Charming Disaster, the goth-folk duo comprised of Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris, has released five studio albums since coming together as a band in 2012, including “The Double,” released this year which appropriately is a double album, paired with “Time Ghost,” a collection of singles dropped in 2024. On a recent tour, and before a show at Cleveland’s The Foundry Concert Club, the pair sat down for an interview for the Every.Thing.After (ETA) podcast and UnRated Magazine, when they talked about their fascination with the macabre and love for telling dark tales in a vaudevillian style.
ETA: You’ve cited writer and costume artist Edward Gorey, as well as filmmaker Tim Burton as inspirations for your flair. The animated music video for your latest release looks like it was directed by Tim Burton himself. You’ve performed with circuses and in cemeteries, with storytellers and comedians and puppets. My first question is multi-part: When do you expect the team behind the Netflix series “Wednesday” to call about getting you on the soundtrack? Why are you not only on the soundtrack but in the movie “Sinners,” which features a vampire folk band, and are you in fact vampires? Because I think you have to tell me if you are. Then again, I’ve already invited you in, haven’t I?
Ellia: Those are excellent questions to start with. In reverse order, we cannot disclose our vampire status. That is confidential, but we will tell you that we are 400 years old, so you can do the math. Jeff: I’m 430. Ellia: And I’ve seen “Sinners,” Jeff hasn’t yet, but I’m willing to go see it again just so he can. … That’s a great gig, being in the vampire folk band. Jeff: I think we could fit in a lot of shows; we have a lot of songs. … We are influenced by the vaudeville aspect of musical performance, and that’s very important to us–the dramatic flair. Since there’s only two of us, we try to as much as we can with what we have, and putting on a theatrical-type show is part of it.
ETA: How did you get started as a band, and what are your musical influences?
Jeff: My earlier band called Kotorino was playing in a bar. I was the leader of that band and had six to nine people in the band at any given time. That was my main musical project. And I had just finished a set and someone came up to me and started talking to me about music. Ellia: Oh yea, that was me. At the time, this was 13 years ago now, I also had a large band of which I was the band leader, songwriter, front-person. My band was called Sweet Soubrette. When I caught Kotorino at the bar that night, sort of by happenstance, I really dug the music. I really dug the songwriting. And I felt a kind of kinship because my band’s composition was kind of similar in that there were strings and horns and keys and drums and bass. It was a kind of parlor rock musical aesthetic with very dark cabaret-ish, lush arrangements. I really felt just a sense that Jeff and I had a lot in common musically so I struck up a conversation. Jeff: And I thought, great, here’s another band we can share the stage with.
Ellia: Jeff had some crazy idea to try to do a show where all of our band members were on stage at the same time. And the thing about having a large band is it’s a nightmare to herd all the cats; it’s just so much wrangling of people. And I was like, “yea, that’s fine, but what if we started a two-person thing, just the two of us? We could rehearse as much as we want.” And I said, “we should try writing songs together,” which was not a thing that had ever occurred to me to suggest to anybody else ever. It just popped out of my mouth. It possessed me. Jeff: And I was like, “Wow, I’ve never written a song with anyone before.” So we had a meet, and I got to see her band the following week. Ellia: Then we had our first band meeting and started writing our first song that very night. That was “Ghost Story,” and we’ve been off and running ever since. This band subsequently eclipsed the other bands because it turned out having a two-person project was so nimble. We were writing a lot of songs and when you are prolific, it’s really hard. It’s very frustrating when you can’t get your band together very much because you have new material, but it takes a while to get good enough to play it out. We were able to just get together all the time and work on stuff, write, practice. Now, 13 years later, Charming Disaster kind of ate the other bands. Jeff: And two people can fit into a car easily and play a variet of venues. Ellia: We do still rope those other musicans into our recording sessions, so you will still hear Kotorino and Sweet Soubrette on the Charming Disaster albums here and there.
ETA: Did the two of you feel this connection right away?
Ellia: It was really easy. The night Jeff came and saw my band after I’d seen his band, we had this really long conversation at the bar about dead cats, like our own departed pets. When you can have a dead cat conversation with someone right away, you really know you’re on the same page. And in fact, it’s sort of a funny thing to say, but that conversation touched on a lot of the stuff that is part of our songwriting and our whole aesthetic, meaning mortality and a kind of dark humor, like gallows humor. It was very apparent from the start that we shared a certain sensiblity. Jeff: After our first meeting, Ellia sent me an email with the first verse of the first song we wrote together. I was immediately like, “oh, she’s serious.” Ellia: Yea, that’s my signature move. Somebody’s like, “oh it would be so funny to write a song about that time, blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, “here it is.” Jeff: She really made me up my game a lot. And I’m still running to catch up.
ETA: That first song wasn’t about your dead cats, was it? Did you ever write a song about your dead cats?
Ellia: We never did write a song about our dead cats. The first song was “Ghost Story,” which is about a living woman who is in love with a ghost, which was the first thing we wrote down on the list of things it would be cool to write a song about for this new project. Because we had this idea that it would be neat to really lean into the two voices thing, both as a musical device and as a narrative device. If you have two characters who have different sides of a story to tell, what are some scenarios that would be fun to explore? Living woman in love with a ghost. Two people have killed someone and they don’t know what to do. Road trip in a stolen car. That kind of stuff, just like regular stuff. It’s funny because our other bands were not so macabre, but it’s such a natural place for me to be in that zone. Jeff: We wanted to tell stories where there was trouble going on, some sort of trouble, and it’s usually dark. … And we’re both band leaders, so there’s no way that one person is going to take a backseat and just sing backups or do handclaps in the back. We both wanted to be active in pretty much all the songs. So there’s a lot of back and forth and harmonies because that’s really fun. There are so many things you can do with two main vocalists.
ETA: It seems like folk music is really having another moment right now. Between the Bob Dylan movie and now “Sinners,” there’s a lot of stuff coming out that’s really folk-forward. Are you getting any of that buzz translating to you?
Ellia: It’s hard to say. We really occupy a niche, and that niche has been pretty consistent for a long time. If that niche starts to extend more into the mainstream culture, we’re not necessarily aware of it, until (“Sinners” director) Ryan Coogler’s people call us.
ETA: Are there any artists out currently that you would cite as really influential and who you would want to share the stage with sometime?
Ellia: There’s some folks that we have shared a stage with, like Rasputina, Melora Creager’s project. We opened for them back in 2019 on a tour of the Midwest, including in Cleveland at the Beachland Ballroom. And that was great. Melora’s historical storytelling narratives are very much up our alley. PJ Harvey is a big influence. Jeff: Led Zeppelin is a big influence. The Decembrists and their kind of baroque storytelling style is something that we can jive with pretty well. Ellia: And there’s also peer bands, other folks we play with and are friends with who really do interesting stuff, like the band Lung, who are another duo. They’re musically quite different from us, but they also are really interested in exploring how much you can do with just two people. We’re fans of the Dust Bowl Fairies, who we’ll be playing with up in Kingston, New York, who also do spooky folk music. There’s lots of people making great music all over, and we feel very lucky to get to play with a lot of those folks.
ETA: Do you think the duo aspect of your band opens up a lot of opportunities for you in terms of booking tours and tour dates?
Ellia: 100,000 percent. We can take advantage of opportunities more easily because there are only two of us, and can clear our schedule if something amaazing comes up. We can play a variety of venues, whether it’s a cult bookshop, a taxidermy store … Jeff: or a mausoleum, or the Beachland Ballroom. We can fit into a lot of spaces. Ellia: Even on this tour, we’ve played some more intimate spaces, and we’ve played some bigger concert halls. In St. Paul, we played a place called the Amsterdam Barn Hall, which was a pretty big room, and we can fill it. Our music is big enough to fill it, but we have a small footprint physically, which means our setup and breakdown is pretty straightforward. We don’t have a drum kit so we make a great opener if you have a complex setup as a larger band. All our stuff fits in an SUV. That’s the other thing, financially it’s a struggle to be an independent artist, especially right now. Ticket prices go up a little bit, but there are venues where tickets have always been $10, for the last 30 years. And then, if you’re not spending a lot of money on the tickets, it’s polite to buy a lot of merch. But it means, as a duo, our overhead is low. There’s not a lot of mouths to feed. There are shows we can’t afford to do because of the travel costs, and that’s become a realer thing as we’ve gone along. We understand better what it costs for us to get to a place and do a thing, so we have to say no to some stuff. But when we’re touring, we try to book stuff really back to back so there are efficiencies and we can say yes to smaller shows. Because if you have 10 smaller shows in a row, it actually works. Jeff: And we’ve seen a lot of other duos who have been doing this for a while. Ellia: It indicates a certain longevity. Jeff: Exactly. They’ve figured out how to make a lot of sound with two people and that enables them to continue. Ellia: There’s a duo called Frenchie and the Punk based in the Northeast in the Hudson Valley, and they do a lot with two people. We just played at the Chicago Steampunk Expo with a duo called Bellhead out of Chicago who also do a lot with just two people.
ETA: Can you share a story about one of your favorite, most-interesting and unique venues that you were able to play?
Jeff: Here’s a tip: It’s really tricky to sell merch at the fetish club because people aren’t wearing pants … Ellia: and they don’t have any pockets. Jeff: And they can’t carry their merch around usually. So that’s one thing. Ellia: And another tip is if you’re playing a former cement mine, it’s gonna be really wet in there because it’s limestone and the water is just always trickling through the rock above you, which means that it’s always basically raining, so you might wanna bring a pop-up tent or something to protect your gear. An umbrella or big hat or just play unplugged because you might electrocute yourself. That’s a pro tip. We’ve played this mine twice, mind you. The fun thing about the mine is also … when they were taking limestone out to turn into cement, they would pump the water out, but since they’re not using it for that anymore, it’s filled back in with water, which means that the place where you perform, right behind the platform, is this vast subterranean lake, which is terrifying to stand in front of because in your mind the whole time, there’s a giant tentacle that emerges from the mysterious depths and just pulls us in.
ETA: You’ve shared a stage with fire-eaters and circus performers. Have you ever singed an eyebrow or gotten too close to the flames?
Ellia: It was a real highlight of that year when we get to MC a fire show at Coney Island. We were like, “guys, you know that we’re not fire performers, right?” But we did come up with some fire bits so that we could kind of participate a little bit. Jeff: To stall for time as they’re getting their kerosene ready or whatever. Ellia: We had a creme brulee torch on stage, and we roasted a marshmallow live. It was very exciting. And we did a dance with sparklers, that kind of stuff. There are all these people doing actual real crazy death-defying stunts — eating fire, they’re all aflame — and we’ve got sparklers.
ETA: Do you have any favorite tracks off of this new album, “The Double,” and what is the inspiration behind it?
Ellia: It’s hard to have a favorite track, but there are some that are especially fun to play live. We’ve been really getting to explore that because some of the tracks on the album are songs that we’ve been playing live for a while and others really not until this tour have we been playing them out. I would say “Trick of the Light,” which we’ve been playing out for six months, more or less. That one’s really fun, and is in fact a Dracula-inspired song. “New Moon” has also been really fun to start playing live. Jeff: “Gang of Two,” which is about two criminals, cons, winding up in jail over and over again. It’s got a lot of time signature changes, which is fun. “Time Machine,” speaking of time, is fun.
ETA: Who did the animation for the music video for “Time Machine”?
Ellia: Summer Purks directed that video and came up with the visual concepts for it as well. She is a recent graduate of Florida State University’s film program and a rising-star animator who may well be the next Tim Burton.
ETA: Can you tell me a little bit about your instruments?
Jeff: This is a 1949 Gibson ES-150, which I use. It works really well. I don’t have to worry about keeping it pristine or anything. I got it pretty beat up and that was a big plus. I love it. Ellia: My ukulele is a custom build by a maker named Peter Hurney, who’s based on the West Coast. His company is called Pohaku. It says Pohaku on the inside and there’s a lot of other pretty stuff inside where nobody can see except for me. I love that gratuitous detail. It has my portrait inlay on the fretboard, which is the most over-the-top. And it’s my most-precious possession if the house catches on fire — this and the cats.
Watch the full video interview on the Every.Thing.After channel on YouTube or listen to Apple Podcasts.
