When it comes to writing music, singer-songwriter carisa is not shy about sharing her life story — even if it’s not always pretty. Her raw and brutally honest lyrics come from time spent journaling, tree-climbing, and just gazing at the clouds.

“If you really want to connect with people in a deeper way, there has to be something real that you're bringing to the table,” she says, during a recent phone conversation from her home of Madison, Wisconsin. carisa is set to perform her jazzy, bossa nova, and folk-style music at The Current’s upcoming Emerging Artists Showcase with Nolen Sellwood on Saturday, Jan. 20. 

Music was always part of carisa’s upbringing in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. It began with memorable sing-alongs during family car trips. She had a growing interest in creating music, picking up piano on her own and eventually teaching herself how to play the guitar after her father passed away. “He played the guitar,” she says, “and that was my way to stay connected to him.”

Those moments of self-discovery through music continued, and with vulnerability poured into her lyrics, carisa wrote her first song. Even though she says it took her two more years to write another song, carisa quickly realized drawing from her personal experiences and applying them to chord progressions was therapeutic. 

“Writing is a form of expression, or a form of releasing thoughts that I'm most familiar with, like writing and music,” she says.

Waves of this vulnerability envelop “to whom it may concern,” the opening track from her latest album the soul is deep water. The lyrics are from a long letter carisa wrote to her former partner. “I shared it with the person who I was seeing at the time because it was a letter to them,” she says. “It [relationship] didn’t pan out, but I got a good song out of it.”

Growing up in a big city limited her opportunities to embrace another passion: nature. As a child, the closest carisa could get to nature would often be climbing trees and “just being among the leaves.” Being in a natural environment often spurs themes intertwined in her music. “I often find a lot of metaphors in nature,” she says. “That's generally what inspires a lot of my music — what I see in the natural world and how I can relate it to my own life.”

Eventually enough songs came to fruition for her first EP, microcosm. With a Yeti microphone in hand, and GarageBand cued on her computer, carisa recorded it in her apartment and released it in November of 2020.

Living in New York during the pandemic felt suffocating to her, and it spawned a desire to relocate to a city with more access to the natural world. After researching several cities, carisa landed on Madison, Wisconsin. “Google said Madison was a great blend of city infrastructure and nature,” she says, “and Google was not wrong.”

After she and her dog Prince — a name partially influenced by the Minnesota icon — adjusted to the Madison scene, carisa began attending local open-mic nights to meet new people. Having an opportunity to lay her emotions bare resonated with carisa — and, as it turns out, to the open-mic audiences as well. The response launched her into the local music scene, and prompted gigs at popular venues like Saint Kate, Stoughton Opera House, both Brady Street and Marquette Waterfront Music festivals and recently opening for Peter Mulvey at some of his East Coast shows last summer.

Inspirations come from a variety of musicians, including Eric Clapton, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Buckley, and Madonna. She has also reinterpreted a variety of songs in her own style, including strongboi, Fiona Apple, the Doobie Brothers, and Buckley. Her version of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” feels intensely tranquil.

Her first full-length album, the soul is deep water, arrived in 2023. Happiness, anguish, love, and moments of sadness come through in carisa’s latest home-recorded project. Her mellifluous voice and intimate lyrics convey real struggles, but there’s a sense of hope and healing that resonates through the 16 tracks.

“I wasn't always comfortable saying this is how sad something made me [and I’d] kind of glaze over it in a general kind of way,” she explains. “But there's something really freeing and gut-wrenching, but healing and cathartic [about music]. [It’s] being like, ‘Wow, this really deeply wounded me, and it wasn't okay. But I think I'm strong enough to get past this and I want to show myself that kind of energy.’”

After ending a long-term friendship, carisa took to music, writing the song “cry” — a song she can revisit when she needs space to heal.“It was heartbreaking to say goodbye to that friendship,” she says, “but I also knew it was something that I had to do for myself. Putting that through music and being able to sing that song whenever I miss them really helps me a lot.”

There are also tracks like “freshly baked bread” that encompass that first-time vulnerability in relationships. “It’s about that feeling of warmth and coziness that you can get from a person,” she says. “The excitement of exploring a person as a new world is like a new universe that you've never seen by seeing things through their eyes for the first time.” 

carisa continues to write songs and hopes to have new music out to listeners sometime later this year. When she is not performing or writing music, she’s still immersed in it through her full-time work as an activities director at a Madison area nursing home. Her background in music therapy helps drive her work with the elderly community.

If there is one thing carisa wants the listening audience to understand about her, it’s that emotional vulnerability breeds human connection, empathy, and new experiences. She encourages others to outwardly face their emotional fears.

“Happiness is really just one of the many emotions that we experience as humans,” she says. “There's nothing wrong with being happy, and I love positivity, but I also love that it's okay for people to feel safe and to feel other things as well. I think it's important in general to be okay with being vulnerable because how else will people really get to know the real you if you're never really showing who that is?”

The Current’s Emerging Artists Showcase, curated by Aby Wolf, is Saturday, Jan. 20, at the Duluth Masonic Temple. Duluth-based musician Nolen Sellwood will also perform a set that captures the spirit of British isle folk.