Rainer Maria

think from a listening standpoint you're you're as you know, somebody who's consuming the music, when you hear a female voice, it pings.

It's kind of, you know what I mean? Like when you're kind of like, oh, that's like different, right? When you hear like Rainer Maria or Pogo or something like that, when you're kind of flooded in this scene of like male vocals.

Yeah.

There's this kind of like, oh, that's unique and different.

There was the Promise Ring associated with Milwaukee.

There was Rainer Maria from Madison.

And there was the Get Up Kids from Kansas City.

They didn't all sound identical.

That combination helped create the sound people now associate with classic Midwest emo.

By the middle and late 1990s, the scene was becoming much more visible.

Braid helped push the sound beyond its original local communities, while bands like The Promise Ring, Rainer Maria, Cursive, and the Get Up Kids helped expand what emo could sound like.

And then came a band that would eventually become one of the most important names in the entire story.

I first became aware of Caitlin in the '90s.

She played in the classic second wave emo band Rainer Maria, who started in Madison, Wisconsin, and traveled in some of the same circles as my first band, Lifter Puller, although I actually never met her then.

I did meet Caitlin when our mutual friend and producer Josh Kaufman brought her in to sing on my record We All Want the Same Thing, specifically on the track Birds Trapped at the Airport.

She absolutely crushed it.

It classed up the whole song in a big way.

In recent years, Caitlin has made a number of solo records, including a new one called Vows, which is about to come out.

She's also been playing shows periodically with Rainer Maria, and she teaches music to middle school students.

Amongst all that, she found the time to come speak with me here, and we had a great conversation.

yeah

i wanted to make music that was like jehu and shot maker and like unround but also kind of had the like feminine touch of like the breeders like Rainer Maria and Sleater Kenny and kind of trying to bring those things together because that's the thing like I love all that 90s post hardcore but like none of it ever felt like hyper feminine in the way that I wanted to do and

yeah

that was kind of what we wanted to do with Split Silk when it started and having an audience that I think is very receptive to that is really cool because I feel like if we were doing this in like 2010 or 2011 like it wouldn't have hit at all people wouldn't have connected with it