Local musician ‘Momo’ releases album

Alyssa Nunke has loved music since before she could speak.

The way her mother Barbara Nunke tells it, when Alyssa was 6 months old she would sing melodies to herself before she could even speak — rocking herself back and forth and singing the blues.

Alyssa, who goes by the professional name “Momo,” has been writing since she was a young girl and making music since she was a teenager, her father Mike Nunke said. When she was a child in Minneapolis, the family ran a music venue with Mike as a sound engineer and took their children to see the Grateful Dead when Alyssa was 6 years old.

“Both of us have been very into music and that since we were kids, and I guess just by nature projected that onto our children,” he said.

Over the years, Barbara said, her daughter has written over 500 songs. Her first album, “Quarantimes Vol. 1,” which explores the realities of living through the pandemic, is now available to stream and for purchase on momoandco.bandcamp.com.

“I've been writing for a long time and just have not done anything with it,” she said. “I was like, ‘well, I might have worked for a few months, and I got the time. Might as well choose now.’”

Music has been a release for her during the pandemic, Alyssa said.

“I think people turning their experiences throughout this past year into art is essential,” she said. “Someday we will all look back at this time and have difficulty explaining what it was like, but through art, our experiences are immortalized.”

Alyssa’s experience of the pandemic has also been shaped by her unique experiences as someone with autoimmune diseases and respiratory issues, she said.

"They are all invisible disabilities, and as a young healthy-looking woman, I often get sideways comments and eye rolls for following pandemic precautions,” she said. “[That] has further fueled my desire to express and explain my emotions and experiences throughout these times.”

Before recording her album at Chicken Shack Studios in Cocolalla, Alyssa recorded songs at a home studio.

“I have a little home studio in a loft, [so] I let her use it and she took her own initiative and started recording herself and then showed it to us,” Mike said. “We were super excited and continue to encourage her. You know, we're her biggest fans. But it's not just because we're her parents.”

Her songs include “Six Feet,” “Alone Time” and “Luke Warm Tea,” among four other tracks.

Early in the pandemic, Nunke said, she worked to keep a music diary, which she later put to music in the summer of 2020. Her song “Six Feet” was especially meaningful to her because she wrote the lyrics days before the death of George Floyd.

As a former Minneapolis resident who lived near where Floyd died, seeing the unrest in the city following his death has had an impact on how she viewed the lyrics in her own song and the tone it took when she put the lyrics to music, Alyssa said

“[It influenced] the more angsty-ness of that song, I would say, just the dividedness of everybody and right now,” she said. “[It’s] a little bit less about the pandemic itself and more about just what it's done to our society and the way that we treat each other.”

In addition to those songs, Alyssa wrote another short album titled “Other Rhymes,” which is available for streaming. The songs include “Im Not A Lady,” “Diamonds,” “Knock Knock,” “Virus” and “Broke In.”

Originally the songs were to be included with the “Quarantimes Vol. 1,” album, she said, but because they weren’t about the same topics she decided to split them off.

Her music is a mix of indie pop and folk rock, Barbara said. Alyssa calls it “porch pop.”

“I hadn’t heard anything like that before, so that's what kind of struck my interest,” said Jesse Bennett, owner of Chicken Shack Studios. “And then once I listened like her lyrical content, I really could tell there was some thought put into it wasn't just, you know, a quickly written song.”

Recording the album took two days, he said. After that, mixing didn’t take long.

“Most of it was just her and her acoustics. So it wasn't really taking too long to mix and mater, we left it really raw. I think that's the way she wanted it,” he said.

While the pandemic has had an undeniable toll on the music industry as a whole, for Alyssa, the move of artists releasing more music online only also opened a door for her.

“Everyone’s looking for new music to listen to,” she said.

In the next few months, Alyssa plans to move to Seattle to continue her music career.

"She's not amazing because she's our daughter in our eyes,” Mike said. “She is incredible. I mean, everybody should hear her words, how she said them and how she puts them together. She's an extraordinary writer.”