They'll Only Miss You When You Leave: Songs 1996-2003

A wise man once said, "sometimes you gotta say 'what the fuck,' make your move. . . saying 'what the fuck' brings freedom." Carissa's Wierd took those words to heart. Over the course of three studio albums that WTF spirit informed their every move, yielding some of the most distinctive music to emerge from Seattle, anthologized for the first time on They'll Only Miss You When You Leave: Songs 1996-2003. For a band that played so softly, Carissa's Wierd generated a hell of a buzz. "We never intended to be as quiet as we were," says co-founder Jenn Ghetto. The hushed volumes that became a stylistic trademark were one of the earliest outcomes of that WTF attitude. As teenagers in Tucson, AZ, Ghetto and Mat Brooke met at a Goth club. Soon they were writing songs together on twenty dollar guitars, plugged into cereal box-sized amplifiers - definitely not the kind that go to 11. They worked around their limitations. "All the early recording we ever did was in her moms' closet on a cheap four track," remembers Brooke. "We'd have to be quiet, because her Grandma was sleeping." As the band grew, that WTF spirit manifested itself in an attitude that prized musical ambition over perceived aptitude. Who was to say they couldn't have brass or strings on their songs? Having developed their compositional styles in tandem, Brooke and Ghetto had a unique rhythmic sensibility that wasn't easily shoehorned into conventional time signatures. "Maybe that's why we went through so many drummers," says Brooke (among those behind the kit was future Sub Pop recording artist Sera Cahoone, one of several notables for whom Carissa's Wierd served as a training ground). At the center of the maelstrom, Carissa's Wierd never quite grasped the ardor of their fans. Long out of print, their full-lengths, Ugly But Honest (1999), You Should Be at Home Here (2001), and Songs About Leaving (2002) all became collector's items, as did the compilations I Before E and Scrap Book - all of wh