AMERICAN OPERA - RETROSPECTIVE

Four completely different records. All in one place. Each of them made by accident. None of this was ever supposed to see the light of day. But here we are. And there we were.

I toured for the better part of eight years in a post hardcore rock band called Your Best Friend. We had no idea what we were doing… I still don’t. We booked our own tours (I still do), released our own albums (I still do), and did our own stunts (I’m too old for that now). We played the shittiest basements and slept on the hardest floors. We played sold out shows and slept two-to-a-bed in the seediest motels. It didn’t matter. At its best, or at its worst… I loved it. That band was my life. But every life ends. People grow up. People grow apart. The band called it quits. I couldn’t.

I worked as a delivery boy whenever I was home from the road. I drove a decrepit little blue Cavalier that my dad gave me just after he rolled it over 200,000 miles. I loved that car. It would be perfect for any 16-year-old girl… if it weren’t 12 years old and rusty as hell. It didn’t have a radio so I would drive around for hours at work, singing to myself. After work I would write music to go along with the songs that I wrote in the car. That’s how American Opera was born.

I drove the little blue car to my friend Sean’s house in Orland Park, IL. He had recently converted his house into a recording studio. Sean was so talented that it made me angry. He could play everything from the sitar to the pedal steel, and he could play them well. I started recording the songs with the idea of making a rough demo, but Sean had other plans. We hired a cellist and a female vocalist that I randomly met at a sandwich shop. Sean put his badassery all over the songs and before we knew it, we didn’t have a “demo” anymore… we had an EP. Those songs mean a lot to me for a lot of reasons. They were an excuse to hang out and play music with my friends for a month. They were another reason to keep chasing my dream. They were another reason to keep going. Sean unexpectedly passed away shortly after the EP came out. The songs took on different meanings to me after he was gone. Thanks, old friend.

I’m in the back of a van on my way to Detroit, guitar in hand, feverishly trying to put the finishing touches on a few songs before the show that night. Classic me, writing songs in a moving vehicle. If memory serves, this was my fourth show ever. I had been playing extremely short sets because I only had a handful of songs. I knew ahead of time that the show would be released as a live recording, what I didn’t know was that people were expecting new songs. Five new songs to be exact. I didn’t have new songs. I had three old songs and a bunch of unfinished ones. I spent that week unsuccessfully trying to piece together new tunes. The 90-minute drive to Detroit was over before I knew it. Thrown to the wolves, I took the stage, and finished writing the songs live. Sink or swim.

For as long as I can remember, I have been writing songs about my own experiences. I needed a break from that. I reached out to my supporters with the plan of writing a few songs about them. Originally the idea was meant to serve as a writing exercise to help with writer’s block. The plan was to write a bunch of silly, nonsensical, 30-second tunes for anyone that wanted a personalized song. But people weren’t sending in silly, nonsensical stories. They were sending in beautiful, honest, heart-warming, and sometimes heart-wrenching stories. Stories that deserved to be told properly. So I set out to write these songs in typical American Opera fashion… in a car. I was on tour and would pull off the road every now and again to work on demos. My newly acquired 2002 Buick Century (thanks again, Dad) served as a makeshift studio in spots all across the country. I recorded these songs at a studio owned by my big brother Joe, who is the sole reason I play music.