Plays Well With Others

I started noticing how hard it is for a female to be taken seriously as a musician when I was around 17. In high school, I pretty much played at least one show a week. I grew up in Fairfield, CT, but when I came back from reform school my family moved to Trumbull, CT. I went to Trumbull High School for my junior and senior year. Fairfield High School was at least three times bigger than Trumbull High. A lot of my friends from Fairfield were in bands. I was pretty much the only musician that played shows in my high school. I was also the only girl who played shows. All of my musician friends were guys. The kind of bands they had were ska, hardcore, jam, and rock bands. I was just this blonde chick playing acoustic guitar and singing in my high, pretty voice. People used to compare me to Jewel. They thought what I was doing was cute. I hated that. My guy friends in bands were considered cool, not cute. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted respect from my other musician friends, but I never really got it from them. A lot of people came to my shows though. I would actually sell out shows and get paid for them every week. My guy musician friends would play about once a month and would only sometimes get paid for them. When I was 19, my friend Matt Anderson heard my music and really liked it. He had been in a bunch of bands in high school. I thought my songs were too girly to be made into rock music. Matt made my songs rock. This was all I had ever wanted. My friend Carlos played drums in a cover band in Trumbull and he liked my music too. We went to a friend of a friends house to record a few songs. His name was John. We didn’t have a bassist yet, so Matt was going to play bass on the recording. Bass was actually John’s main instrument, so he played on the record and joined the band. A few months after we started playing shows, I got $135,000 from a lawsuit from my mothers death. So we all went to the studio and recorded START. I had to get out of Connecticut before I spent all my money, so I moved to Philadelphia. It sucked breaking up my first band when I moved, but I just had to. About a year or so after I moved to Philly, I started playing again with my new band Friends of Sven. It was the first time that my bandmates wanted some creative control of the music. It was really hard for me. I thought of my songs as sacred. It took a couple months of crying and fighting with my band to get over it. What happened after that was amazing. They actually made my songs better. It felt like we really were a band. I really don’t remember how or why we broke up. I started a new band called the Living Dark. A year or so after that, I ended up having to move back home to Connecticut. I played solo shows under the name the Living Dark and did so until about a year ago. I thought it was a lot cooler than just being Kari Bunn. I got a manager who is my good friend, Meg. She thought I should just be Kari Bunn again, so that is how I am billed now. She helps me a lot. It is really hard to do this on my own. I feel so lucky to have her as a manager. I am now playing with this awesome drummer named Christine. She is the first female bandmate I have ever had. She is amazing.