One warm, sunny afternoon few weeks earlier, Bielich glances around affectionately at the patrons the 61c Café, her place of semi-employment. Large mug of coffee in hand, she leans across the small table and wonders aloud at what it would be like to have taken a different, more conventional route in life. Now nearing her fifth decade on earth, she figures that her business-suited contemporaries must look at her and wonder the inverse. The question isn’t a denunciation of the "normal" life so much as an extension of empathy, and a true curiosity about what it might mean to break down conventional expectations of career and success to allow for more personal creativity. “I feel like we’re just perpetually having to take [the expected path] and I don’t think that’s the way it should be. I think it needs to be flipped a little bit," she says firmly.

Growing up in a Pittsburgh suburb, music was a constant in Bielich’s life. She loved the stuff her parent’s loved – classical and big band music – but remembers discovering David Bowie around the age of six, a revelation made “probably courtesy of the neighbourhood kids, because we would see what shirts they were wearing.” Later, via her older brother, she discovered Deep Purple, the Ramones, and the Romantics. In sixth grade, her family moved to Valparaiso, Indiana, where she joined the school band, dabbled in drumming, then fell in love with the bass playing of Geddy Lee, John Paul Jones and especially John Taylor of Duran Duran (“He was so funky!” she recalls with a laugh.) High school nights were spent driving to nearby Chicago to see shows, and playing punk covers with her first band. She moved back to Pittsburgh to study music at the University of Pittsburgh. “To me, we might as well have been in New York City,” she recalls. “I met some people, and it's Pittsburgh, so if you’re in one band, you’re going to be in five.”