Delicate chamber pop meets cantering alternative folk in the opening bars of “Brat (Humor Me),” the breakthrough 2023 single by Charlotte singer-songwriter Marissa Butler, who creates and releases captivating, challenging music as Deore.
On the tune, spare strummed guitar cradles hushed confessional vocals before Deore launches into a flirty, almost sing-song delivery.
“I like it when you’re angry/ I like it when you yell/ I like it when you hit me/ Just in case you couldn’t tell…”
A chiming triangle signals the song’s intentions like a mischievous wink, but “Brat” doesn’t stop with a mere tease. As bouncy bass and woodblock percussion entwine with double-tracked voices, Deore encourages the exploration and embrace of dominance, submission, consensual power exchange and the rich emotional payoff of BDSM.
“It lets me know you see me/ For who I really am/ So who you really are/ Can maybe play pretend…”
It’s a catchy, sexy and unexpectedly moving manifesto wrapped in a two-minute pop gem, a delicate fairy tale madrigal where Little Red Riding Hood surrenders to the Big Bad Wolf only to have the predator pledge undying devotion to its supposed prey.
For Diore, “Brat (Humor Me)” delves into the dichotomy of finding personal power through submission.
“I find it empowering to strip yourself of control … and give that control to somebody else in a safe and consensual environment,” she says. “It’s a reclamation and an exercise in sensitivity and vulnerability. It’s like making theater out of [the power exchange].”
For its practitioners, BDSM is an expression of trust and love, Deore notes, as well as an act of self-actualization in which people can accept and celebrate their vulnerability despite the fact that mainstream culture focuses on the lifestyle’s sexual aspects.
“Most often the media portrays … this hypersexualized illustration of [BDSM] when there is this wide scope of what it could look like that flies under the radar because it’s not as fashionable,” Deore offers.
Charlotte songwriter and musician Jason Scavone has been working with Deore as a producer and collaborator since 2022, shortly before the release of “Brat (Humor Me)” and her subsequent project, The Brat EP.
Scavone notes that many artists exploring the kink and BDSM realm lean into a hypersexual aesthetic with whips and restraints.
“That’s a safe form of rebellion, in my opinion” he says. “[Deore] doesn’t do that. She writes from the perspective of a submissive, which is a lot riskier.”
That point of view could be misunderstood as regressive, a kink version of an anti-feminist trad wife bowing down to the Manosphere’s self-professed alphas, but Scavone doesn’t see it that way.
“I think at its core feminism is about agency and … the freedom to define yourself on your own terms,” he notes. “That’s what Deore is doing, and I find that compelling, both creatively and personally.”
After The Brat EP dropped in 2024, Deore and Scavone continued to work together. They collaborated on Deore’s single “bad thing,” released in February, and are currently wrapping up her anticipated debut LP Tantrums as well as “The Chase,” a single that playfully tweaks vintage 1990s horror tropes.
Deore brings her playful kink-supporting pop songcraft to The Milestone on Sept. 27.
Deore’s path through trauma, ghosts and BDSM
Growing up in Stafford, Virginia, Deore started writing songs and singing in the second grade.
“I remember seeing my dad take his guitar down from the closet and something sparked in my brain,” she says.
There was a dark counterpoint, however, to Deore’s discovery of music. Her home life was riven with domestic violence. Looking back on her childhood, Deore believes she started writing lyrics to process what was happening.
“There was a theme in my child’s brain of wanting to be believed,” she says.
Deore reasons that her childhood desire to be heard catalyzed the attention to detail and clever wordplay that characterize her lyrics today.
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In retrospect, Deore acknowledges that her volatile home life wielded a huge influence on her worldview. Fortunately, it hasn’t driven her to accept and define her life’s role as a victim.
“I view it more as alchemy,” she offers. “Going through something like that [is] emotionally and energetically charged and can make you an artist. You’re … transferring trauma into something that can be received by people and do good for people.”
Deore reasons that she went into nursing as a result of her desire to do just that.
“I felt called to be a healing presence; I felt that would be my path,” she says. “It still is. I just think it’s through music.”
But all these revelations still lay in the future when Deore moved to Richmond, Virginia, in 2012 to attend J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and Virginia Commonwealth University in pursuit of a nursing degree.
There she started playing in bands, first joining alt-roots combo Indigo and the Folks. Since no one in the band owned a car, members loaded their equipment on skate boards that they pushed to venues around town. The band played its biggest gig opening for indie rock group Mammoth Indigo, then promptly split up.
With a group of friends, Deore launched punk shoegaze foursome The Talkies. With Deore on vocals, the band gained a small but dedicated local following.
“We would play these awesome little venues, get paid in vegan mac and cheese and beer, and it was just a blast,” Deore remembers.
While she was fronting The Talkies, Deore continued to study for her nursing degree.
“I didn’t have the full bandwidth to be creating a lot of [music] that was 100% mine,” Deore says.
Still, she cherishes her time in Richmond … with the exception of her tenure in one haunted apartment located near the university on a stretch of Grace Street fittingly nicknamed “Hell Block.”
After Deore took the front room in the old building, she started seeing shadows flitting back and forth across the wall and up to the foot of her bed. A heavy presence would also push on her while the foot of the bed dipped down like something unseen was sitting on it. At one point, in the midst of a bout of sleep paralysis, Deore screamed the name “Jesus” as loud as she could. She says it banished the specter.
In 2016, Deore married Joe Butler, who was serving a stint in the US Marine Corps at the time. The Talkies broke up when the couple married and moved to Okinawa, where Joe was stationed.
Not knowing the language and feeling isolated on the small Pacific island, Deore drew inspiration from its rugged natural beauty. She also had a massive flare up of what she now knows was complex post-traumatic stress disorder, a form of PTSD that occurs when someone is exposed to trauma for a long period.
As Deore dealt with fallout from her beleaguered childhood, she also delved deeper into spirituality and found healing with a nondenominational and nontraditional faith. Deore says she feels a personal connection to Christ but doesn’t belong to any church.
It was also on Okinawa that Deore recognized that she wanted to include BDSM practices in her life.
“I always knew, ever since high school, probably even earlier, that I wanted something like this, but I didn’t know it had a name,” Deore remembers “When I got to college, I realized that there was a [BDSM] community.”
Poking around on Tumblr, Reddit and elsewhere, she educated herself on the lifestyle. When it became time to approach her husband to tell him about the topic and her needs, Deore was prepared.
“I remember I wrote this note on my phone that clearly articulated what it was that I wanted and, like, why I wanted it,” she remembers. They read the note together. “Context is everything,” Deore notes. “I feel it’s less jarring to bring this up to somebody if you back it up with how it will help you, like, ‘I feel most loved by you if we could do this.’”
In 2019, while still on the island, Deore connected long distance with Charlotte producer and musician Chris Williams, known as Yung Citizen. She began releasing music under the Deore name with her debut single “Labyrinth.”
Deore and her husband moved back to the US in 2020, settling in Jacksonville on the coast of North Carolina. There, Deore released her four-song debut EP Sink or Swim and her lilting folk-inflected 2021 single “Soft.”
“‘Soft’ is about maintaining vulnerability and … sensitivity [and] not hardening yourself,” she says, noting that trauma survivors can be damaged by the armor they forge to protect themselves.
The follow-up single, “Brat (Humor Me),” was Deore’s first to explicitly address BDSM.
“When I wrote that song, I was coming from a feeling of wanting more,” she explains.
To place the song in context, there are two different styles of BDSM, Deore offers. There is the bedroom-only approach that draws most media attention, which is primarily sexual. Then there’s a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week scenario where a couple is operating in a dominant and submissive headspace.
So, there are doms, subs and switches, with the latter going back and forth between the two roles depending upon mood or circumstances.
There are also subsets of subs, including service subs who derive gratification from doing tasks for their partner and receiving validation from them.
“Then there’s a sub called a bratty sub,” Deore says. “They find it fun to challenge the dominant partner. It’s like a form of playful flirting.”
That bratty sub archetype is the angle that Deore sings from in “Brat (Humor Me).” Though she says the song does not advocate any one form of BDSM over another, Deore proclaims that she is “100% a brat.”
“Having your submission foiled by a strong dominant presence is awesome,” she says. “I find it inspiring and addicting in a way.”
The brat gains a collaborator
“Brat (Humor Me),” was not the first song Deore brought to Scavone to record at his Sioux Sioux Studio in Plaza Midwood, but it was the tune that truly sparked music industry veteran Scavone’s imagination.
“Something clicked,” says Scavone, who served as frontman and songwriter for The Noises 10, recorded the duet “My Repair” with Brandi Carlile and has worked in recording studios for nearly 20 years.
“[Deore’s] writing had leveled up, and it wasn’t just the subject matter,” he notes. “I felt she had found her voice, [which is] a really powerful and bold place to be as a female artist.”
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Deore’s next song, the jaunty, lilting “Mr. Philosopher” was recorded with her friend and fellow musician Zach Moss. Her plan was to develop a follow-up EP worth of material with Moss, but he died suddenly in June 2023 at the age of 33.
Distraught, Deore started writing what she describes as depressing songs that would martyr her emotional health as a means of processing her friend’s death.
“Then I realized, ‘What the fuck am I doing? I want to be happy,” she remembers.
Recalling how working on “Brat (Humor Me)” had given her joy, Deore launched a TikTok account, where she released a homemade video of her lip syncing to the single. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with the video garnering over 60,000 views in less than a week. Deore realized there was an appetite for material that discussed BDSM, so she did so with her unique voice.
That’s when she brought the songs that became The Brat EP to Scavone, who went from producer to full-fledged collaborator.
“We function as a team,” Scavone says. “She brings the raw ideas in, usually a vocal and a basic guitar part, and we shape the songs together.”
He tends to leave the lyrical aspect of Deore’s songs to her, though.
“My role is to create the musical interpretation and build the sonic world around her words.”
To Deore’s surprise, the EP blew up, garnering over 1.2 million streams on Spotify by April.
“I think she’s filling a space that nobody else is occupying, and she’s got guts in how she’s doing it,” Scavone says. “Culturally we tend to package female sexuality through a male gaze. She flips that by approaching her music from the perspective of a submissive. She’s reclaiming it and turning it into powerful art.”
Scavone also praises Devore for the way she engages with her devoted and growing audience, sharing how the music is made on her phone, going live from the control room to include her fans in the process.
“She’s sharing [the music] with them in those early stages, and drawing creativity and influence from that community,” Scavone says.
While The Brat EP’s follow-up single, the loping and textured “bad thing,” continues in the bratty sub vein, Deore’s crowdfunded Tantrums LP, a self-described “kinky concept album,” promises to be a progression. The project has already created buzz in the music industry, landing Emily Lazar, the first woman to win a Best Engineered Album Grammy in 2019 for Beck’s Colors LP, as mastering engineer.
The 13-song LP won’t drop until 2026, but advance single “The Chase” will be released on Oct. 3. Deore says it’s a departure from her previous work.
“I’m usually kind of low-key acoustic, but this is kind of punky,” she says. “It’s a rock song.”
The song draws heavily and playfully from 1990s horror movie tropes, Deore notes.
“It’s a stalker adjacent song that’s funny” she elaborates. “The killer is running after the girl and she’s like, ‘Oh, my clothes are falling off.’ There’s something so silly and predictable about hot girls trying to outrun a killer.”
It wouldn’t be Deore, however, without a kinky twist.
“I wanted to create something risky and unexpected,” Deore says. “What better way to do that than with a song where [the girl] falls in love with her psycho killer? ‘The Chase’ pokes fun at that [slasher] horror dynamic while diving into the predator-prey, mask-kink side of BDSM.”
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She notes that in addition to the things that go bump in the night, All Hallows’ Eve is also a draw to a group she calls “masking people.” It’s a reminder that she’s conscious of all her fans, including people who find freedom, role play and a wide range of psychological and emotional release in wearing masks.
“My biggest motivator in [making art], is to foster a community where people feel free to be their most authentic selves without being judged,” Deore says.
Without compromising her artistry or unique point of view, Deore is reaching out to a wider audience.
At the same time, she continues to support people who want to connect with each other and themselves, and to live shamelessly and authentically no matter how unconventional it might seem.
