karissa bone
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"AN AIRY VOICE WE CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF"
- Quadio
‘Maybe in the Summer,’ is a Capri Sun pouch filled to the brim with sunlight — and hope for a romance-to-come"
- The FADER
KARISSA BONE
*Writing songs to make you go to therapy*
Karissa Bone is an artist and songwriter from Saginaw, Michigan, combining vibrant pop aesthetics with indie subtleties...like if Bon Iver and Lorde got in a car crash with Olivia Rodrigo. Her music is the soundtrack for the things we don't say out loud— it's brutally honest, “golden hour” nostalgic, and aches like a bee sting.
Releasing her debut single "Maybe in the Summer" last August, she has been busy ever since—joining Charlie Burg's Blue Wave Band singing bgv and playing synth, being chosen as a Quadio X FADER college creative of the year and receiving a feature in the FADER magazine, and landing her first sync placement in Starz drama Heels.
Having just graduated from Berklee College of Music, Karissa is working on her debut EP and relocating to LA. She hopes when you listen you hear pieces of golden midwest drives and feel a little too understood.
Welcome to my safe space.
I'm going to start posting little snippets of writing here just to talk into the void. I'll write them as if I'm talking to my closest friends. You included. If you happen to resonate please send me a message:) you're not alone.
Entry #1 - Drinking Lemon Juice Out of a Broken Mug
7.15.22 I recently (as in this week) have felt fairly uninspired to write songs. A feeling I’m sure many of you have become well accustomed to. The strange element of my hiatus is that I can’t seem to stop WRITING. I can’t stop thinking of stupid goddamn poetic things at 12:15am and reaching for my way-too-bright & way-too-old iPhone to reluctantly jot it down— like it will somehow be useful to my tomorrow brain. I’ve also happened to lose my voice in the last 48 hours which makes writing songs inevitably difficult, so I’m resorting to life’s small comforts (trader joes green tea mochi and sliced pineapple) and thinking pointlessly deeply about life. I’m not going to say I’m “lost” but it’s definitely been a weird week/month/year. I seem constantly accosted by *existential* questions like: is your career actually supposed to be the most important thing in your life? Should I be spending more time with my family? Should I be spending more time dating (I’ll come back to this, but for now I’m giving it a *heavy sigh*)— the list goes on. So I drink orange juice and I go on walks around the corner to “get my mind off things,” but it’s really to get my mind off of everything. Although I haven’t been going into my void (if you know me you’ve seen this and if not you can guess). This is a new type of quiet confusion, one where I feel like I’m waking up after hours on social media or I’m exhausted after 10 hours of sleep. A brain fog when I’m driving to and from work and I don’t play music in the car. Is this a diary? It might be. I’ve never been good at journaling because I don’t like to remember the ugly parts and that’s always what I seem to write down. I actually made a scrapbook, sorry “the scrapbook,” for this reason— some of you have seen it. I’m fairly proud of my poor, scrawled handwriting and the retro polaroids I’ve forced on so many of my now deemed "college friends." I started “the scrapbook” because I couldn’t remember the good parts..or any parts for that matter. I was approaching my senior year of fucking college (which is over now, don’t mention it) and I didn’t want it to go by in a blur of cheap meals and crises I couldn’t recount. So I cheated. I glazed over the rejections and the failures and the times I felt deeply sorry for myself and covered them up with stickers from the movie cars and little scribbled stars. Am I cheating myself by only wanting to remember the good parts? Wouldn’t it be nice to just remember the parts you felt whole if you got to choose? I think I’m too young to know, but too old to not know better. x Karissa
Entry #2 - In Combat with Hornets at 2am
7.18.22 I used to have hornets in my room at home— they lived in the air ducts for a bit, so I was always caught in 2am combat. There’s something about squishing the life out of bugs that I just can’t get behind, so instead I had a nightly showdown. Normally I would manage to hit the bugger out of the air and then I would trap it under about 6 Harry Potter books and call it a night. The next morning I would whisk my mom upstairs to view my success in battle and politely ask her to move the remains. Now, I don’t have anyone to pick up my wasp guts. When I’m sick I get to uber eats myself groceries that are way too expensive and when I’m tired I get to go to bed without eating— shit I even called customer service today about not enrolling me in a 401K program. It’s like one of those annoying “would-you-rather” questions where they say idiot things like *would you rather crush the life out of a wasp* OR *deal with your retirement plan today*? I always hated those games because I wanted to say “neither,” but when you’re an adult you have to say “both.” Nostalgia hits harder when you’re not sure when it’ll be back. There’s a certain order to the first 21 years of your life (if you went to college), and when it’s over you wake up from very long coma with an apartment you can’t pay for. It hits you in waves. You buy a tote bag because it was inspired by your favorite book as a kid. You get ice cream sandwiches at the grocery store to remind you of Michigan summers. You grab onto the pieces because you’re not sure when they’ll be back. Up until now you’ve been twisting and turning through reliable cycles, you always kinda knew what was coming next even when you didn’t. You always knew that if you went home there might be a hornet in your room— and that would be enough. A small comfort in a large dish of unknown. x Karissa