Mom’s in the kitchen filling sippy cups when a 2-year-old with sky-blue hair, freshly awake from a nap, rushes into her arms. Dad zips around along with everyone else, popping in and out of rooms for one reason or another, trying to find his phone, looking for Mittens (the family kitten) and following each small voice that beckons him. Two dogs have been banished to the detached backyard garden house for getting too loud, but one serene fox-red Labrador named Heidi lounges in the living room, unmoved by the bustling flurry around her.
The cheerful energy in the house is infectious. They’re one big happy family. “Certainly big,” Dad says. “Very, very big.”
The mother of this brood is Sherri Dupree-Bemis. She’s the singer, songwriter and guitarist of Texas’ beloved dreamy indie-pop sibling band Eisley. The group rose to fame when she was just 16, after Eisley was enlisted as the supporting act on Coldplay’s “A Rush of Blood to the Head” tour in 2003.
Dad is Max Bemis. He’s the madcap vocalist and guitarist behind gonzo pop-punk project Say Anything. The sardonic songwriter is promoting both the 20th anniversary tour for his band’s seminal LP, [Say Anything] ... Is A Real Boy and a new album titled [Say Anything] ... Is Committed.
Both Eisley and Say Anything were notable acts during the highly influential early-2000s major label boom of emo music, the vulnerably sensitive and misunderstood multi-genre scene that’s been experiencing a retro-revivalism among Gen Z. Max and Sherri met in their early 20s in the industry orbit of one another's bands. After five months of emailing love letters back and forth they finally agreed to meet in LA before a Say Anything show, and they’ve been nearly inseparable ever since.
Clearly, a typical day in the mix with this clan is going to be far from the cookie-cutter stock image that comes to mind when picturing a nuclear family in Texas. The Bemises are a new breed of domestic bliss, living and forging an unconventional punk version of that standard white-picket-fence archetype — two now-sober rock stars using progressive theories of childhood development to cultivate a strong sense of agency and radical free expression in their children (thus the colored hair).
“We homeschool, but it's essentially unschooling,” says Sherri, describing how the education method pioneered by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau works for her family.
“The day’s basically [structured by] whatever they want to learn. So that can look like, ‘Today, I want to work on some math’ or ‘Today I want to learn creative writing.’ Or [figuring out] how to bake a cake. … Sometimes it’s going to the zoo or going to take a sewing class.”
Max and Sherri, both 40 and married 15 years, were a sweetheart love story for the emo generation. They recently moved to Dallas and are the proud parents of five adorable kids: Rory, age 2; Ellis, 4; Charlie, 6; Coraline, 9; and Lucy, 11.
Max is proud to see a younger generation embracing emo now, even if it gives him a bit of the existential icks to see the music that he made at their age now categorized as classic or even vintage. For example, the widely read independent alt-rock music blog BrooklynVegan debuted an emo column in 2020 called “In Defense of the Genre,” taking its name from the 2007 Say Anything LP. The recurring post covers monthly new-music releases of “once-maligned punk subgenres like pop punk and emo”.
“When I go to [emo-revival music] festivals like When We Were Young Fest and I see a bunch of 22-year-old kids drunk on Patron, I don't think to myself, ‘Jesus what has this become?'” Bemis says. “I go, ‘That's fucking awesome!’ These kids are having a lot of the same kind of weird experiences I did, and I’m there and present in some way, hopefully doing something positive for them.”
Max and Sherri, along with many of their peers, have moved from rebellious young artists escaping the mundane trappings of their suburban homes with songs of romantic daydreams or angst-driven revenge fantasies to become the heads of their own household. The tables have turned. Twenty years after the scene emerged, emo kids are all grown up now and subverting the old-school societal standards of marriage and family to fit their own sensibilities.
Sherri’s been documenting that journey for more than 100,000 Instagram followers over the last few years, establishing herself as a sort of alt-mommy blogger. She shares everything: from traversing the grounds of Disneyland, to Max performing onstage for a packed house while Sherri delivers backup vocals with Ellis planted firmly on her hip, to the kids simultaneously decorating a cotton-candy pink Christmas tree and bopping around their living room to the quintessential 2002 indie-sleaze dance floor banger “Move Your Feet” by Junior Senior.
This online family photo diary is collaged with real smiles, mismatched socks and dog-pile cuddles in Mom and Dad’s bed without the manicured, unrealistically stylized veneer of much family-focused content on social media.
“I think that the world is allowed and should see moms learning to be moms, parents learning to be parents, us being sloppy and figuring it all out, I mean.” says Sherri. “If we go out there acting like we know all about what we're doing, then no one's gonna be the better for it.”
Despite settling into a new city and all that goes into raising a house full of children, the couple are still evolving as artists in their careers (that detached garden house in the backyard functions as Mom and Dad’s at-home recording studio). Sherri’s working on new Eisley material while finding time for an ongoing apprenticeship at Bat & Cave Tattoo Studio in Oak Cliff. Max is diving headfirst into a new era of Say Anything, which will take the entire family on the road for a 27-city U.S. tour this summer. How’s that for a geography lesson?
Max feels anxiety-free about touring with the kids. “I'm excited for them. [My kids] being joyful is my biggest joy. Since we unschool them, getting to experience and navigate that, that's the best … one of the better settings for them to do it in,” he says. “It is the equivalent of, like, living in a traveling commune but without the hard parts for a kid, the traumatic parts.”
Chuckling, he assures, “I'm certainly not going to be like, ‘Oh, no! What are we gonna do? It’s a shitty diaper!’ I live in a shitty diaper.”
Emo music was named for its major stylistic through-line — confronting emotional problems head-on in rejection of previous generations’ stigmatized refusal to acknowledge the existence of mental health issues and the importance of trying to heal from them. Bemis’ renegade madman persona (fueled by a radical transparency in art and life about the nuances of his own experience with bipolar disorder, PTSD and addiction) almost shapes Say Anything into something like a concept band. More than a vehicle for semi-autobiographical subject matter, the band is itself a character within the brashly narrated high-camp storytelling of Max’s singular songwriting style.
The satirical themes of Max’s music have evolved along with his day-to-day life. The frustration and confusion behind “Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too,” off the celebrated 2004 album ...Is A Real Boy, now informs the self-deprecating “I, VIBRATOR”— the band's recent single about the performance anxiety of satisfying a long-term spouse, to be featured on the forthcoming album ... Is Committed. But the gritty emotion is still there.
Like many “elder-emo” adults, Max and Sherri are still working on their mental health. They take their meds and go to therapy every week. After the pervasive wine-mom culture of COVID-lockdown became an unhealthy crutch while mourning the loss of her mother, Sherri completed a weeks-long inpatient treatment program for alcoholism in 2022. Max was briefly hospitalized last year to recover from a manic episode. These events are documented candidly on Sherri’s Instagram, just as any other aspect of their day-to-day family life, regardless of the parent-shaming it draws in the comments and from their own cult-following fandoms.
In today’s culture of online respectability politics, artists' eccentricities are not as accepted as they once were. Growing up with beatnik parents in the Chelsea Hotel or being raised on the road by rockstars in the ‘70s may still be romanticized today as a charming part of history. Take away that historical lens, however, and most unconventional family dynamics are now the target of great wrath by the online masses, drawing harsh criticism of those deemed to be unfit for child-rearing.
Sherri and Max are all familiar with that wrath, online and off.“It’s a weird thing to navigate,” she says, “We're both in therapy for stuff that's happened just because of something we share on social media,” she says, “We’ve had [an Instagram follower] try to report us for child abuse before … and it's so traumatizing. It's so heartbreaking because my kids are the number one thing that I care about in my life. I mean, I would literally stab myself in the eye … to keep them from being harmed."
The Bemises refuse to present or participate in the myth of the perfect parent, that having children somehow permanently fixes you, that your responsibility to them somehow negates your permission to ever falter in life, or even that your art doesn’t matter anymore once you have kids. It’s the same emo-ethos of their youth culture applied to their adulthood, and it's a family dynamic that prioritizes their kids’ emotional well-being as well.
The question posed by the Bemis clan is how relevant the traditional societal standards of all-American family life even are any more, and why new alternatives to those dynamics are so looked down upon. Their family is happy and healthy, and Max and Sherri are proactive in keeping it that way. This just may be what “having it all” means for the elder-emos. And after surviving the existential trauma of the millennial experience (9/11, Columbine, an opioid epidemic, multiple economic crashes), maybe we should give this generation a little more credit for what they’ve managed to make of themselves.
Say Anything kicks off the 20th Anniversary tour for ...Is a Real Boy on April 27 at House of Blues Dallas, 2200 N. Lamar St.
