chokecherry Talks Their Debut Album, House Show Culture, and Community as Resistance

chokecherry – comprised of Izzie Clark (guitar/vocals) and E. Scarlett Levinson (bass/vocals) – is a San Francisco band that just dropped their debut album, Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls, via Fearless Records. Across ten tracks, they spotlighted the spectrum of human vulnerability, from tenderness to rage, rendered as powerful femme rock which pulled from their roots in S.F.’s music scene – from dreamy shoegaze to hollering punk rebellion.

This transcript has been cut down for clarity.

Read the show coverage here.

IC: Izzie Clark

SL: E. Scarlett Levinson

Photography by Carissa Leong (IG: @carissalphoto.cr2)

What communities and locations in S.F. and the Bay ultimately had a major influence on your inspirations and where you shaped your current sound?

SL: “We love the Bay Area music scene. I mean, it absolutely shaped us and everything that we do, and we have a real, like, love affair with it. I’m born and raised there. Izzie lived there for six years, and went to school there as well. We met there. The band started there. Izzie, do you want to talk about it?”

IC: “I feel like San Francisco is a really unique place to make music. There’s not really a music industry, so everyone’s very informed by their peers, and I think we’re all kind of bouncing off each other, getting inspired by each other. There’s also a great deal of diversity, I feel in the genres in the Bay Area – we have an amazing hip-hop scene, an incredible shoegaze scene. We have punk, also just rock-and-roll, which is kind of like what I used to play in my old band. And there’s also obviously a huge psych scene, and so many psych influences.

“And I think having all of those, that whole world of music is in such a small surface area. I think artists are very much influenced by each other, and they pick up so many nuances that are very much Bay Area – for example, like the hyphy music scene and all of that. There’s so many characteristics of the Bay Area music scene that you could hear in the music, which is really incredible.”

SL: “I mean, Izzie was completely right in that, for the Bay Area music scene, it’s very interesting when a scene exists outside of industry, because people are doing it for the love of and for the sake of – not for, like, commercial viability or whatever, and so it’s really authentic. And we have a really good house show scene.”

“We had a really great house show scene prior to the 2020 pandemic lockdown, and then Izzie’s other band, Thank You Come Again, was like a pivotal band in that scene. There were a couple bands, like 7-11 Jesus, Pork Belly. Thank You Come Again. Like, you would go see these house shows.

“And I went to a house show on Halloween. I remember in 2019 and it was 7-11 Jesus, which is a band that has not existed, I think, since the pandemic. But they had a song called ‘Dead Dogs.’ And I remember I played it on repeat for […] 72 hours straight, while […] I was finishing my thesis, and I didn’t sleep for three days, and I only listened to that song, but it was, you know, it was so moving and cool. And I guess that’s what I’m trying to convey, is how much impact it had on the people who were there.

“And so now, I think what’s really interesting is, like, Izzie and I’ve been chatting about this lately, there’s been, like, a resurgence in this house show culture and scene. Shoutout Rose Blood Fest. Our friend Natalia has a band called Starzdust, which has been doing really well. There’s a band that we both just found called Town Bully. I don’t know them at all. Their music sounds amazing. There’s a band called Dim Aura, and I really like their music. There’s a ton of new projects popping up, and it seems like some of them might be SF State students who graduate and stay or USF students. Some of them are UC Berkeley students. Shoutout to a band called Swell Foop. They are doing really, really well right now. I was listening to their EP this morning nonstop, because it’s just beautiful songwriting.

“Yeah, I feel like in 2021 when everything reopened, we were all sort of forced into the bar scene because there wasn’t much else. We played like nonstop at The Knockout. For some reason we played like five shows a week at random bars, and it was fun, to nobody. I mean, it was really nobody. It was really, really fun. But the house show scene was, I think, what my heart always was so nostalgic for, because I feel like so much happens there.

“chokecherry’s first show ever was a house show in our friend Cam’s basement on […] February 11th, 2023. And I feel it’s having a moment again now, we both do, and it’s kind of drawing us back there, like we both feel like, [expletive]. We want to, at the very least, spend a lot more time around that energy and what’s happening up there, because it’s thrilling. But L.A., obviously, is like the epicenter of industry. So many people from all over move here to make music. People from here make incredible music. Shoutout Rocket, for example.

“There’s so many things to be excited about. I think that’s the other thing that’s really cool too, about S.F. is like, people discredit it, but there are, like, a lot of OG bands that popped off there. Obviously, you have the ’60s and ’70s and all of that, like, historically speaking [expletive]. There’s also, I don’t know, there’s some really cool things and shoegazy things that have come out of S.F. over the years.

“And, oh, shoutout to our friends Pure Hex, who are going to be on [our] album release, weekend run. They’re from the East Bay. There’s also a band called Pink Breath of Heaven. [They’re] incredible. That’s just like really good [expletive] going on. And now I’m going to stop rambling.

I will say, I think this new scene of Bay Area music, and the rock scene, is being pioneered by women. It’s really sick. Like all of the bands we’re seeing that are doing really well, most of them are femme-led, or have women in them, and it’s awesome. What I was gonna say is, like, if you don’t have diversity on your lineup, you’re just [expletive] lazy because clearly it exists.”

In the press release for “Secrets,” it mentioned how you implemented elements of atmosphere from S.F. like the audio of train tracks. What other atmospheric or just sentimental elements of this nature have been buried intentionally within the mix?

SL: “Oh, wow. I can’t believe I forgot. Literally just my mind went to the gun sound. In Izzie’s incredible track she wrote called ‘Part of You,’ we have a gun click in it, which I think is like a really wonderful pop effect. We do a lot of it in Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls.

“But, I completely forgot this in every interview until now. So thank you, there is a vocal sample of me as a kid, and wow, that’s crazy I forgot. I don’t know why. I’ve never brought this up.

“Well, we bring it up now, so thank you. But yeah, we were with Chris Coady (mixing engineer). We actually ripped a random vocal sample of an awkward British child complaining about Christmas as a placeholder, which is really funny. It’s like a famous YouTube video. But we were looking for like, childhood videos and my friend Claudia – shoutout Claudia – went to my parents’ house because my dad could not figure out how to send the video. ‘Sad face’, because my parents are older and he had all of the videos still. And there was a full version of this play I was in when I was a kid.

“I was a child actor, which is like a terrifying sentence. It carries the same, like if I was, like an altar boy. It’s like the John Mulaney joke. You know what? I mean, people kind of look at you weird, um, but, it’s me. I was playing Anna Giro, which was like Vivaldi’s child protege, and it was a play called The Red Priest of Venice. And I trained as a classical singer as a kid, so it was just this dialog between me and this actor, [but] there’s a kind of sentimental line of this kid who I was playing. She was like, hoping that he would be somewhere to see her, and he was like, ‘I’ll be there’.

“So I don’t know, but that song is like a gut punch in so many ways, and it’s so personal to both of us, and has so many elements of both of our personal journeys and stories, some which I think people may never know about.”

What favorite examples of “empathetic humanity” and quiet resistance within this tumultuous political era have you found to serve as inspiration for the overall commentary of the album?

IC: “When we were on tour, it was like Election Day last year, and Trump got elected. We were just driving through middle America, and I went into every gas station. I just looked at everybody, and I was like, ‘what did we do? Come on, guys.’

“But yeah, writing an album with the backdrop of the Trump administration, when things were just becoming more and more dire, I think it gave us a little bit of urgency to, like, say what we wanted to say and say it now. But there’s a lot of moments on the album that are either pleading or rebellious or just snide in the face of a patriarchal oppressor figure, which is exemplified in our next video coming out on Friday, the album opener, ‘Porcelain Warrior.’

“We wrote that kind of on a whim in the studio, but it had this motif of, you know, waiting for something or somebody to change, and then also, like, keeping your joy and finding joy in resistance. The lyric is, ‘keep dancing in your flames,’ like, I’ll keep my joy amidst this destruction because you’re never going to take that. And I kind of think that is the essence of the album. It is grieving and it is really angry in a lot of moments. But at the end of the day, it’s like, ‘[expletive] you.’ We’re gonna have our freedoms anyway. We’re gonna, like, build the New World without you.

“And, yeah, I think music in general, has such a powerful way of connecting us and building community, and I think that community is the number one thing that fascist governments try to dismantle and undermine. And just the more that we can build community – whether it’s through art, through shows, through supporting your local musicians and building networks – the stronger we become and the less susceptible we are to fascism.”

What inspired the maximalist style of the album art of this era?

SL: “I like stuff and things. [laughs] There’s a ton of things that I have. Always been kind of a kitschy, over-the-top person in terms of fashion style, visual [stuff]. I mean, Izzie co-directed the last two music videos too and has a very strong visual background. And I think that both of us have a tendency to – we really like the drama. I think that I really love the idea of Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls and the point of the album title. Like we’ve been over it so many times, but in the styling of chokecherry.

“Over the few years since [the band] began, I feel like we have gone, you know, a little bit Gothic, sometimes campy. I had a tendency to wear, like, bows for a long time. Both of us really like lipstick. And it’s not that any of those things are essential to who we are, but they are things that we’ve done, and we really like these brighter color palettes. And I think that, you know, with ripe fruit, and the colors and vibrancy that you would see in that – then the idea of something rotting, falling, youth wasted – there are all sorts of visual identities and signifiers there, but there is something kind of gaudy and wasteful and opulent and over-the-top about it.

“We worked with an incredible photographer named Whitney [Otte]. She shot the album cover, and she just absolutely understood the vision, and it’s complete with scans of actual fruit. All of the things on the cover are real. So it’s real dead, preserved butterflies and bugs that she owns, and real, real fruit. Real flower petals, all, you know, all of that scanned and then Photoshopped it and laid over.

Photo of Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls album by chokecherry. FAIR USE under review/criticism. Original photo: Whitney Otte

“But I think that [for] a lot of our visuals, we really shoot for the moon and see where we end up – and if you shoot really big, you usually end up somewhere incredible.

“We try so hard to accomplish everything that we dream of. Sometimes you don’t get to do everything, but it’s still so incredible because you pour so much into it. I think that we really wanted a beautiful album cover for our for our debut; at first, I was kind of hoping it would be an oil painting, and then it turned to this artist named Daisy Patton who does blown-up vintage photographs with oil painting over them, and she has a lot of messages of political resistance in her art. She’s really incredible. She wasn’t able to do it in the timeframe, but it all worked out so well with the multimedia. Like, I actually couldn’t imagine it being anything other than what it is now, which is so cool.

“I think also, just like working with artists who do these, one-of-one things – like, a lot of the clothes that we get to wear, or pull, all this stuff are things that people handmake. I have been hoarding [expletive] for forever, and a lot of my clothes I’ve had for quite literally 15 years, which is kind of funny to think about in terms of a lifespan, but, yeah, I don’t know. It’s cool, man […]”

What do you want to accomplish by the end of the tour?

IC: “I think it would be awesome to be able to connect with local mutual aid groups and basically just put on a better show than we ever have before, and be very dialed and organized. And yeah, just come and do a good job and put on a great show.”

SL: “Try not to smoke so many cigarettes. Both Izzie and I are figuring that out. We’re both on Nicorette now. We both use nicotine gum, so I think that’ll help.”

IC: “‘All you need is nicotine and good communication skills on tour, baby.’”

SL: “One of my favorite Izzie Clark quotes, and it’s actually true. It’s 100% like, I love that. I love that quote.”

A large theme of your album is wrestling with the unattainability of imagined futures. What would the alternate versions of yourselves be up to now, if you weren’t pursuing your music project?

IC: “I feel like I would probably be doing a lot of visual art, because I used to do a lot of painting before I got into music and also maybe acting. I don’t know. I feel like we – Scarlett and I – would definitely both be doing some sort of art, but I don’t know, what would we be doing?”

SL: “That is a really amazing question. That’s one of my favorite questions we’ve ever been asked. So I think we would both be doing artistic things – we both have always done it, no matter what, throughout our whole lives. I think that the thing is we’ve both always been drawn to it in one form or another. From the time we were very young, I danced and you drew. You know, we did all sorts of things. So I think art would still be a really prevalent part of our lives. But, I don’t know. I think that maybe, I think I probably would have, like, succumbed to the pressure of going to grad school or tried to run a marathon.”

IC: “I could totally see either you’re on Broadway or the head of Amnesty International.”

SL: “I was supposed to work for the NRC doing anti-human trafficking stuff. I was at school, then COVID hit, so I didn’t end up doing that, but I think I would have probably ended up going to law school and dropping out. Quite frankly, I don’t think I would have made it, but I don’t really know. I think that no matter what, we would both still be making art, which is a cool, cool takeaway, but Broadway would be so funny. I would love that.

Yeah, I morbidly was gonna be like, ‘dead’, and I’m like, ‘no, it also isn’t true.’ You know what I mean? I think that one of the things with the imagined futures question too, is the things that are possible given the state of the world right now, and the things that you think about for yourself can be different. Or what you might have, or could have, or would have done differently if you had other options.”