Brian Slattery Photo
Corpse Flower at Cafe Nine.
Grace Yukich picked up her first acoustic guitar in high school, in Opelika, Alabama, in the mid 1990s. Women like Alanis Morissette and Courtney Love ruled the burgeoning alt-rock music scene. But Yukich didn’t personally know any non-famous women, let alone moms, who also played rock music — and certainly none who wanted to start an all-woman punk band.
So, perhaps subconsciously, Yukich put guitar playing on the back burner to pursue other things —theater, a PhD in sociology, marriage, and, in her 30s, a move to Hamden, and the birth of her daughter.
Things seemed to be going fine, until early 2020, when her marriage started falling apart.
“March 2020 was my 40th birthday,” said Yukich. “With Covid happening and getting divorced all in that same year, I think those things together made me really rethink, ‘Okay, who am I? What do I want to be doing with my life? What makes me happy?’ And one of the things I realized that I really missed, that I had put on the back burner during the time that I was developing my professional career and having a daughter and being a wife, was my creativity.”
So in fall 2021, Yukich decided to join New Haven’s Rock Lottery to connect with other likeminded musicians. Being single and caring for a 7‑year-old during the pandemic was tough, but she’d started playing guitar again, performing solo acoustic shows in places like Best Video. Soon after, she and fellow Hamden musician mom Sarah Dunn, who she’d connected with during Rock Lottery, realized they wanted to form a femme punk band — Corpse Flower — featuring Yukich on guitars and vocals, Dunn on bass, and Kelly Kancyr on drums.
Dunn, a mother of two and lifelong violin and piano player, shared a similar story of putting music aside to focus on her career and raising children, before divorce and the pandemic — which was especially draining for Dunn, who works in a nursing home — left her parched for creative catharsis.
In 2020, Dunn picked up a guitar for the first time since high school and began relearning chords, slowly building her skills each week. When she felt ready, she started gigging in and around New Haven, both solo and with other musicians.
“We had ten people dying a day,” recalled Dunn. “Getting to go home and have music for myself was a way to turn off parts of my brain and turn on other parts of my brain and give myself my emotional medicine.”
Today, the members of Corpse Flower have three school-age kids among them — Dunn’s two little ones and Yukich’s daughter, as well as Kancyr’s partner’s child — so flexibility is key to maintaining a band.
“Sometimes we’re practicing from seven o’clock to eight o’clock at night and all the kids have wet hair together because they’ve all had their baths before we get together,” said Dunn. “We practice and then we go home and put them in jammies into bed. It’s like a Tetris thing of your life to make it work. But, you know, it’s also good for our kids to see us doing this.”
In many ways, Dunn’s and Yukich’s stories of starting a rock band after becoming parents — and over age 35 — represent an exciting and encouraging national trend.
With franchises like Guitar Center and School of Rock enrolling a greater number of adult women in rock-music performance classes, coupled with the post-pandemic desire among aging Gen Xers and millennials to chase their dreams, we’re seeing more mothers wielding instruments in bars and nightclubs throughout the U.S. According to the most current figures available from guitar maker Fender, women account for 50 percent of all beginner and aspirational players, a trend that some attribute to the Taylor Swift effect.
Yet while these data are encouraging, mothers in rock bands still seem highly outnumbered by fathers in rock bands — even in progressive areas like New Haven.
While many nightclubs and organizations like Rock Lottery welcome all performers, the New Haven music scene is heavily male dominated, say both Dunn and musician mom Val McKee, who lives in Hamden. (According to New Haven Rock Lottery co-founder Nancy Shea, roughly one-third of participants are women, but it varies each year).
“New Haven is a bit of a musical boys’ club,” said McKee, who started playing music out and about around 2016, in the wake of a divorce, and started an alt-country band called Junebug Saddle with her partner. Today she’s a fierce advocate for increasing equity and inclusion in the music scene. “One thing that can be done to change … is for those ‘members of the boys club’ to do more shows with female, queer, and minority musicians. Insist they get put on the bill. We should all be active allies.’
Yukich, who happens to be a sociology professor at Quinnipiac University when she isn’t playing music, suggests the lack of moms in rock bands (compared to dads) may be linked to societal pressure for women in heteronormative partnerships to not pursue leisure activities that interfere with home responsibilities.
“Being in a band is so hard. It’s really time consuming and, you know, juggling childcare and all that stuff was really challenging,” said Yukich. “So I think I’m just always kind of like, oh, like, ‘how are these guys doing it?’ It’s funny because I’m a sociologist, so I know how they’re doing it — their wives are taking care of their kids.”
A recent Pew Research report underscores this leisure time gender gap, noting that fathers with children under age 18 in the household on average spend about three hours more time on leisure activities than mothers (27.5 hours per week vs. 24.5 hours per week).
Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show women are more likely to volunteer than men, observed author Soraya Chemaly in an essay for Time on the pressure that mothers feel to donate their unpaid labor to PTAs across the United States, rather than, say, start a band. That, coupled with other factors, such as the well-documented “second shift” responsibilities of housework and childcare among working mothers, and the relative lack of encouragement given to Gen X and millennial moms to pick up rock instruments in their youth, further fuels the reality that it’s harder to find bands with more than one mom in them (if that).
“For a lot of guys, it’s like, ‘the nighttime and the weekend are still my free time,’” said Yukich. “Whereas with women, it’s ‘the nighttime and the weekend it’s also my responsibility as a member of this household to clean and to run the household,’ and ‘it’s my responsibility as a parent to take care of my children and make sure that they have activities to do.’”
That “second shift” parental dynamic seems to exist less in families with two parents who are both gigging musicians from the start or play together in the same band.
Hilary Stearns Photo
Little Silver.
Take Erika Simonian, a mom of two children ages 10 and 12, who has been playing music with her husband Steve Curtis pretty much since they met in 2006. When the couple and their family moved to Hamden from Brooklyn in 2017, practicing together became easier in some ways because their new house had more space than their cramped city dwelling. But being in the same band presented its own unique challenges.
“It’s particularly tricky for us to do anything because we are both on stage at the same time,” said Simonian. “It’s not like one can just watch the kids while the other goes off on tour … so we’ve been very limited in touring. We have toured as Little Silver with the kids, but it takes an inordinate amount of planning, like more than the average. Like we’ve done two West Coast tours where they came along. But, you know, we tend to do it as a duo.”
Also, since their full band — Simonian (lead vocals and guitar), Curtis (vocals and guitar), Mike Paolucci (drums), Mike Tepper (bass), and Kevin Brady (keys and backing vocals) — is full of parents, rehearsals happen less frequently and feel more like cramming before gigs.
Nevertheless, Simonian can’t imagine her life without playing music, both at home and in live settings.
“It does take a lot of energy to do anything extra other than your work and your family, but for me, I find life kind of depressing if I don’t have a creative outlet,” said Simonian. “People often say to us, ‘you guys are so amazing, I don’t know how you do this. How do you have a band?’ And I’m like, ‘how do you not do it?’”
However, for the time being, the sacrifice of not touring or gigging more frequently is well worth the rewards.
“I love spending time with my family and I love being with my kids,” said Simonian. “That’s another reason that we don’t tour. You could throw a lot of money at somebody … who could stay with your kids while you go away. But I don’t want to do that. I want to be a part of my children’s lives.”
After a couple of years of hearing about Corpse Flower (mostly Grace) and admiring from afar, I finally got to hear Grace and Sarah playing at a mid-afternoon gig at Twelve Percent. Kids were doing homework at some tables; moms were singing out; everyone was having a blast. It was a fierce, brave, powerful, and fun musical event and seeing it brought tears to my eyes--it's so freaking hard to figure out what you want to be/do, harder to do it as a woman, harder still as a woman with kids to nurture. I was in awe. Go hear these women anywhere you get the chance. What they represent is extraordinary.
“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” ee Cummings