Alex Chambers: Singer/songwriter Amy Oelsner founded Girls Rock Bloomington, in 2019. It's an after-school program and summer camp for girls and trans and non-binary youth. On this episode, we hear from some of the youth at Girls Rock Bloomington, and Amy and I talk about how she got started as a musician. Hint, it involved working at a different Girls Rock program. We also talk about what it means to be an adult, how personal loss can lead to creative growth, and about a band that started in Girls Rock Bloomington and recently released their first EP. The members of the band were 12 and 13-years-old. This is Inner States. I'm Alex Chambers.

Alex Chambers:  Do you want to be a rock star?

Girl 1:  I want to be a pop star.

Alex Chambers:  What do you have in you that's going to make you good at that?

Girl 2:  A lot of excitement and encouragement for the other people.

Girl 3:  I'm sly. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS]

Girl 4:  Well I love it. I love singing and also I feel like I went to a Lizzo concert, a while back, and what I thought was really amazing, besides her fantabulous voice, is that she put on such a good show. And she sang just as good in concert as she does on recordings and I think that's really important, because it shows that you're not super produced.

Alex Chambers:  Do you want to be a performer?

Girl 5:  I really want to be a performer.

Alex Chambers:  What do you want to do?

Girl 5:  I want to be this singer and the main person that's in the whole band.

Amy Oelsner:  There's a reason why I didn't feel like I could even get started with music until I was 27. I felt like I could have done folk music or quieter music or something, but I was really into going to punk shows and stuff like that. And it was super male dominated. I remember touring bands coming through and hitting on me and my young friends, and we're only 14, and it's a lot of predators, you know? It's really not very safe.

Amy Oelsner:  When you're not in a safe situation, you can't be creative and that is just deeply unfair. I really don't care if the kids I work with decide, "Oh, music's not really my thing," you know? It's not like I'm trying to create an army of musicians [LAUGHS] or anything.

Amy Oelsner:  But, for some of them it really will be their thing and I want to give them something that I didn't have and let them get started with that as soon as they want to. They can start their life right now, you know? You don't have to wait until you're an adult to start your life. You're already doing it and I think it's exciting to encourage kids to just make big moves.

Alex Chambers:  That's Amy Oelsner, she's the founder and director of Girls Rock Bloomington. Girls Rock is about rocking, yes. The kids learn how to play in bands, but the secret goal, the real goal, is to help the kids become more confident in their ability to express themselves. It can be hard for any of us, I think, to start putting creative work out into the world and I don't just mean songs or paintings. It could be starting a business, saying your piece at a city council meeting. Just putting yourself out there is hard. But Amy Oelsner seems to have found a way.

Alex Chambers:  She's a singer songwriter in her own right. She's put out nine albums in the past 12 years under the name Amy O. Her most recent, Mirror Reflect, came out this past May. She also wrote the theme song for the show you're listening to right now, Inner States, with her husband Justin Vollmar. We're going to hear from Amy about how she got started and we'll also hear from some of the kids at Girls Rock about what the program means for them. I talked with them last year as they were rehearsing for a performance at Bloomington's Granfalloon Festival and then a couple of weeks ago I caught up with the three members of a band that's come out of Girls Rock Bloomington. They're called the Seratones and they've been playing all over town lately.

Alex Chambers:  Alright, one last thing before we really get going. The image of the tortured artist runs pretty counter to how Amy approaches creativity. I don't think she would say that art has to come from suffering. Except for this. Being an adult almost by definition means you've gone through something, some sort of loss, and losing something or someone can give you a focus you might not have found otherwise. Here's Amy.

Amy Oelsner:  I was living in Leicester, Massachusetts for quite a few years after college and met my friend and then it turned into a romantic relationship. He was 19 years older than me and he was a very unconventional, really cool, weird, very charismatic person. And we had, you know, a really fun relationship and a great intellectual connection, I guess. He was super encouraging of my music and my art, and I really wasn't doing anything with music much at the time. Just a little bit. We ended up breaking up but we stayed good friends and--

Alex Chambers:  A month after they broke up, he found something that seemed like it might be cancer.

Amy Oelsner:  He was someone that was very into natural health and was definitely a perpetual child [LAUGHS] in certain ways. And so I immediately felt this sense of responsibility for the situation. I immediately took charge and was. Like, "Alright, we're going to the doctor and we're going to get this looked at. I'm going to take you tomorrow" because I had this feeling he just wouldn't deal with it. And so we went and they ended up sending him to the ER and it was just this really wild experience where he ended up getting surgery the next morning, at eight am, because it was such an extreme situation.

Alex Chambers:  His oncologist said he couldn't be sure they had gotten it all.

Amy Oelsner:  "You should definitely go check that it didn't spread to your lymph nodes."

Alex Chambers:  Time went by and he didn't go. Amy was worried, but it was complicated because they weren't together any more.

Amy Oelsner:  And I'm 19 years younger than him, you know. [INTERRUPTION] And [LAUGHS] He's a grown-up and [INTERRUPTION] I'm 26. And yeah, I was just totally lost in that situation. Completely consumed by it, losing weight and I developed all these stomach issues and, kind of, almost like sympathetic pains. I actually still have digestive trouble and all this stuff that started then.

Alex Chambers:  It was a stressful time and he was only getting worse.

Amy Oelsner:  In the meantime, I was trying to figure out how to move on with my life and I felt I didn't really know what to do with myself. I was at a very, very low point and very depressed and I was, like, "Is there anything I'm interested in?" And I thought, "I've always wanted to work at a girls rock camp." [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Oh really?

Amy Oelsner:  Yes. Like, it makes me, kind of, emotional, [LAUGHS] but just thinking about it. So, I looked up the Brooklyn Girls Rock Camp and I was, like, "I'm going to sign up to volunteer and then just see where life takes me." Because I just wanted to do something that was life-giving and, kind of, get myself out of that situation or, you know, just have some other identity outside of it.

Amy Oelsner:  So, I went and did that that summer and I just ended up loving it so much. It was lighting me up inside.

Amy Oelsner:  And it made me feel this confidence for the first time ever around, like, I could perform music. It gave me that, even though I was an adult, but I really hadn't performed music very much. And also I'd never seen that many women and non- binary and trans people who were really good at instruments. I had just never been around that.

Alex Chambers:  Yeah.

Amy Oelsner:  So, it was kind of mind blowing. I was secretly learning along with the kids, because I, kind of, pretended I knew guitar better than I did, because I signed up to be a guitar coach. And I'm actually just secretly, "How do you play a power cord?" [LAUGHS] Like, figuring it out.

Amy Oelsner:  I ended up loving it so much and I decided to move to New York. And then after making the decision, just totally serendipitously, the Girls Rock organization in New York,called Willie MaeRock Camp for Girls, they had an opening. They had this new position of running an after-school program. And that's what I've always done is work with kids and do all sorts of creative stuff. So, I applied for it and I got it. So, it was, like, "Alright, this is good." It made me feel like I had somewhere to go and something to aspire to.

Amy Oelsner:  I feel like there's been a few points in my life where I was, "Okay, my life is going to be okay." And that was one of them. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Wow.

Amy Oelsner:  And I think also in part because I did feel like it was in such a difficult and painful situation, that I needed kind of lifted out of.

Alex Chambers:  She moved to New York, but she was still helping her friend and he was getting more and more sick.

Amy Oelsner:  I was going to help cover some of his rent and I was just very much involved in trying to keep him afloat. I was almost manically trying to just make him not die. [LAUGHS] But I think it was, kind of, almost like, a very childish, like coming from a childish place of "I can fix this," and "They say that papaya is anti-inflammatory, so I'm going to go get him like five papayas, kind of delusional thinking. And also just trying to show him love. I almost kind of laugh about this, how people say, "When you break up with someone, you kind of want to see them not doing well." But I'm always laughing, "Yeah, but you don't want to see them die." [LAUGHS] It's so dark but it's just, like-- [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  She was in New York calling him all the time, but also feeling complicatedly relieved that she wasn't there as his illness started to take over. It was very stressful.

Amy Oelsner:  In part, also because it just felt like there were no adults around, you know what I mean? Because he was in denial and so there wasn't a system really in place. He had a lot of friends and community members helping him, but it wasn't going through the usual channels when someone's sick of, like, go to the hospital and they have a doctor and they have people watching over them. So, it felt terrifying to me. And witnessing-- I had had grandparents die, but I had just never seen somebody's body deteriorate in such a brutal way. And then he died.

Amy Oelsner:  During the whole year that he was, you know, I guess slowly dying, I began this song a day practice that I did and I made four albums that year. [LAUGHS] And that very much kick-started my music career.

Alex Chambers:  How did you realize that you needed to do that? And what did it do?

Amy Oelsner:  Yeah. So, I had done this thing called fun-a-day with my friends in the past. And it's a project you do in January to beat the winter blues. And you do some sort of creative daily project. Then at the end, there's a show. And I responded really well to it. I really liked the structure of it. In a way it takes the pressure off, because you're just doing it every day, so you're exercising that muscle. And I felt like I got a lot better at songwriting, because I had done that the first time I tried. So, when the next year came around, I definitely want to do that again. And I basically decided not only was I going to do it in January, but I was going to do it in April, July and October. This was 2012.

Amy Oelsner:  And I was going to make an album each time. And I think that I needed to do that because I was having such a hard time. I really didn't want to basically get devoured by that painful situation. So, it was me just thinking of Harold and the Purple Crayon, that book. [INTERRUPTION] And how he is able to draw a little life raft to get him out of something. It was like that. [LAUGHS] When you're going through something that feels, like, senseless, you know, and awful, I think it feels important to make something out of it. That is what makes life okay.

Amy Oelsner:  He was so supportive of that project, and so supportive of my music and it was really extremely poignant because every album he listened to, except the October one because he died in November, so I hadn't made it yet. I just want to say, not, like, anyone knows him, but just he was a beautiful person and he made a really positive impact on my life.

Alex Chambers:  Still to come, the 12 and 13 year olds who released an EP, a young Amy O convinces people she's a real musician, even if she's not sure yet, and pronouns get discussed in a saloon. That's after the break.

Alex Chambers:  The Sera-Tones are a pretty new band based here in Bloomington, Indiana. They are:

Natasha:  Natasha. I'm the drummer of the band. I'm 13 and my pronouns are she/her.

Sagan: Sagan] I am 13-years-old. I am the guitarist of the band.

Tesla:  Tesla. I'm 12-years-old, almost 13-years-old. Next month, I will be 13. My pronouns are she/her and I am the singer and bassist of the band.

Alex Chambers:  They got their start in Girls Rock Bloomington. They had been put into a group together in the summer camp, in 2022. One of their first tasks was to come up with a name.

Sagan:  I was, like, we should base it around seratonin because we're happy, or whatever.

Natasha:  Because the first song we wrote was about being happy and it's the opposite of the songs we write now, but, you know.

Tesla:  Yeah, some of them are happy.

Natasha:  There's like...

Tesla:  Some.

Natasha:  ...one.

Alex Chambers:  I mean, they are staring into the headlights of adolescents. Anyway, one of their band coaches suggested the Sera-Tones, and it stuck. They played together in camp, but almost a year went by before their next step. Girls Rock did an after-school program to get ready for Bloomington's Granfalloon Festival. That's a festival of music, art and literature in town. That was the Sera-Tones' second formation. Amy could tell they had a good thing going, so she put them together again at summer camp 2023, where:

Amy Oelsner:  They really killed it, and Girls Rock was invited to perform at the Russian Recording 20th anniversary showcase and Mike Bridavsky, who runs that recording studio, asked if there were any camper bands. So, I thought of them because, I mean, all the camper bands were amazing, but they felt the most ready since they had this previous experience together.

Alex Chambers:  Russian Recording is, as you might have guessed, a recording studio here in Bloomington. Once you start saying yes people start saying yes to you, too. Russian Recording offered each of the bands that played their 20th anniversary show a free day at the studio.

Sagan:  Which we used to record all of the original songs that we had written so far.

Natasha:  And that became our EP.

Alex Chambers:  Happy But Alone came out in January, 2024 and that led to other things.

Amy Oelsner:  I noticed that they were starting to get gigs around town.

Alex Chambers:  They've played a bunch of shows the past few months. They're generally the youngest band, but they haven't let it go to their heads.

Tesla:  I don't necessarily think it's important making it big. I think it's important to have a band that is creating music that you feel is emotional, that you feel is important and you feel is going to help somebody some day.

Sagan:  Making something that could be important to somebody and that they would want to listen and stuff. If we got bigger or more popular while doing that, that's probably what would happen, but it's not the main goal.

Alex Chambers:  It's a good insight. There are more important reasons to make art, but it can also be a way to build your own confidence. You discover things when you start to put yourself out there. Back when Amy was in New York, she was having a great time at the Willie Mae Rock Camp, but she was also wondering what other possibilities were out there.

Amy Oelsner:  I also, at the same time, was thinking is there anything that I enjoy in life? [LAUGHS] You know, because when you're going through a dark time, you have to wonder that. And I realized that I was very curious what would happen if I tried to go and be more serious about music. I decided to start playing shows around New York.

Alex Chambers:  Do you get nervous?

Sagan:  Oh, for sure. Always. I've been on stage so many times and I always get nervous. But not nervous in a way that, at this point, stops me from singing.

Amy Oelsner:  Then I decided to plan a tour. I'd never been on tour before for music.

Natasha:  It's a little scary sometimes.

Alex Chambers:  Yeah. I feel like actually a lot of people have been saying that.

Natasha:  Yeah, lots of people say that because it's scary.

Amy Oelsner:  And I got in touch with Justin Vollmar. We just knew each other a little through music and I had always loved his music and had a crush on him through his music. [LAUGHS] He lived in Bloomington, so I thought I'll stop in Bloomington and see if he can set up a show. It was like I have a crush on this person, this will be fun. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Totally.

Amy Oelsner:  And so, it was just one of the stops on the tour. And yes, I came through here and then I went on my travels for the rest of the summer and we kept in touch. I don't know, it was, kind of, like a love at first connection type situation and we just fell in love really quickly. I decided to, like, I was like if I can get a job in Bloomington, I'll move here. It was all, kind of, nuts and really fast. [LAUGHS]

Alex Chambers:  Wow.

Sagan:  I just take some deep breaths and just perform without thinking about it.

Alex Chambers:  Nice. How does that feel to perform?

Sagan:  It feels really nice when all the audience clap and shout.

Amy Oelsner:  I ended up seeing that there was a job opening at Rhino's Youth Center, so I applied for that. That was the visual art program director.

Sagan:  I just pretend that literally nobody is there and then I just play.

Alex Chambers:  That's cool. Does that go okay?

Sagan:  Yeah.

Amy Oelsner:  Again, I was like I don't really know that much about art but I'm just going to pretend. [LAUGHS]

Amy Oelsner:  If I were to give advice to any young person it would be just start behaving as if that's what you do already and people will totally believe it. Even just the way you present your music is actually pretty important. At first, I just put it out casually because that's where I was at and I was just like, "Hey, I'm sharing some music." I just emailed friends and stuff. I didn't even have social media for a long time. Then I realized I need to take this seriously, and I noticed what real musicians were doing and I copied it, like I don't actually have a label but I'm just going to make up these arbitrary dates and be like this is my first single release date. This is my second single release date. This is my music video release date. As soon as you start doing that, people will start taking it seriously because you are.

Amy Oelsner:  I was surprised at how quickly people were ready to see me that way. I thought it would take years of ground work or something, but no, it's pretty immediate. As soon as you present yourself like a musician then you're perceived that way. People are immediately asking me to play shows. With setting up the tour, I had never done that before, but I think there's just this assumption like oh yeah, she sets up a tour, she knows what she's doing. But I'm just making it up.

Alex Chambers:  If you present yourself the right way, people don't realize that you're--

Amy Oelsner:  Yeah, they're not paying enough attention to follow the back story, so they just assume you have more experience than you do.

Alex Chambers:  I think too, like--

Amy Oelsner:  Or they don't care. They just don't care about experience because we're just humans, yeah.

Alex Chambers:  That's it. You were saying about Tom and there were no adults around, and I feel like that's another thing that's running through this conversation, partly because you work with kids and you help them come into their growth. What is adulthood but just other people thinking you know what you're doing?

Amy Oelsner:  That's a really good point because I feel like going through that death and grieving experience was this huge initiation into adulthood for me and in a way I felt like it busted up this innocence that I had been carrying. Then on the other side of that, there is this freedom and this realization that no one knows what they're doing. But at the same time, I think an adult is someone who can be emotionally regulated. Someone who can hold space and, most importantly, someone who can take care of themselves. I think what I try to bring to working with kids is this duality of I also don't know what I'm doing and I'm exploring, and I have developed many years of learning emotional regulation and learning how to tend to my inner child so that I can hold space for you guys and not be triggered and activated, and then you guys can have safe space to feel your feelings.

Alex Chambers:  I'd be interested to just hear you say why it's important to have this space that does not include cis boys.

Amy Oelsner:  I mean, I think it goes back to my actual experience. For one, as a kid, a teenager and a young adult, I was really interested in music and I experienced a lot of sexism. It was very discouraging and upsetting. I am cis, even though I can feel that non-binary range in myself and I use she/they pronouns. I also, for sure, experience the privilege of going through life as a cis gendered woman. I've just always felt almost like a passion around gender expansion. It feels really exciting and important and life-giving to me. I mean, the gender binary is so bad for everyone, like for the male/female dichotomy, and it's just so rooted in everything that is restrictive about our world. It's connected to everything, like racism and hurting the earth, all of it. I just think that people who are open to the multitude of gender expression are leading the way in a beautiful new world. I have felt that way, naturally, since I was a child, since I ever heard of it. I feel like I was just born feeling that way.

Alex Chambers:  Yeah, so cool.

Amy Oelsner:  Before it became something people were talking about.

Alex Chambers:  Yeah, tell me more about that.

Amy Oelsner:  I don't know. I felt so restricted. I just felt very sensitive to what was expected of me as a girl and being raised as a girl. I just think I had no awareness that that was very limiting at a young age, and I could see that with boys, too.

Slim Stuart:  Well, hey there. Come to these parts often?

Nelly Jo:  Yeah, as a matter of fact, I live around here. I'm Nelly Jo.

Slim Stuart:  I'm Mr. Slim Stuart. My friends call me Slim Stuart. That's because my name is Slim Stuart.

Nelly Jo:  Nice to meet you, Slim Stuart. What you doing around these parts?

Slim Stuart:  I'm just visiting some relatives.

Nelly Jo:  Oh, what relatives have you got around here?

Slim Stuart:  I've got blood cousins.

Nelly Jo:  Are there any other kind of cousins?

Slim Stuart:  I mean, you've got thirds cousins.

Nelly Jo:  Third cousins can also be blood related to you.

Bertha Mae:  Well, howdy there.

Slim Stuart:  Hi, Bertha Mae.

Bertha Mae:  Hi, what can I get you folks?

Slim Stuart:  Me and the little lady will have two root beers.

Nelly Jo:  Slim Stuart, I am [INAUDIBLE] See here, the thing is that Slim Stuart is not respecting my pronouns after I asked him to.

Amy Oelsner:  On the other side of that, I had a sense of the expansive possibilities of not adhering to those, and actually how it's not just like we have to get away from the binaries, it's like there is so much to gain and to learn from gender expansiveness. I just feel like there is so much play and pleasure and beauty in that, you know, that people allow themselves.

Slim Stuart:  I don't know what the problem is. I don't see a pronoun.

Bertha Mae:  Well, look here, sonny, around these parts, we respect all people and how they identity. Nelly Jo here is the best ranger on this side of the Mississippi, but they ain't no missy. Nelly Jo has respected what you want to be called, so now you can either respect them or get out of this here saloon.

Slim Stuart:  I don't know what to call you then when I buy you a root beer.

Nelly Jo:  Well, you could call me by my name, Nelly Jo. My pronouns that I use are they/them. Another gender neutral term is partner, as in howdy, partner.

Slim Stuart:  Thank you for educating me, partner.

Nelly Jo:  You're welcome. Cheers.

Slim Stuart:  Cheers.

Amy Oelsner:  I started working with kids when I was in high school. I guess, in 2002 or something. I just saw that there was a lot of homophobia that was very common and it was just baked in transphobia. It was just like that is reality, you don't even think about a different way. No one would even talk about it, except just in joking around about things in movie. I just feel like kids now are so much more open, or at least the kids I see. I'm sure there's really a huge range. They understand to not be assholes.

Amy Oelsner:  It's not fair to hold people back from these forms of expressions that are fun and awesome and can lead to lifelong careers. It's really bad for the music industry as well because it needs representation. I think a lot of it is I'm reacting to something that didn't feel good to me as a young person and just like we were talking about at the beginning, you take something that feels bad and senseless in life and you try to turn it into something good.

Amy Oelsner:  I think it's exciting to encourage kids to just make big moves and be independent.

Alex Chambers:  Yeah, that's really true. I think we've recently seen that with the Sera-Tones.

Amy Oelsner:  Yeah, exactly. They are the dream of what I was hoping would happen, and we've been going now for five years exactly.

Alex Chambers:  That's how they've been a group.

Amy Oelsner:  Not their group, but Girls Rock Bloomington.

Alex Chambers:  Oh, right. Okay.

Amy Oelsner:  So, two of the members of the Sera-Tones started that first year. So, I guess it took about five years, but we're starting to really affect, slowly but surely, the actual eco-system of the music scene in Bloomington, and that was what I wanted. It's like gardening, you know. I'm going to plant these seeds and I would love to see, in ten years, just that that scene is reverberating even further out from there.

Alex Chambers:  And that's our show. We'd love to hear what this made you think about, whether it was about your own experiences with gender, or loss and creative work, or getting started in something hard, or something else. We'd love to consider your thoughts on a future episode. If you have thoughts, there's a contact form at our website WFIU.org/innerstates. You can record a voice memo on your phone and send that. You can also just send an email.

Alex Chambers:  Okay, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first if you like the show leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps people find the show. We'd love to hear what you were doing while you listened. Maybe you had just dropped your kid off at summer camp and it was their last day and they were weepy about not seeing their non-school friends anymore and you were feeling a little impatient because your kid knows your number, they could just give it to their friends to give to their parents. But maybe also you're cranky because of your own lack of sleep last night since it was finally cool enough to leave the windows open, but your neighbors were on their porch all night talking about the trip they were going to take to Iceland. And after your kid got out of the car, without thinking a whole lot about it, you turned on Inner States, and when you heard Amy Oelsner say:

Amy Oelsner:  I was almost manically trying to just make him not die.

Alex Chambers:  You realized you just needed to let your kiddo feel sad. And maybe you needed a nap. Like that, tell us what it's like. Inner States is made by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer is Dom Heyob. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get additional support from Eoban Binder, Aaron Cain, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Kayte Young and Lisa Robin-Young. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstrige. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Instrumentals on this episode are from Amy Oelsner newest album Mirror Reflect, which came out in early May. You can hear the songs with the lyrics on your favorite streaming service. At the Girls Rock Bloomington rehearsal, we heard from Phoebe, Anna, Simone, Fiona and Aria, and in the skit Em and Simone and Phoebe again. Okay, time for some found sound.

Alex Chambers:  That was a stream after a storm at Griffy Lake, Bloomington, Indiana, recorded by Kayte Young. Thanks, Kayte. I'm Alex Chambers, thanks as always for listening.