Cherimondis J finds herself on the other side of ‘Gone Girl’

The bulk of Gone Girl, the sophomore album from Cherimondis J, takes place internally, the Columbus musician wrestling with deep-seated anxieties, struggling with her self-confidence, and, in its darkest moment, confronting passing thoughts of suicide.

Intimately revealing, carefully crafted, and deeply felt, the record finds Cherimondis transforming this chaotic swirl of emotions into a series of overwhelmingly graceful, carefully composed songs, her voice ringing with the confidence she sings of lacking in “Vines,” a slinky turn colored in piano and strutting, elastic bass. 

“Expression, for me, is very difficult outside of music, outside of writing,” said Cherimondis, who will celebrate the release of Gone Girl in concert at Ginger Rabbit on Thursday, Nov. 20. “I’ve noticed my emotions can be very complex, where if I feel sad, it might show up as angry. It’s never either/or. It’s both in an entwined way. And that makes it difficult to understand my inner world sometimes. And the only thing that detangles it and makes it clear is music.”

Cherimondis described her approach to songwriting as a matter of harnessing the tunes that consistently take shape within her mind – a running internal soundtrack that can play at such volume that it at times dulls the outside world. “I could be in the middle of a conversation, and I guarantee you it will get drowned out because there is so much music playing [in my head] that I can’t hear what you’re talking about right now,” she said. “So, the writing is already happening. The music is already happening. And the only thing I’m really doing is transmuting. I can hear the symphony. I can hear the chords. I can hear the harmonies. … And my job is to figure out what those sounds are and translate them into something tangible.”

While the songs initially took shape in solitude, with Cherimondis translating these internal symphonies via a keyboard set against a wall in her room, the musician knew that these tracks demanded the support of a band, which led her to recruit the likes of bass guitarist Jamal Cox, keyboardist Mitchee Van, drummer Brenton Newman, and guitarist Eric Clemens into the fold. This collaborative pivot built natural layers of tension into the music, with Cherimondis singing lines about feeling so lost within herself that she’s practically drowning while buoyed by a close-knit family of players.

“And that’s what I wanted. I knew it would not sound the same if I was like, okay, I just produced an album in my room. This needed much more care, because it was so delicate,” said Cherimondis, who wrote and printed essays in which she detailed the specific meaning behind each track, distributing these diaristic packets to the band members prior to starting rehearsals. “I knew that in getting a whole crew together that it was going to take time, it was going to take explanations, it was going to take having heart-to-hearts and letting them know of the serious topics that are in some of these songs. And they took it so genuinely, and every note was played with that care.”

The songs contained within Gone Girl first emerged from an emotionally exhausting stretch for the musician, who graduated college at Ohio State University and entered into a new relationship – a series of events that sent her into a prolonged emotional freefall.

“Being out of college and not knowing the direction I was going … triggered a lot of fears I didn’t realize were there,” said Cherimondis, an introvert by nature who began to further insulate herself in the midst of this spiral. (“I’ve been losing all my friends lately,” she sings on one track, “because I don’t pick up when they call.”) “And it got to a point where I wasn’t interested in doing anything at all. I wasn’t interested in writing music. I wasn’t interested in playing my instruments. … And then it boiled over into my relationships with friends and family, where I was kind of a hermit for a good while, not talking to anybody because there was so much going on internally.”

“I Feel Medicated” documents this bottoming out, Cherimondis delivering shattered lines about losing sight of herself to such a point that she briefly questioned her desire to carry onward. Even now, the musician recoils from that moment in revisiting the record, allowing that it has a way of transporting her back to that troubled headspace.

“This show at Ginger Rabbit is the only time I’m going to be playing this song, because it’s excruciating to have to play that onstage in front of people,” she said. “But with the other ones I feel like I’m in a place now where they don’t take me back. It’s more like I can acknowledge what I’ve been through and can say with pride that I’m still here.”