, and I write the music together. It’s a very democratic process, and it’s super rare that one of us walks into practice with a complete song. I write all of the lyrics, but I usually work on them for a long time and they’ll change a lot within the creation of the song. Sometimes the lyrics come from drawings that I’ve made – (I use a lot of text in my visual work) – and I often use those lines for jumping off points.

Marissa: I often use romantic relationships as a metaphor for other subjects that might not have the same visceral appeal – but yes, of course some of the songs are about my personal life and the relationships therein.

Marissa: Steve was nothing short of a professional gentleman and we are still close friends who speak often. Steve is one of the most celebrated and talented engineers in the world, and with that being said, his interest lies in serving the band in precisely the way the band desires. He will take you seriously if you take your project seriously.

Allan: Are “Bell” [off 2009’s Power Move ] and “Brass Bell” related?

Marissa: I wish I had a better answer for this, but no, they aren’t related.

Allan: A song I love of yours – “Criminal Image [off 2015’s Rose Mountain – also has my favourite musical mondegreen since my wife thought David Bowie was singing about making love to a seagull I was sure the chorus was, “You’re a Cylon.” Do you get that a lot? What is “Criminal Image” about? I am assuming there is an out queer politic in there but I dunno.

Marissa: Haha, that’s very funny! Well, as you know, the lyric is “You’re a siren/ Everything I want” which obviously makes reference to Homer’s Odyssey. In the book, the traveling warrior comes across monsters known as “sirens” who pretend to be beautiful women to lure the men to shore in order to kill them. Interpret it however you wish, it’s a fairly malleable tale that I’m sure everyone can relate to/shape to fit their lifestyle in some capacity.

Marissa: We’ll usually sit down together after the record is done being tracked and begin to suss out the tracklist. I don’t weigh in too much during this process – I very rarely listen to albums from top to bottom, but Mike and Jarrett do, so I leave it to the experts.

Allan: Any Vancouver stories? You were last here at the Media Club in 2015, right? Memories of that night? Any other associations with the city? 

Marissa: When we opened for Garbage in 2015, Mike stepped in a massive pile of what was unmistakably human excrement outside of the venue. We didn’t really notice the smell until he had put his feet up on the dash and smeared it all over  the glove box, and let me tell you – it was a memorable smell.

Allan: Anything I’ve missed that you want to tell people about?

Marissa: Our new album Desire Pathway is out everywhere now, and we’ll have copies at the show!

[Screaming Females tour dates here. All photos Bob Hanham]