An Interview with Gouge Away's Christina Michelle

Stuck in a tour stress dream.

Apr 17, 2024

There’s a saying I think about a lot: “Jump off the cliff and learn to fly on the way down.” Gouge Away vocalist Christina Michelle is the embodiment of that mantra. As a musician, an artist, and a member of the hardcore scene, she always bites off more than she can chew but still manages to find her way. Whether it’s booking shows as a teenager in Florida, learning to play an instrument to fill in for a popular shoegaze band, or designing an album cover, she says yes and figures it out as she goes.

Her yes!-first philosophy has served her well. Gouge Away has just released their third album, Deep Sage, after a brief time apart for some much needed recalibration. The record takes the scathing hardcore sonics of their previous works and stretches them out a bit, giving the band more room to explore the spaces between the chaos. In other words, Gouge Away is no longer afraid to write songs that pass the two-minute mark.

Christina took a break from packing for a month-long tour of America with Metz to unpack the psychological meaning behind her stress dreams, the imagery in her artwork, and her fashion sense.

Since you're leaving for tour shortly, do you have any pre-tour rituals or anything you like to do before you leave?

Christina Michelle: Just freak out. [Laughs] I always have tour nightmares for a couple days before.

What happens in the nightmares?

I just had one the other night. We had to leave for tour in minutes, and I was like, “I'll go take a shower.” And then when I came out of the shower, I realized I left the front door of my apartment open and a bunch of small animals got in and I had to get them out but keep my cat inside at the same time. So I'm trying to leave for tour and I have this huge problem on my hands.

All right, well, let's psychoanalyze that. It feels like you are maybe paranoid about forgetting to sew up the little details that are going to lead to chaos, and you fear chaos.

[Laughs] Yeah, there's that phrase: not my circus, not my monkeys. But I feel like it is my circus and it is my monkeys. So I'm just worried that I'm just gonna miss something.

I have a recurring nightmare where somebody last-minute is like, “Hey, Dan, you have to play bass for this band.” Like, as they're going on stage. And I don't know any of the songs and I'm just standing there basically trying to hit the root note and not embarrass myself. And if I were to analyze that, I guess in my soul I think I'm an imposter and it's just a matter of time before people figure that out.

[Laughs] Yeah. I had so many dreams like that during COVID, especially when we weren't doing anything in real life. I would have these dreams where it was the second before we have to go on stage, and I'm like, “I haven't practiced. I haven't warmed up. I'm going to sound horrible.” But they’re like, “Well, we have to go right now!” It's so scary.

COVID dreams were a special kind of nightmare because they kind of didn't stop when you woke up. I remember that first week where we were all wrapping our heads around the idea that there was a virus and we had to stay home and the whole world was insane. And I remember having these crazy stress dreams and then waking up and thinking, “Oh, but that was just a dream, right?” And then you realize, ah fuck, no it’s not. Just no separation between nightmare and reality.

Yes! Definitely.

We’re off to a weird start here. But I did want to ask you about something you posted recently on Instagram. It’s a photo where you're on stage screaming. You're wearing a dress and the caption says, “Sometimes I dress as the person kid-me imagined.” What inspired that?

I grew up in Florida, and between the weather being very oppressive and just feeling like I don't really belong or fit in there, I had a hard time expressing myself and I really didn't care about clothes or anything. I kind of just cared about being comfortable. And since moving to Portland in the last few years, it's opened my mind up a lot more. And experiencing seasons too, I have to buy a lot of things for the first time. At first I felt very silly, literally buying a turtleneck or something. I had this fear in my head, like I was still living in Florida and everyone's judging me and someone's going to have something to say.

But here, it's like I have this clean slate. I feel kind of stupid and silly all the time when I want to try something new, and I feel like the best way for me to convince myself to just commit is to be like, well, the young me who watched like the Spice Girls on TV and watched Wish Upon a Star, the Disney Channel movie, I wanted to be people like that. I looked up to those people. So I just want to be that person that my younger self would look up to.

So those were your main sartorial influences then, the Spice Girls and Wish Upon a Star?

Yeah. [Laughs] Also, Legally Blonde is super fun and Mean Girls and stuff. I grew up watching all these women look super cool, and I'm like, “I don't want to hold myself back anymore. I want to have fun.”

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You mentioned growing up in Florida and it shaping how you saw yourself. I feel like we have in common that we are both from places that people deem shitty. I'm from Staten Island, New York. I'm still unpacking the good and bad ways that affected my mentality. Have you thought about how your Florida upbringing affected you?

Moving from Florida to Portland, I can't really pick anywhere that's more opposite. I feel like I have to unlearn things every day. Even just the way that I work with my coworkers now. They're conditioned to be very worker-first. But when I worked in Florida, I didn't get breaks and I didn't question it. It's just stuff like that.

Florida is definitely the United States on Hard Mode. Do you go back there a lot?

Not really. Just if we play there. I really hate going to Florida, if I'm being honest.

Do you feel like Florida is still in you, in a way?

It definitely is. I feel like in Portland, I can relax a lot more. But it is funny, because if I come across a crazy driver in Portland or something, I'll just snap into that Florida mode, like I'm Florida Man all of a sudden. I'm like, “You don't even know crazy!” [Laughs]

Switching topics here, but you were playing bass in Nothing last year. Are you still playing with them?

I'm not. Gouge Away has just made me way too busy. But I love them. If they called me for something, I feel like I would have to say yes.

How'd you get hooked up with them?

Gouge Away and Nothing did a tour together with Basement in 2019. And it was only a week, but we hit it off. And then during COVID, I had some time on my hands and I was trying to learn guitar. I thought it'd be cute to tell Nicky [Palermo] I was trying to learn a Nothing song. And then he was just like, “We need a bass player.”

How much bass experience did you have then?

Uh, very close to zero, really. I was trying to learn a couple New Order songs and that's about all I knew. [Laughs]

Wait, so my nightmare literally happened to you! You didn't know how to play bass and then just started playing for Nothing!

[Laughs] Yeah!

That's amazing. So how was that adjustment? Their audiences are pretty big and you're playing this new instrument in front of all these people. How did that feel?

It was really scary at first, especially because Nick Bassett and Aaron Heard before me are both legendary parts of Nothing. So I had really big shoes to fill. I feel like I was learning how to play bass, live in the moment. They were telling me after some of the sets, “You were feeding back.” And I was like, “I don't even know what that really means.” [Laughs] Every night I would get my little notes of my things to fix. It was scary, but it also taught me: I'm here now, doing this thing, so I just have to do it. I feel like the biggest part of playing live is having fun and having a good time, and if I'm having a good time instead of being in my own head and nervous, other people have a good time too. So it was a cool learning experience.

That’s actually really inspiring. OK so please forgive this extremely music journalisty question, but you started playing in this shoegaze band, and then Gouge Away releases this new album where there's a lot more space within the songs. Some of the songs are two or three times longer than most of the songs on your previous records. “Dallas” is over six minutes long. Is this the Nothing effect? Did playing in this spacey band make you change the way you approach Gouge Away?

It's funny because the spaciest songs, we wrote those before I joined Nothing. We wrote those before COVID. We wrote so much material. We had totally emo songs that were not going to make the cut. We were just exploring everything that came out. Every idea, we would just try it. So, “A Welcome Change” and “Dallas” were both written before Nothing. But I do feel like, lyrically, [Nothing] influenced me quite a bit, because they listened to Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams and stuff like that. A lot of storytelling. That was my first big exposure to that kind of music. From there, it just kind of switched something in my head and I wanted to do a little bit more of storytelling-type stuff.

Do you enjoy being a bit more in the background, as opposed to Gouge Away where you're the focal point?

I really love both. I feel like at some point I probably would have said I prefer to be hidden. Even in Gouge Away, when starting this band, I was so shy. Being on stage in front of people was literally my worst nightmare and I don't know how I did it sometimes. But now I feel like, having the experience of playing bass and learning about tone, I get why guitar and bass players want to be loud, because it's so fun. When you know you sound good, you just want to be heard. Applying that to Gouge Away, on all our previous recordings, even for our Audiotree, I always wanted to be buried. I didn't want to be the loudest thing. But then going into recording Deep Sage, I had a conversation with Gouge Away and [producer] Jack Shirley, and I was like, “Don't let me bury myself. Do not let me do it.”

What goes on in your head while you're on stage? Or are you just more in the moment?

I think I'm pretty in-the-moment. I also drink a little more these days which makes some of the nerves go away. If I'm focusing on anything, it's just making sure I hit things on time or trying to hear myself.

I wanted to ask another question about something that you posted online recently. When you announced the new album, you said that old Gouge Away used to operate from a place of spite and new Gouge Away operates from a place of loving what you're doing. Tell me about that.

Man, where do I start with this one? When Gouge Away started, it formed from a place of feeling like I had to prove myself. I was really young when I started going to shows. There were not a lot of girls around. There were certainly not a lot of bands with women in them where I lived, if any. With Gouge Away, my intentions were just to record an EP and play a couple shows, just to prove that I could do it to the people around me. I feel like everyone was always doubting me or talking shit. To peel back the curtain and just be honest, we've always had this level of caring about what people think. With Burnt Sugar, we wanted to push things, but didn't want to push things too far. And I wrote a lot about people who made me mad. It's so easy to only see all the negative stuff that comes along with playing music. Mean comments can eat you up. Even things that aren't about me or about us, just reading the horrible things people have to say about other bands and artists, it eats you up. I feel like I had always been operating from that headspace.

When COVID hit, I was burned out on music altogether. I feel like I hated music. I was like, “This is not a place for me. I'm pretty miserable here.” But then having a break from everything, I got a chance to fall in love with music again and explore new things and fall in love with Gouge Away again, fall in love with these demos we were sitting on all over again. We wrote a lot when we got back together. We didn't tell anyone, completely under the radar, so all those expectations were just gone. We didn't even tell Deathwish for a while. It got to a point where it was just the five of us as human beings writing music together that we just loved. And we went into this record thinking everyone was going to hate it and being okay with that, being secure with our decisions and just being like, “Well, this is something we love.”

So not to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like the lesson that you learned from that experience is that you actually do like the music itself, but it's all of the things around it that make you question your devotion to it.

Yeah. I even had something [negative] happen this week, and I want to believe that I'm above all of this stuff now, but sometimes certain things just get under your skin and they bother you. I avoid Twitter as much as humanly possible. I still call it Twitter.

Oh, you mean 𝕏, The Everything Website.

[Laughs] I don't know what we're calling it these days, but I go on it for like five minutes and I try so hard to avoid it. I see this stupid thread where everyone's just complaining about everything that has to do with music and it bothered me for like two days. I was just thinking about all of it and how wrong these people are. It's just like, here's a step-by-step guide on how to not enjoy anything. But then I go to a show last night and see Alice Phoebe Lou, and it's just like… this is what it's about. It's about going to shows, seeing an artist you admire, and the crowd is having a good time, and that's it.

Yeah, totally. By the way, is that where the title comes from? Deep Sage, is that a cleansing of your relationship with music?

It's been kind of hard to define it. In the song “Deep Sage,” it represents the unknown and the future being unknown and the meaning of life and sometimes not knowing why all these things are happening to us. Sometimes it feels defeating, but I try to see it as empty pages. You can kind of just write what your life is supposed to be, because everything is unknown.

You also did the artwork for the album, and you've done artwork for other artists as well. Every artist has their favorite go-to thematic elements, and I feel like yours has a few staples where I can recognize it as yours. What imagery would you say runs through your work?

I love any kind of necklace or some kind of chain. I try not to do the typical thick steel chain links, even though it looks really cool. A lot of people use those. I try to rely more on necklaces and stuff like that, just because you can kind of fit it into any space. And I like to chop up an image of something like that and make the shape that I need.

Why necklaces, if you had to analyze it? Let’s break this down and get into our own heads here!

With my own art, I’ve always liked when things can fit into a tough space but are really not that tough. Just taking a beautiful piece of jewelry and, because chains are so tied into the punk aesthetic, it's like, “Well, if I take the softer, prettier version of this, but use it the same way, I think it's a little more interesting.”

Do you feel like that's a metaphor for your place in hardcore? It’s an incredibly aggressive genre where you're adding a little bit more delicacy to it. Is the necklace you?

I've always been an open book. I wear my heart on my sleeve way too much. And I've overshared way too much in the past, to the point that I'm very embarrassed when I think about that. And I think being vulnerable is really cool at the end of the day, whether you embarrass yourself or not. I think we all need more of that.

When you're doing artwork for Gouge Away versus designing a shirt or something for another band, does the process change? Is there any difference there?

Doing the album artwork for Deep Sage was one of the hardest things I've ever done, just because it is the face of the record and I want my band to love it. I put so much pressure on that project. And I did a lot of research. I went to a bunch of record stores and looked through the bins. I was shocked to realize how much bad art there is. The good album art, it's rare. It's really rare. But I know that feeling of picking something up just on the artwork alone and being like, “What is this? What does this sound like? What is this band? I'm going to check this out.” I had that in my head the whole time, that I wanted an album cover that would make a stranger who's never heard of us do that.

Did you try to match the visuals with how the album feels and sounds?

Yeah. I was listening to our record on repeat. I thought a lot about the lyrics and how the songs feel. And I was listening to The Cure a lot when I made it.

That makes sense. From what we've talked about and from what I've learned about you, you seem like a person who just sort of learns by doing, jumping off the deep end and figuring it out. Is there anything on your list of things you still want to do? What’s on your bucket list?

I really have music videos on the brain. I think just exploring music videos would be really cool.

I was just thinking about music videos yesterday while I was driving because I had this 90s alterna-rock station on. You can hear all those songs and think about the video imagery. Blind Melon’s “No Rain” comes on and you think of the bumblebee girl. I am generalizing but I feel like we've really lost those visuals that are so iconic and unique that we connect it to the song. I feel like music videos are a nice bonus now but they're not integral to the song itself.

Yeah, they don't really seem important anymore in the world of music right now, but I watch them all the time. And I love seeing my friends and my peers make cool stuff. Spiritual Cramp and Militarie Gun, especially. I've watched both of their videos like a hundred times because I'm like… that’s so cool, they did that.

What purpose do you think music videos serve in our post-MTV era?

I think that YouTube is very important and I think it's more important than any of us really realize. We're all thinking about Spotify and Apple and stuff, but I use YouTube for everything. Like, they call it YouTube University for a reason. Literally any thought I get in my head, I'm gonna go to YouTube. And I think it's a great place to discover more music. I've certainly discovered bands that way. And I think music videos are a cool way of showing a band's personality outside of just listening to their songs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.