“Ryan [Brewer], our bass player, would always be like, ‘You are always in a contest with yourself to write the most wholesome song you can write,’” Carrie Fussell recalls.
“I’m like, ‘I want to get to the truth. I want to say the truth. I want it to be real. I want it to be honest. I want it to do its best.’
“And I think that’s why writing ‘Cherry’ was like, Ew.”
For over a decade, Fussell fronted Calliope Musicals, the freak-pop collective that spun whimsical folk and theatrical psychedelia into two colorful albums – and two Austin Music Awards – in the pre-pandemic indie scene.
Following their breakup in 2022, she premiered her new project, BRUCE, with 2025’s Must Love Teeth. Its first single, “Cherry,” is less chipper. It’s a Western runway strutter, dripping with sarcasm, as the singer details a foundational, fraught relationship with a purr.
“My mother said don’t call her mama/ My mother said don’t call her mommy,” Fussell coos, over a smirking guitar line. “My mother told lies when the truth would do just fine/ So now I don’t call her nothing.”
“It was coming out of my mouth and I was like, ‘Ew, who is this nasty bitch that said all this?’”
That’s BRUCE – not so much a character as it is a vehicle for Fussell to write as herself, fully, for the first time. Collaboration was paramount to Calliope, and the songwriter felt her most personal compositions should be saved for her solo music. Over vegan onion dip and bubbly waters, she explains: “Calliope stuff was personal to me in a broad sense, and BRUCE is more personal to me in the, Ooh, I don’t want my mom to listen to this kind of sense.”
Perfect Stranger
Not a lot of people frequent the Continental Club at midnight on a Wednesday. Perfect.
Fussell worked out the songs comprising Must Love Teeth during a weekly late-night residency at the South Congress staple, where an empty room worked to the anxious artist’s advantage. Speaking to a stranger at a bar feels like entrapment – “but when you’re onstage,” she notes, “they fully can walk out.”
“It makes me feel way more comfortable to be myself,” Fussell says. “If people don’t like it, they’ll leave, and if they do like it, they’ll stay. And that means I’ve found some people that I resonate with and speak to in some way.”
Such is the basis of LP track three, “Perfect Stranger”: one explanation of many as to why, out of three 2025-2026 Austin Music Awards nominations, Fussell has won Best Vocalist (despite this publication once writing of her “off-key whoops,” she points out). Raised by a stage mom in East Texas, she grew up singing Celine Dion at home, Patsy Cline at the nursing home, and all-state choir at school competitions before beginning her University of Texas matriculation as a vocal performance major.
She left the “machine” to avoid dulling her personal style, but still pulls out that classical training throughout “Perfect Stranger,” and Must Love Teeth as a whole. “I need you to see me,” she cries – part Angel Olsen, part Broadway baby – to those unknown observers, as the ballad’s cinematic piano and strings build. Connection remains the artist’s white whale, even as self-doubt has threatened it along the way.
“I had been putting off recording BRUCE or caring about BRUCE in any sort of way,” Fussell shares. “I just had been like, ‘I don’t want to care. I don’t want to try to be a musician.’ And so I was really afraid of: ‘I’m gonna record an album and release an album, and then what? I feel fucking bad when I don’t succeed?’”
She recorded it anyway with producer Jank Sinatra, who helmed her best friend Jazz Mills’ “fucking incredible” 2020 album with Stephanie Hunt, Popecoke.
“He’s got this production style that is kind of unkempt,” Fussell says of the artist, born Tim Crane. “I just loved how unattached to rules and down to just fuck around and find out [he was].”
Fucking around at Sinatra’s home studio, the two filtered live drums into drum machines and built samples out of Fussell’s old demos. She referenced late-Fifties vocal group the Fleetwoods; he brought up MF DOOM. Must Love Teeth thus arrived last July as an art-pop odyssey through strings and 808s, operatic vocals and synthesizers, booming bass and country-fried slide guitar.
Sinatra lauds Fussell as “somebody with real artistic vision, and somebody who’s not afraid to deviate from the norm.”
“I’m always drawn to artists that are doing something a little different, and she is that for sure, in spades,” he drawls over the phone. His Oklahoma accent complements Fussell’s Gulf Coast twang.
Visions
Jazz Mills, also Fussell’s manager and Free Lunch co-founder, did more than connect artist and producer. When Must Love Teeth dropped, BRUCE marked the occasion by filming an elaborate performance of the album at Central Presbyterian Church. Much like the music, the idea appeared in Fussell’s brain fully formed. She knew how to set the lighting. She knew she’d open the show by walking down the aisle. She knew she’d wear a cape and headpiece – one inspired by the Renaissance, but whose sheer white fabric in certain lights recalled Laura Palmer plastic.
“I’m doing the thing where I care,” she fretted to her manager. “I don’t want to want something. I don’t want to have a vision and try to see it through and feel disappointed.” Mills, of course, encouraged her to move forward.
“One of my favorite things I say about Carrie all the time is that you could break both of Carrie’s legs and she’s still gonna get to the church on time,” she tells me. “She has so much will in her.”
Yet, “as unique as she is in her artistry,” Mills continues, “there is something about her that is the same as every other brilliant musician or artist that I know, which is that they’re very tortured.
“They have something incredibly invaluable to share and to give to others, and there’s that part of them that believes: ‘I don’t know why I do this with my life.’ Or: ‘Maybe I don’t even make good music.’ ‘Maybe I’m a fraud.’ ‘I should do something else and nobody cares.’ That self-doubt that creeps into all human beings, that creeps in in a very devastating way to artists.
“So for me, it’s nice being able to be that person that is not encouraging Carrie simply out of niceties, but [because] I really believe in her.”
At Mills’ behest, Fussell gathered over 30 musicians, dancers, speakers, and production crew members to stage the concert film, nominated this year for Most Creative Event. Downtown, in a place of worship, five musicians stood behind Fussell in matching trench coats, while three additional, more flashily dressed backup singers sat in the pews, fanning themselves and playing with props, when not adding to the choir. Burlesque dancers stalked the walkway during “Cherry”; a ballerina twirled during a vocal-forward interlude before late-album aria “Trash Fire Singing Child.” Fussell even threw herself a funeral, complete with a lavender casket, for the finale, “Kitty of the Year.” They didn’t do a single run-through before the taping.
Real Things
Fussell hates watching herself perform, but she shows me one moment from the concert film with glee.
About halfway in, she sets up her looper pedal, plucks the guitar melody that cycles throughout “You’re Only a God; You’re Only a Man,” and leaves the Central Presbyterian stage, reciting the track’s quick-cadenced sing-song as she runs backstage and up some stairs. She reappears, to the audience’s eyes, on a mezzanine, and begins to climb on top of the pews.
And then she falls.
“We had so much fun editing this,” she laughs, rewinding the wipeout over and over. The team turned up the sound on the microphone to emphasize its clunk – though it also reveals that Fussell was still singing even as she hit the ground.
“How could the most embarrassing thing be my favorite thing?” Fussell asks, before answering her own question. “I think people want to see someone fucking eat shit and pop up and figure it out.
“People want to see real things,” she continues. That’s how she manages to get through this viewing. “I forced myself to be like, ‘Don’t hate this just because it’s vulnerable or embarrassing at times. Love that, because that’s what makes it special and real.’”
Vulnerability is, undoubtedly, Fussell’s gift. She shares with this (almost) perfect stranger her lowest memories, her most fractured relationships, but her honesty doesn’t overwhelm. It just seems – there’s that word again – real. She tells me she wants to make a long-form lyric video for Must Love Teeth, maybe release her demos. She recorded three BRUCE albums at once, by the way; she plans to release the next one sometime this year.
“The world is fucking AI,” she stresses. The least we can do is live authentically.
“With Calliope, we were always trying to transport people to another place – sort of this idealistic, fantastical situation,” Fussell explains. “And I think with BRUCE, we’re trying to see where we are and make that fantastical. Like, I am here, and this is hard, or this is ugly, or this is good. I’m here, and I am gonna make it something I love.”
In BRUCE’s world, reality provides its own romance.
This article appears in February 27 • 2026 and 2026 Austin Music Awards Issue.