CMAT furthers the Yeehaw renaissance

When I meet Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, the initials being her alias, CMAT, virtually on two opposite sides of the Atlantic, she’s drinking Coke and has a microphone in hand, in preparation for a day of recording new demos. We seem to be at similar transient points in our lives. She is bouncing around different living situations, while I am living in my childhood home. As I tell her I am currently in my home state of New Jersey, her eyes light up and she immediately tells me about her complicated relationship with Jersey Shore and her time spent at the actual Jersey Shore where her and her aunt were unfortunately bound indoors after a grotesque sunburn.

“I come from a family where the culture being depicted on Jersey Shore was not....” she says taking a pause as if to figure out how to delicately phrase what proceeds, “... a world not far away from the world I was growing up with. My sisters and my sisters’ friends and everyone in my family would definitely be in the bimbo school of fake tans, hair extensions, long nails. Back home is all full of glam, and then going out to pubs just for the sake of getting into fights with people.”

I am only a few minutes into our interview, but CMAT quickly creates a welcoming space for questions. It’s easy to see right off the bat why her songs feel so intimate and funny - because the person writing them genuinely is. There were many times throughout our hour-long interview that we got sidetracked on tangents, ranging from the singular joy of being a teacher’s favorite, to her gripe with the pervasive lack of enjoyment and charisma of performers nowadays. Never once, though, did she make me feel as if I was taking up her time, and even assured me not to be embarrassed when my dad walked into my computer’s video camera during our chat.

After this quick segway into New Jersey, our conversation begins by delving into her musical origins, which lie in her love of the past. Growing up in the ‘00’s, she adored her nanny and grandad. “I just loved how cool and old they were,” she says. Her grandad especially has eccentric taste, being a huge fan of Skepta. She would also devotedly listen to the five-or-so old CD’s, her mom kept in the car, especially Boney Em. At ten years old, she began to Google questions like ‘what old music is good,’ which led her to a Beatles obsession. Later in her teenage years she was drawn to reruns The Old Grey Whistle Test, a music show from the 70’s that featured non-charting music.

It wasn’t until she saw Taylor Swift on the Paul O’Grady show and Emma Roberts show Unfabulous,, that she felt inspired to pick up a guitar and really begin to write songs herself. “I remember seeing her and listening to her songs and they were just so simple. I heard her country music and thought, that’s doable, and I love it, and it’s cool, and it’s amazing.”

She wasn’t an instant protege, and she cringes when recounting her first attempt at writing a song, age twelve. “That still exists somewhere, god forbid it resurfaces,” she said grimacing. For the rest of adolescence, she would go back and forth between taking music seriously and getting embarrassed by it. At seventeen, this culminated with her doing a mashup of “Colouer cafe” by Serge Danesburg and Harry Belafonte’s “Mama Look a Boo Boo” for her university entrance exam. “I arranged it myself, and I formed a band. I remember my music teacher was like, ‘you know you’re better at this than everyone else.’ I was so her favorite,” CMAT tells me.

One song on her new album is actually one she wrote when she was seventeen, and is what she claims is the best song she’s ever written. It wasn’t until recently though that CMAT rediscovered how to write songs like that.

“I think I wrote that song by accident and then spent five years trying to figure out how to write a song as good as that, and it's taken me until now how to write with those themes and be clever enough to be an interesting songwriter. And, it’s not about trying to write the same song again, but it’s using the ethos of how you created that one song to put the kind of spirit of what you're doing into every new project that you start.”

Those following years were brutal, though. After high school, CMAT moved to Copenhagen with her family, then to Dublin to attend Trinity College, where she dropped out and formed an eventually doomed band named Bad Sea, before moving to Manchester to start trying to make PC Music in the vein of Charli XCX. These years were mired with self doubt and a lack of conviction. She was still writing songs through this period and especially when she was in a band, but her bandmate, who she only refers to as The Bad Sea Guy, and manager, often dismissed her songs as being too comedic or unserious. This included her song “KFC,” which she released last year.

"It wasn't like I'd bring an idea, and he'd be like 'I hate that,' and I'd be like 'But I like it. Why can't we do it?' It was more like I'd bring something to him and I'd be like "is this good," and he'd say "No,' and I'd be like, "Okay!" and just throw it in the bin. It wasn't like we were butting heads or arguing all the time. But once I left that band I realized I should've been sticking up for myself more and I should've been figuring this out here and figuring this out there. I think I had so many years in a band where I wasn't good, and nobody in the audience ever really liked it, and I was exhausted 24/7, and constantly being rejected by everything and everyone it just makes you better, she says.”

This odyssey of rejection continued until she eventually moved back to Ireland and into her mom’s house, with no money and no friends. She truly had nothing to do, so she just decided to start again, writing songs prolifically and off the cuff. Without the burden of bandmates or expectations, she could now do the kind of music she wanted to do. Music that references the genres she loves, music like that of Richie Kavanaugh or Kirsty MacColl in that it sounds great but also funny, and music that fosters connection with people going through the same things she is going through.

“I started recording acoustic Youtube videos once a week for 6 months. I'd just take a song or write a brand new song. I got into a phase of writing a new song once a week and posting it for two months. I thought, I'm just going to keep writing songs and putting them on Youtube, these really shitty recordings, and just see what happens. They picked up a fair bit of traction, not loads, they didn't go viral or anything,” she interrupts herself, “ but they were people who were like 'this is really good.’”

"My manager convinced me to be a solo artist. He was like, ‘no one else is going to sing these songs,’"

One of the people watching ended up becoming her manager, who prompted her to start releasing singles. At the time she wasn’t even thinking about releasing professionally and had given up on being an artist, instead taken up the idea of being a co-writer. “My manager convinced me to be a solo artist. He was like, ‘no one else is going to sing these songs,’” she says, laughing.

And he’s right. After spending an hour with CMAT and listening to her songs, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else creating the music that she has officially released so far, because each captures the various facets that make CMAT not only the artist she is, but also the person. Her most recent song, “I don’t really care for you,” showcases the full range of her diverse musical influences and also her knack for combining them in unlikely ways, just like the mashup she wrote as a teen. Though still drenched in twang, this song is a dance bop that has been described as ‘Abba soundtracking a Spaghetti western.’

"The production side of things is always a struggle because I don't have any production language. The only way I can have a hand in my own production is referencing because I don't have any musical knowledge or any musical language,” she says, explaining the way her unlikely genre referencing and combinations come about. “So I'll say, ‘let's do this with this and this and this and this and this’, and Ollie [my producer] will help make that in a way that sounds good. I guess that's how it comes about: it's that I literally don't know how else to describe the sounds of things if it wasn't for my very large library of references in the back of my head."

With doo-wop-esque backing vocals and a shuffling beat, the production gets feet moving, but lyrics like “I just spent sеven hours looking at old pics of me//Tryna pinpoint where the bitch began//Somewhere after the Passion of Christ//And before I had an Instagram” show eviscerating self-effacing. The contrast between the upbeat production and cynical lyricism also present a gateway into the contrasts that makeup CMAT herself.

Her biggest song to date, and my personal favorite, “I wanna be a Cowboy” creates a nostalgia the listener has likely never experienced—one of open plains, tumbleweed, and complete solitude. CMAT’s fascination with the past and of old media shine through, as she creates a vivid yet still humorously ironic song about escaping into the cowboy mythos.

"I had a full length mirror, and I was just walking around the apartment talking to myself. And then I stared at myself in the mirror, and I just started singing it. And then I grabbed my guitar. I was singing it and crying. It was really melodramatic,” she explains, talking about the time back in Manchester when she wrote the song. “I was really miserable at the time. It illustrates in the song that a reason I was so miserable was because I was so lonely. So fucking alone. I couldn't do anything to cure that. I'm always looking for escapism. I'm always looking for imagery. I'm always looking for things that I could be that would solve the problems that I actually have."

What’s surprising about this song, given it’s subject matter is wanting to escape into a life of quiet refuge, is the kind of communal response it evoked. “I feel like ten percent of the population who have heard that song have made artwork about it. People love cowboys, I didn’t realize!” she says. She gives me examples of this craze; about how a group of 15-year-olds added her to an Instagram groupchat titled, “We all want to be cowboys, baby!,” where they send messages of their utter devotion to her and her music. She even responds at times and wishes them happy birthday. It seems striking to me that she’s already developing a fanbase of the same devotion that she had for artists at that age.

“There's this girl who lives with her massive family in the rural part of Ireland,” she says of the reach of “I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby.” “She'll just take videos of them all walking around the house singing ‘I wanna be a Cowboy baby.’ She'll say, 'look, he's singing it again.' and it'll just be this 6-year-old singing the chorus. And then they filmed a video, one of the sisters was pregnant with her first child, and the way they announced it to the grandparents was by giving them a box with the news inside. The granddad opens the box and he's taking things out, and he looks at it. The mom starts crying, and the dad looks at it for 30 seconds. The woman behind the camera asks, 'What do you think dad?' and he looks up and goes, 'I'm gonna be a grandpa, baby.’”

In the final phases of our conversation, we discuss the future. CMAT is thrilled at the premise of playing shows again (hopefully), cannot say anything specific about her upcoming album. Despite what she’s accomplished so far, she's not even fully convinced that she’ll make it as an artist. She’s not trying to be a huge cult figure with a massive STAN army, either. If anything, her intention as an artist is just to continue to try and foster the community that “I Wanna Be A Cowboy,” initiated. In other words, it’s to make herself and her audience feel less alone.

“That is the intent, just having platonic intimacy with people in a way that I probably can’t get, by the nature of my personality and my lifestyle.

You’re reaching out into the world and saying, ‘can someone relate to this please, because I’m really fucking freaking out over here.’ And if other people are like, ‘Yes! I do!’ it’s great! That’s the point, I think.”