Carafice was born and raised in New Zealand. In 2003, due to a severe bout of
clinical depression, fears for her safety prompted the government of New Zealand to make her a
ward of the state and place her in a
mental institution in
Auckland. Her recovery from this episode informed the recording of her debut album,
Tells You to Fight. This album was recorded at
Steve Albini's
Electrical Audio studio in
Chicago,
Illinois and released in 2008 on the New Zealand
independent label Monkey Records. In addition, she collaborated with rapper
Serengeti and producer Tony Trimm in the group Yoome, which released the album
The Boredom of Me in 2008. She also appeared on two tracks on Serengeti and
Polyphonic's 2009 album
Terradactyl. While recording
Tells You to Fight in Chicago, Carafice met the Nashville-based band Heavy Cream, who she eventually followed to move to Nashville. Her second album,
I Will Raise a Bird Army, was released in September 2010. It was recorded at Hill Street Studios in
Onehunga, New Zealand, and produced by
Jamie Stewart in Chicago. The
New Zealand Music Commission described this album as "starkly beautiful and gently disturbing". Carafice's third album,
Power Animals, was released in 2014 on her own label, Bird Army Records. It was written while she was receiving extensive
hypnotherapy, and was originally released in an unfinished form in mid-2012. She later started a successful
Kickstarter campaign that led to the album being re-recorded with the help of Daniel Tomczak. According to Carafice, "This album is an anti-suicide note: love songs to myself and hate songs to the haters. These songs say: I am alive, and perhaps being alive is more brutal than being dead." ==Discography==