Music: Babe magnets
It seems to happen every couple of years in the Twin Cities music scene: a band of teenagers comes along and reminds everyone that rock 'n' roll is still very much a young person's game. The latest underage band with overachieving gumption is Total Babe, a violin-laced folk-pop quartet of 17- to 18-year-olds led by high school dropout Clara Salyer.
Salyer is anything but a slacker. A bespectacled, slightly gawky but sharply witty sandy-blond singer/guitarist, she says she quit Main Street School of Performing Arts because "I knew I could get my G.E.D. and focus on other things." Besides music, her focus now includes running a record label called Personal Best and booking gigs for her band and others.
Salyer is clearly smart, too. Take, for instance, the quote she gave me on her band's growing buzz when I met them all at a coffee shop Sunday: "The weird thing about Minneapolis is, if a band is really well liked here, they don't ever seem to get liked anywhere else," she observed, "but then if they're liked everywhere else, no one likes them here." Total Babe, she concluded, "is lucky because we're starting to be liked here and in other places already."
Those places include Germany -- where one of their songs is featured in a TV commercial -- and New York, where they have landed with a small indie label (So TM Records) and recently played gigs during the CMJ Music Festival. That's right, the teen band traveled on its own to NYC, where the members hung out in Brooklyn and briefly stalked the guitarist from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
"We all have really supportive and cool parents," said classically trained violinist Lizzie Carolan, Salyer's classmate since elementary school.
Salyer said she originally wanted to put together a folk act (hence the violin) but started writing poppier songs after teaming up with guitarist and De La Salle High student Jordan Gatesmith, who plays with Carolan in another band, We Valedictorians. Drummer Tim Leick came aboard this summer. The name Total Babe was a joke that stuck because of the boys in the group. Said Carolan, "Clara says she never wants to have more than two girls in the band. Otherwise, 'Total Babe' would be too obvious."
The group's debut EP, "Heatwave," bears vague echoes of orchestral pop groups such as Camera Obscura and Belle & Sebastian, with a little Jenny Lewis/Rilo Kiley-ish purring via lines such as, "Even when I yell, I know I'm right." Most of the songs are light and brooding but playful and lushly arranged, including the new Current/89.3 FM single "Bearbones" and the whistling-filled gem "Shape Up."
As with most teen bands, the future of Total Babe depends largely on post-graduation plans. Gatesmith wants to land in New York, and Carolan hopes to study in France. Salyer plans to enroll somewhere local, but said, "We'll make it work somehow."
