In Conversation with Silver Liz: How “Unlikely Girl” Exposes the Vulnerability of Musicianship
Photo Credit: Matt Schwerin
Silver Liz is the musical collaboration of Carrie and Matt Wagner, married in 2015 who originally met in a music practice room at their college in 2011 as freshmen. As Carrie’s lush vocals collide with Matt’s impressive production techniques, they leave audiences in a shoegaze, dreampop trance with their first album I Can Feel The Weight in 2017. Silver Liz introduces a new single, “Unlikely Girl”, found on their upcoming sophomore album due early fall. As the song is the first that Carrie had written on her own, the lyrics reflect Carrie’s experiences as a songwriter. Timeless is an excellent word to describe the beautiful and deep melodious 12-string guitar sounds combined with Carrie’s lyrical approach - the style reveals the duo’s love for the likes of Elliot Smith, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. The romantic heat waves of “Unlikely Girl” discover a beat of dream and jangle-pop
[UNPUBLISHED]: Can you give us a backstory to how you found each other and what made you want to start this musical journey together?
[MATT - SILVER LIZ]: We met in college, it was freshman year in 2011. I was a music major and Carrie was just taking piano lessons at the time. So there’s this practice room hallway and Carrie was playing the piano in one of them. I needed a music stand for my own practice and saw she had one of them in her room. I recognized her from campus and thought she was really cute, so I saw this as an opportunity to say hey. You heard my friend and I talking about The Strokes in the hallway.
[CARRIE - SILVER LIZ]: That was when Angles (2011) came out, so we were talking about the album. That’s basically what the foundation of our first conversation was about.
[MATT]: We didn’t seriously start making music together until after we got married which was 2015.
[CARRIE]: We had played covers together in college just a couple of times at the Student Union. That’s kind of when the collaboration started I guess, but Matt started writing music and then he asked me to write lyrics and melodies. I then branched off and started making my own tunes and Matt produced them.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s the Brooklyn-indie music scene like?
[Matt]: I mean, I feel like it’s so much easier to get plugged in here. It’s been fairly easy for us to get shows just from meeting people from the internet and then they just have asked us to play shows with them.
[CARRIE]: It’s hard to tell if it’s because we’re all kind of coming out of the pandemic a little bit or maybe it’s just us being here instead of Chicago – probably a bit of both. It feels like there are more opportunities now which is awesome.
[MATT]: Our friends have a record label called y3s Recordings - they’re a new label but they put out really amazing experimental electronic music.
[UNPUBLISHED]: I know you bonded over The Strokes beforehand, but are there any other artists or musical influences that inspire you?
[CARRIE]: I think Alvvays is a big one for me.I love Molly Rankin’s voice and songwriting. Beach House and Elliott Smith are big influences, too.
[MATT]: Yeah, I think those are the big ones. Our earliest stuff was very influenced by My Bloody Valentine - I still think My Bloody Valentine is one of our favourite bands for sure.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Can you break down the creative process you work through when building a song as a duo?
[CARRIE]: We have an upcoming album that we’re probably going to release sometime late summer or early fall - so the collaboration has changed a bit over time. I wrote about half the songs on this album and Matt wrote most of the second half of the album. We’re pretty collaborative on every song though, but I feel like for the most part, I’ve been working on the lyrics.
[MATT]: Yeah, I think for this upcoming record Carrie is doing most of the songwriting and then we will flesh them out a bit and workshop them. I’m usually the one working with the software and trying to figure out what we want it to sound like. I have enjoyed taking a stronger role as just the producer in the recent stuff versus our first record.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Let’s chat about your upcoming single “Unlikely Girl”, can you walk us through how this song came to be?
[CARRIE]: I think this was the first song I wrote through and through. Maybe like in 2018 it was just a little song I made in a voice memo that sounded horrible. I guess after college is kind of when I started to think about music more seriously, and so when I had told people they were surprised that this is something I wanted to pursue. It kind of made me feel like my personality is at odds with what I’m pursuing. That’s an insecurity that I feel like is definitely going away because you don’t need to have a certain personality to make music. The song is essentially about that - just how people may doubt you.
[MATT]: Carrie wrote the song and then I had the idea for the bridge. It grows into a noisy build which I feel is very Sonic Youth. I think we experimented a lot with what we wanted it to actually sound like but it ended up being sort of, timeless. There’s no fancy sound design or synth or anything - it’s actually the most straightforward, indie pop rock anthem on the album. All the drums were going to be recorded in the studio, as opposed to using drum machines and samples. We wanted to keep that live, raw sounding drum with this song in particular. Anything else we tried to do with non-natural sound production - it just didn’t work because the song itself does have a classic, timeless feel to it.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How have you grown as artists since the debut of your first album I Can Feel the Weight released in 2017?
[CARRIE]: I think we’re experimenting with more genres now. It’s been fun to explore all these different sounds. I feel like the lyrics were maybe more cryptic and abstract on our first album and then they have transformed into something more personal. Which I feel like can be a little more scary because songs like “Unlikely Girl” are pretty vulnerable. I had gotten some texts from people like, ‘are you okay?’
[MATT]: I think for both of us our approach to lyrics has definitely changed and matured a lot. Lyrics aren’t super important when it comes to shoegaze because usually they’re buried in the mix. When we were writing [the first album] we were really into shoegaze music, I think the lyrics definitely took a backseat. Another thing that really influenced us was when we took a trip to Nashville shortly after we released the first album and we went to the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Johnny Cash Museum - we both developed an appreciation for how important storytelling is in country music. That’s when we were reminded that great songs usually have stories. I think we’re just very conscious of writing lyrics that listeners can project their own interpretations on to.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Is there a song off of your discography that you love playing live the most?
[CARRIE]: In our rehearsals, it’s been really fun to play “Roman Candle Part II” which is a dance track and we’ve just been experimenting with how we could make it sound a little different live. I just love performing dance music because I feel like I can more easily lose myself a little bit more on stage. You’re getting that energy from the audience too.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s up next for your duo after the single release?
[MATT]: I think three more singles after “Unlikely Girl” - and I think there’s going to be a video for almost every song on the album. We’re just going to try to space out content through the next couple of months, then have the album released around September or October.