Magazine

On a Saturday night in Northfield, the Contented Cow hums with conversation and the scrape of barstools on hardwood floors. Then the crowd demures and the lights dim. A drummer counts off. A guitar howls through the speakers. Phones lift into the air as the crowd presses closer to the stage. 

It’s a familiar ritual for generations of Oles — the shared electricity of live music in a small room, the feeling that something fleeting and communal is unfolding in real time. Long after the final note fades, the energy lingers.

St. Olaf College’s musical reputation is anchored in its world-class choral and instrumental ensemble traditions, but another lineage has quietly evolved alongside them: student bands building their own creative ecosystems, rehearsal by rehearsal, gig by gig, decade by decade. From improvised stages in the 1960s to genre-bending ensembles recording studio tracks today, Ole musicians have consistently carved space for experimentation, collaboration, and independence — carrying that creative spirit far beyond the Hill. 

---

1960s — The Reveres and “Devil Music”

When first-year students arrived at St. Olaf in the fall of 1963, the soundtrack of campus still belonged to Bobby Vinton, Andy Williams, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Within a year, everything had shifted. The Beatles, The Animals, and The Dave Clark Five poured out of dorm windows, signaling a generational handoff — and the beginning of St. Olaf’s first rock band. 

At the center of that shift was Don Hoover ‘68, a blind guitarist from St. Paul who arrived on campus with a singular idea: start a rock and roll band. It began casually in Ytterboe Hall, where Hoover and Roger Christians ‘67 played guitars with the windows open, drawing curious listeners. Soon they needed a bassist (David Nelson ‘68), then another guitarist (David Erdman ‘68). Parents shipped amps and instruments to campus. When they finally found a drummer (David Hersrud ‘68) the group’s success was immediate — and short-lived. 

“We were the first rock and roll band on campus, and the first rock and roll band to be thrown off campus, because we were playing the ‘devil music,’” Hersrud says. “The dean at the time told us that we could no longer practice on campus, and in fact, he called most of the guys in to try to convince them to give up the band. Fortunately, the guys down at the power plant said, ‘Why don’t you come down here and play?’ I tell people we were the band that invented heavy metal because we had to play so loud to be heard over the machinery.”

By then, The Reveres — sometimes known as “Ma’s Boys” after a weekly residency at Ma’s Place downtown — were booking dances, fraternity parties, high school gyms, and regional “world tours” through the Dakotas. Hoover recorded new songs directly off the radio and pushed the band to learn them immediately — sometimes incorrectly, they later discovered. They once drove through small towns with a loudspeaker announcing their shows. Another night ended in subzero North Dakota until a police officer convinced his prisoner to hot-wire their car. 

“Music was part and parcel of who we were,” Hersrud says. “You walked into any dorm and they’d know who we were, because of our music. It was totally our music—— it didn’t belong to anybody else.”

The band dissolved as members graduated in 1967-68, scattering into careers ranging from ministry to engineering to architecture. Hersrud was the only member of The Reveres to remain in the music industry. 

“I went to high school in Faribault at Shattuck-St. Mary’s, and there was a gentleman by the name of Townes Van Zandt there, and he was one of the premier Texas singer-songwriters that ever lived. While I was in graduate school in Eau Claire, he and his label came through and saw a concert of mine, and I ended up getting a job with a record company in Chicago. I was there for what turned out to be probably the most prolific and profound musical decade in the history of music. I got the chance to work with the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Joni Mitchell, The Doors, the list goes on. I got very lucky to have been involved in the music industry in the 70s,” Hersrud says. 

While Hoover has since passed away, the friendships of The Reveres have endured. The original Reveres reunited in 2024, still bound by the memory of a time when rock music, once labeled forbidden, carved its first permanent groove into St. Olaf’s cultural history. 

---

1980s/1990s — Formal Excellence and Underground Experimentation

By the time Thomas Christenson ‘89 arrived on the Hill, St. Olaf’s musical culture had matured into something layered and paradoxical: formal excellence on one side, underground experimentation on the other. The St. Olaf Choir toured across the world. Guitar bands set up makeshift stages in front of dorms and crowded into bars and student events. Punk edges brushed against angelic hymns. For Christenson, that contrast wasn’t a contradiction: it was home.

Music had shaped his life long before college. The youngest of six children in a Lutheran pastor’s family, Christenson grew up performing as part of the Christenson Family Singers, a traveling ensemble that recorded albums, toured Europe three times, and sang everything from Norwegian folk songs to The Sound of Music. 

“I started performing when I was about four,” Christenson says. “I just wanted to be with the family.”

At St. Olaf, Christenson initially struggled to find his place musically. A talented tuba player, he bombed his band audition after neglecting his scales. He spent sophomore year abroad in the Middle East. But junior year brought a turning point: acceptance into the St. Olaf Choir under legendary conductor Kenneth Jennings ‘50. 

“I remember realizing that I was doing something for an hour and a half every day — consistently — which was not my personality,” Christenson laughed. “You don’t realize what you’re absorbing at the time. But the discipline, the vocal control, the harmonies — all of that stayed with me.”

Outside the choir loft, the campus buzzed with student bands. 

“There were a ton of bands,” Christenson recalls. “They’d pop up stages outside of dorms. A lot of guitar-driven stuff — it was the eighties.”

He admired the original music his peers were writing, even as his own confidence lagged behind. 

“I always wanted to be in a rock band,” he admits. “But I didn’t have the confidence yet. I was a late bloomer.”

That bloom arrived after graduation. Coffeehouse duos with fellow Ole David Christensen ’89 in Minneapolis evolved into albums. A move to Australia led to his first solo release. Today, recording under the name Archer Monk, Christenson writes, records, demos, and produces his own work almost daily — Americana-rooted songs shaped by melody, harmony, and persistence. 

“I’m not rich doing it,” Christenson admits. “But I’m still at it. I constantly crave trying to write the best, catchiest song I can.”

Asked what keeps him going after decades of uncertainty, his answer is immediate:

“Stupidity,” he jokes — then clarifies. “I don’t really have a choice. I’m obsessed with melody. It’s like a puzzle. When it comes together, there’s nothing like it.”

For Christenson, recreational music spaces — the scrappy stages beside institutional excellence — mattered deeply. 

“College is the perfect place to try whatever you want,” he says. “Your friends show up. There’s a stage. There’s a sound system. What’s wrong with that? That’s the best.”

Music, he says, is simply “the blood of my life.”

---

2000s — Building a Life Around Music

For Bethany Kochsiek Valentini ‘02, music did not arrive at St. Olaf through the front doors of rehearsal halls or choir lofts. She was a biology major and a tennis player, more likely to be found on the courts or preparing for study-abroad travels than singing in a formal ensemble. But in the margins of college life, she taught herself guitar. 

“I’ve always been a very independent musician,” Valentini says. “In college, I taught myself to play guitar just by learning other people’s songs, printing off chord sheets and playing with friends. It was a very social thing, learning to sing and play with others.”

At some point during her senior year, the covers stopped being enough.

“All of a sudden, I just had this feeling that what I wanted to play next didn’t exist,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘What you want to play doesn’t exist yet, so you’re going to have to write it yourself.’ That is when I started working on the craft of writing songs.”

That instinct, to follow the pull of something not yet named, would deepen after graduation as she navigated grief, collaboration, and the slow process of claiming an artistic life. Supported by her partner, who urged her not to abandon her music even as he battled and eventually succumbed to cancer, Valentini wrote intensely. Six months after his passing, she relocated to Brooklyn with her sister Jennifer Kochsiek Kapernick ‘05, and both started attending open mic nights, performing as the duo The Ericksons.

“It was such an opportunity to just play these songs, all of this original music — it was the next step,” Valentini says. “You can sit in your living room or bedroom or whatever and be playing the songs for yourself, but there is that next level of where these songs live in a community, amongst my fellow musicians.”

Today, she balances music with teaching, preparing to record a new album tied to a forthcoming memoir. For her, sustainability has come not from abandoning art, but from learning how to ground it. 

“I think there’s something powerful in finding a balance between meaningful work and creative life,” Valentini says. “That creative work is vital. It has meaning beyond what we even understand.”

Chris Koza ‘01 remembers arriving at St. Olaf initially disappointed that there weren’t more students making rock or pop music. What he found instead was an education in breadth — choirs ensembles, jazz bands, recital halls filled with orchestral music — and a slow realization that there is no single way to build a life in music. 

“There’s room for all kinds of expression,” Koza says. “Some people are technically virtuosic. Some people are deeply experimental, and create in ways that have very little to do with traditional forms. The spectrum of that was valuable to be around during those formative years.” 

On campus, Koza sang in Viking Chorus, played in jazz band, and fronted a student band called Katnapping. Years later, he would co-found the Americana-Rock band Rogue Valley and build a parallel career as a solo artist, producer, and collaborator. His musical life today spans writing, arranging, file wrangling, performing, and hauling his own equipment to venues — a mosaic of the minutiae that keeps the passion burning. 

“Music is a kind of magic, and I really try to expose myself and seek all different kinds,” Koza says. “It’s probably why I gravitate towards Americana when describing my sound, because it’s subjective. What I make isn’t true rock music, but I incorporate textures and tones of that genre. Sometimes it is more pop, with synthesizers and really trying to focus on a hook or a chorus. And I don’t think I’m country, but sometimes I have pedal steel and banjo. So, for me, Americana is a melting pot of genres.”

One of Koza’s ongoing challenges is navigating the tension between intentional art and the modern demand for constant visibility. 

“Where’s the line between sharing and just slop?” he asks. “I’m trying to make meaningful choices about the art I make and how I live. Self-promotion is hard — but if you don’t do it, nobody knows you’re making work.”

For Eric Wilson ‘08, the road into music ran through theater stages and early-2000s indie rock. 

“The early 2000s was a very good time for music,” he shares. “White Stripes, The Strokes, TV on the Radio, and Interpol — all of those bands were coming up.”

Wilson’s high school theater background helped performance to feel natural, and by the time he arrived at St. Olaf, he was immersed in a campus ecosystem rich with rehearsal space, house shows, a radio station, and student bands. It didn’t take long for him to link up with fellow Oles to form the band Plagiarists, in which he played guitar and provided vocals.

“There were a lot of bands at the time, it was a sort of indie rock heavy scene, but there were hip hop groups and folk groups,” Wilson recalls. “The Pause was a big place. Everyone who wanted one could have a rehearsal slot in there, and we became very spoiled by that experience.”

He remembers fondly basement shows at houses like the legendary Art House, outdoor festivals like Lutefest, and the thrill of opening for nationally touring bands. 

“One year [Lutefest] happened to fall on my birthday, and we were invited to play a set before Rooney, one of my favorite bands at the time. Again, spoiled.”

Wilson moved through several multiple projects after graduation, eventually joining The Stress of Her Regard as a drummer, and, more recently, launching his first solo act, The Peekaboo Moon.

“It’s shimmery, surf-rock, shoe-gazey kind of pop,” he laughs. “The first release is a four-song EP called Golden Hour, and these are songs I have written and recorded all on my own, and I played all the instruments and did all of the arrangements.”

As for what it is like to be a member of a band, both in college and out, Wilson says collaboration remains central to his artistry. 

“When you’re in a group, you go into a room with friends and it becomes a melting pot of emotions — you create something out of that. There’s nothing quite like it.”

Like Koza and Valentini, Wilson balances music with a full-time career — he works in arts nonprofit leadership. They are also united by a shared understanding that music persists beyond campus as a living practice, shaped by community, adaptability, and long patience. Whether writing quietly in a classroom after school hours, hauling gear into a Denver venue, or tracking songs late at night after a day’s work, each continues to build a life where creativity is not ornamental, but essential. 

---

2010s — Basements and Belonging

On weekend nights in the early 2010s, the glow from basement windows along Ole Avenue spilled onto frozen sidewalks. Extension cords snaked through snowbanks. Someone always forgot a mic stand. And inside crowded rooms that smelled faintly of damp coats and spilled beverages, students leaned shoulder-to-shoulder as classmates took makeshift stages and played their first original songs.

For Zach Harris ‘16, those basement shows were an invitation. 

“When I first came to St. Olaf, I was seeing upperclassmen bands play all the time,” Harris says. “It was super inspiring. You’d go into these basements and it felt like a whole world was happening there.”

Harris arrived at St. Olaf planning to immerse himself in the college’s renowned formal music culture, singing in Viking Chorus and studying philosophy and political science. But what he found off the rehearsal hall schedule reshaped his understanding of what music could be. 

“I always thought of St. Olaf as very classical and theory-driven,” he says. “Being part of a band made it feel more organic — more about creativity and self-expression instead of just skill and rules.” 

Through choir friendships, Harris and a small circle of friends formed the indie rock band Air is Air, a name that stuck by accident after someone made a joke that Harris couldn’t recall (or cared to share). Their early shows, played for pals packed into basements and dorm rooms, revealed something deeper than the performance itself. 

“It opened my eyes that it really was a community,” Harris says. “Those first shows felt pretty special.”

Drummer-turned-multi-instrumentalist Colin Loynachan ‘16 remembers joining the group under equally improvised circumstances. He met Harris in their dorm during their first year, when Harris shared an early demo drenched in reverb. 

“It had more reverb than music,” Loynachan laughs. “I told him it sounded like Bon Iver — which I don’t think he appreciated at the time.”

From that rocky start grew a long-term collaboration that evolved musically and philosophically. Air is Air began as straightforward garage rock — ”kind of like the Strokes or the Black Keys,” Loynachan says — before drifting into more experimental territory as members introduced each other to new influences. For Loynachan, who later played in an additional student band, Fringe Pipes, the scene offered something academic music spaces could not. 

“In ensembles, you’re often performing music that’s stood the test of time,” he says. “But making music outside of that was about creating something new. There were no rules. We were asking: why does music matter? What makes something authentic?”

These questions weren’t only abstract — they fueled developments. Along with peers, Loynachan helped launch DNNR PRTY, a student-run collective that functioned as an informal record label for campus bands. The group produced compilation albums and filmed live sessions using borrowed recording equipment and spaces typically reserved for departmental use. 

“The first CD featured 14 of the best groups and acts on campus. We were trying to capture a snapshot of the scene at that moment,” Loynachan says. 

That ecosystem extended beyond the Hill into Northfield venues — The Contented Cow, the old Rueb ‘n’ Stein, and The Grand — where students tested their sound in front of wider audiences. 

“It was great for us, because then we could get in front of some people who weren’t Oles and try to make some new fans,” Loynachan says. “We got to meet some townie, more established bands. It wasn’t just about the music, it was basically just a really big friend group. There was a sort of subculture, where those who didn’t necessarily fit the mold of a stereotypical Ole could come out and get away a bit.”

For Ben Marolf ‘15, the St. Olaf band scene didn’t begin on stage, but behind a soundboard. 

“I loved going to concerts and different venues, even though I wasn’t playing a bunch of music coming into college,” he says. “I applied to work at the Pause as a sound tech, and I was really excited to just run sound and lights for shows that were coming through. One of our jobs was to help student bands that reserved the space — including the guys I would eventually play with (Megatherium Club). One day, their lead singer didn’t show up for their practice, and I went up and sang the song they were rehearsing, and we kind of just kept working together after.”

That porous boundary — between tech and performer, listener and creator — defined the era for Marolf. Campus houses hosted weekend shows, with bands rotating through living spaces and basements across campus.

“People would go listen to different campus bands at different houses,” he recalls. “There seemed to be this little scene of traveling shows that would occur throughout the semesters.”

What made the scene work was the access to support — bands relied on a web of friends, collaborators, and mentors. 

“It’s far easier to make a big impact in a smaller community,” Marolf says. “We were six dudes who found each other and wanted to play music together, and we were able to do that because we had a community who showed up for us. Our purpose was never to blast our albums out into the universe and make it big, but we wanted to just go through the process of creating something cool, and we succeeded.”

In hindsight, that impermanence became the point. 

“St. Olaf without campus bands doesn’t feel like St. Olaf to me. It’s part of the reason that you go to a school like that, it’s part of what you’re getting, being able to be a part of these private little experiments that pop up while you are there. I imagine that probably 95 percent of those bands from any decade of the college are probably not playing music together anymore. People go their own directions after graduation and most bands break up eventually — but during those four years you’re there, there’s something like 40 bands that pop up during that time, that will only exist for that period of time, and that makes it even more special. The things these musicians are creating are more valuable than any song you’ll hear on the radio, because it’s just a little pocket that you as a student at that school for that specific moment get to experience, that nobody else ever will.”

Maria Coyne Churchill ‘15 picked up on that sense the moment she encountered the band scene on campus. 

“‘Oh my God, this is so cool,’” she remembers thinking when she attended her first student band concert. “St. Olaf is obviously known for classical music, but this was off the beaten path, which was awesome, because I wanted to be able to pursue all different kinds of music while I was in college.”

During her first couple of years on the Hill, Churchill wasn’t in a band — she was writing songs alone, playing piano in practice rooms, and quietly experimenting. That all changed when one of her submissions was selected to be featured on the DNNR PRTY album. 

“When my song was picked to be on the CD, I started asking friends by going around asking ‘Will you play on my record?’” she recalls. “Funnily enough, the person who played keys on that song and the person who played drums are still my current keyboardist and drummer.” 

Said keyboardist and drummer are Zachary Baker ‘15 and Sheldon Way ‘14 respectively, and the band is Maria and the Coins — one of the estimated 5 percent who are still actively performing together. While still on campus, however, Churchill appreciated the breadth of influences she was exposed to.

“There was such a beautiful atmosphere of creativity and exploration, and there was such a diversity of sound that you would hear all over campus,” she shares. “You were constantly getting all of these disparate genres. It’s the jazz concerts I’d go to, and then I would be performing with an a capella group, and then I’d go see a student band play somewhere random. There is a freedom of expression that happens outside the classroom you can’t compete with — that vulnerability we can experience outside the confinements of our formal education spaces is so priceless. I think that atmosphere of let’s create, let’s explore, and let’s not worry too much about defining it too quickly and just being open, was a beautiful framework that a lot of people on campus — especially those who weren’t music majors — had. As a music major participating in the campus scene, I felt I got the best of both worlds getting to experience both environments.”

That freedom mirrored the realities she found of a creative career after college. 

“No two career paths really ever look the same in the arts — amorphous is always the word I use when I describe it, because there is no set linear path where it’s like, first I book a gig, then I get the fans, and now I can tour, and then I get the agent. Everything is always happening all at once. There’s really no one path to success, and everybody’s looks different. You have to make your own road. Our band spends as much time on the business side of music as the performing and creative side of music, which can be hard. We are a band that records and tours, but we do all that independently, without a label. And it’s viable, whereas 20 years ago it wouldn’t have been — it’s possible for us to do every part of what we want to do ourselves.”

The impact, Churchill learned, could ripple outward in unexpected ways. After releasing a single about her struggles with anxiety and depression, the band was invited to speak at a youth mental health conference. 

“This organization in Northern Minnesota reached out to us, and asked us to be the keynote speaker for a conference put on for the whole district each year, educating the youth about mental health,” she says. “That was the most rewarding experience we’ve ever had the opportunity to be a part of, because while we love music and performing, at our core our goal is to bring something really good into the world — some joy, some light, some connection.”

Sonja Midthun ‘11 too knows the importance of creating a relationship with the listener through music. As a musically gifted child, choir, church music, and theater defined the early years of her life — but none of it fully fit. By the time she arrived at St. Olaf, she was burned out on performance expectations and gravitating toward the technical side of music. 

“I was just trying to find who I was in music,” she says. “All of those spaces I had been in before, only a few people have the opportunity to stand out, and if you want to be ‘the star’, you really have to have a lot of confidence in yourself and what you are bringing to the table. I wasn’t quite there yet.”

The campus recreational music scene made space for that searching, and fostered an environment of trial and error and boisterous energy. It was an environment that helped Midthun, a music theory and composition major and passionate vocalist, grapple with feelings of trepidation she had before her performances. 

“I think a misconception that a lot of people have is that performers just love the spotlight, and I don’t think that’s me at all,” she says. “Once I realized that it was going to take about a hundred performances to get through the nerves, I wanted those performances to go by as quickly as possible. I would book anything I could, even if I didn’t want to do it, because I needed to build that connection with audiences and experience myself in that really powerful way. Now, I crave that feeling — the vulnerability of being present with other people in real time.”

Having just released her debut album, Running From the Lesson, this past year, Midthun (stage name Sonja Midtune) is also teaching songwriting at Mount Saint Mary’s University. Her advice to students, both there and on the Hill, is simple and unflinching. 

“Consider college a place that shows you a glimpse of what you’re capable of,” she says. “If you study English in college, but you want to learn how to engineer and produce music, congrats, you have the next 70 years of your life to do that. So for the love of God, please don’t limit yourself. If you’re limiting yourself, know that there is someone out there living the life you would want, because they didn’t limit themselves.”

---

2020s — The Scene Now

On a winter afternoon in the basement of Tomson Hall, five voices overlap in excited crosstalk: half-finished jokes, half-remembered stories, plans for the upcoming gig, debates about what counts as glam versus grunge. A meeting room commandeered for an interview becomes, briefly, something more akin to a practice room — messy, loud, alive. 

This is Undergrad: a student band whose energy feels inseparable from the moment it occupies on campus. 

“It was a converging of paths, really,” bassist Martin Skare ‘26, a mathematics and physics major, says of the band’s origins. “Myself and our drummer, Aidan Fitzpatrick ‘26, met our first year when we were lucky enough to be placed in the same SOAR group, and from week one we were talking about starting a band — but it wasn’t until sophomore year that we went bowling at Flaherty’s with some first-year friends, one of whom was Blake over here.”

Blake Fedie ‘27, a pre-med student who is majoring in chemistry with a concentration in biomolecular sciences, picks up the story, after a brief back-and-forth over which band was playing over the loudspeakers to score this pivotal moment (either Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses, or Kansas).

“In any case, it was something I could play, and I mentioned it — and you said ‘Oh, you play music?’ And I said, ‘Well actually, I am a guitarist,” Fedie recounts. “You can only toot your own horn so much without showing proof, so I eventually made it over to his pod and played a little bit on his guitar, and you said ‘Maybe we have something to work with here.’ Of course, I happened to be roomed with a guy first year, and ‘Well guys, I know a singer.’”

That singer is Undergrad vocalist Anthony Igboabuchi ‘27, a creative writing and English major, who had been experimenting and finding success with soloist interpretations of soul, pop, and R&B before being recruited. Keyboardist Reece Howell ‘27, a philosophy and political science major, joined after casually sitting in on a session — learning the full setlist over spring break before stepping on stage the next night. Roman Kendrick ‘27, a chemistry major with a concentration in biomolecular science, was initially pulled into the group as a temporary replacement for Skare while the latter was studying abroad in Scotland, before becoming an official member of the band playing rhythm guitar.

What began as a loose constellation of friend and acquaintance-ships rapidly became something more focused. 

“The basic process for [our songwriting] is someone has a concept and they show it to another one of us, and they go, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good,’” Howell says. 

“We then put it through the Undergrad gauntlet, and by the time the rest of us are finished with our inputs and plugging in our own parts, it’s hardly something you recognize — but it’s usually something better,” Fedie adds. 

Even the band’s name began as a placeholder — and stuck. Rather than abandoning it, the group leaned into the academic connotations, staging a tongue-in-cheek photoshoot dressed as students and professors, adopting a mock collegiate aesthetic, and building an identity that balances absurdist humor with technical precision. Their sound is hard to define, and they prefer it that way. After a Halloween Metal Festival at The Grand performed in costume (Napoleon Dynamite, Freddie Mercury, Pirates, and Smurfs), a YouTube commenter labeled Undergrad as a “Michelle Obama–fronted glam grunge band.” The band adopted it instantly. 

“It was probably meant as a roast, but we were like, hey, glam grunge is kind of legend,” Igboabuchi laughs. 

What keeps Undergrad grounded, however, are not the jokes — it’s their building momentum. 

“I think as soon as we got all of the members in the band that we have now, that’s when we really just took off and kind of fully became professional musicians — and we can say paid professionals, but it’s not much,” Kendrick says. “When it comes down to it, people really love an Undergrad show because of the energy we bring to the stage. In Undergrad, every member is just going off —  this guy [Fedie] is jumping, we have so many pictures of him looking like he’s riding a broomstick.”

Over the past year, the band has steadily grown in confidence and audience. 

“I would say that success for me is facing the fear of having to lead the crowd,” Igboabuchi says. “We have to interact with the audience, I have to make some people feel seen. It’s not just about singing or having fun, you have to invite people to have fun with you. After a show, what makes me feel satisfied is I have some sort of sense that I invited people to the stage to be seen.”

From early gigs at The Contented Cow, Undergrad has gone on to win the Pause’s Mane Stage Madness competition.

“In the final round of [Mane Stage Madness], we were against Higher Ground, and the voting was like 50/50 right up until the show closed, and earlier in the year we were opening for them,” Skare shares. “We love those guys, they are so good, so the fact that we kind of stood on the same level as them, we were like, ‘Oh. We’re good at this.’”

The shared ecosystem of the St. Olaf band scene matters. Student bands cross-pollinate constantly: sharing stories, audiences, advice, and encouragement. 

Film studies major Will Christensen ‘26, drummer for both Wintery Elementary and Higher Ground, describes the campus band scene as resilient and scrappy. 

“The odds are kind of stacked against us,” Christensen says. “We don’t really have the infrastructure — you’re rehearsing in dorm rooms, hauling gear around, recording in practice rooms with library microphones. You have to be really determined to make it happen.”

That determination creates its own culture of community. 

“Sharing the music is as much a part of the process as creating it,” Christensen adds. “You wouldn’t make music if you didn’t get to play it for people at the end.”

Biology and environmental studies major Julia Kauth ‘26, guitarist for Higher Ground, echoes that sense of shared connection. 

“Having recreational music gives people a way to go outside of the limits that ensembles have to try new things and grow on their own,” they say. 

At the heart of Higher Ground is Jerome Covington ‘25, the band’s primary vocalist, keyboardist, songwriter, and conceptual engine. His songs, rooted in funk and R&B traditions, carried a unique identity that set them apart from other offerings on campus — but there was a time Covington doubted they would be heard at all.

“I originally wanted to be a music major,” says Covington, who majored in film and media studies and race and ethnic studies. “At the end of the day, I couldn’t sight read, and for a long time that made me feel like maybe I wasn’t really a musician”

He navigated around the issue by taking musicology courses open to non-majors, signing up for piano lessons to learn to read notes he already knew by ear, and spending hours alone in practice rooms. It was through this network that he met a drummer from another band, who encouraged him to start asking around. 

“I just started asking people, ‘Do you know anyone who plays?’” Covington says. “And eventually someone said, ‘You should talk to Bobby.’”

Bobby Bellairs ‘25, a saxophonist and jazz performance major, had spent much of his time at St. Olaf engaged in a music program that didn’t always feel tailored for the kind of musician he was becoming. 

“I felt like I didn’t really find my fit in the musical community here until Higher Ground,” he says. “I was playing jazz, but this was different. [In Higher Ground] we weren’t reading anything, we were arranging everything by ear and improvising as we went. As we developed as a band, I really felt a sense of belonging come into play.”

Within a week of meeting, Covington and Bellairs had assembled the core of Higher Ground from the circle of jazz collaborators that Bellairs knew. By halfway through J-Term, they were rehearsing twice a week in borrowed spaces across campus, building arrangements from nothing but Covington’s piano demos. 

“That first rehearsal all together, I realized two things,” Covington says. “One: we might actually be able to do something with this. And two: this group of people had real chemistry. I played the song once on piano with no chords written down, and we just figured it out.”

That alchemy carried them to their first show at The Contented Cow on a night the venue had originally planned to be closed. 

“They put out a sign that said, ‘Opening at 10 p.m. for a special performance,’” Covington recalls. “We were the only band playing. And people came. We got an ovation. And we were like — whoa. People actually like this.”

For Bellairs, that night marked a shift. 

“That was the moment where I was like, this is real,” he says. “And honestly, our second show there was even better.”

Higher Ground’s sound grew out of its ear-led rehearsals, producing neo-soul, funky jazz, and R&B tracks. Covington hopes that fans of the band take away a sense of contemplation and understanding from engaging with their music.

“I think right now, music generally is in a place where it’s not asking much from its audience — it’s more like, ‘Let’s have fun,’” he says. “I would like to see, especially in the times we are living in, people reflect more on the music and use music as a way to communicate and give people a voice. If Higher Ground has a legacy on campus, I think it would be one of amplification of softer voices.”

Both Covington and Bellairs point to the same reality: this band would not have existed inside the formal structure of St. Olaf’s music program. 

“If recreational music didn’t exist here, you would never have Higher Ground,” Covington says. “Only one of us is a music major, but we all love music.”

Bellairs agrees.

“Other ensembles have a straight avenue to rehearsing and performing,” he says. “With a band, you kind of have to fight for it. You’re hauling gear, finding rooms, figuring it out yourself. But that’s also what makes it feel like yours. There’s a whole group of students who will just show up to the Cow on a Saturday night to see live music. I didn’t discover that until my last year here, and once I did, it made me feel like I belonged.”

Even after Covington and Bellairs graduated, their connection to the band didn’t dissolve. This winter, most members of the band reconvened in a professional studio to record five original songs for release this spring. 

“We can keep doing this; we don’t have to stop just because we graduated,” Covington says. “We all love what we do, and I think we love it too much to bank on it going viral or having a flash moment of visibility. We are starting to solidify a system where we are able to make music, do performances in the Twin Cities, and establish an identity that goes beyond our success at St. Olaf — but we know where we come from, and that local Northfield base supported us so much. What makes Northfield special when it comes to the local band scene is, because of the colleges, you have people from all over the world, from anywhere, coming together with the influences they have, and creating such unique sounds. I’ll always be grateful for that.”

For Avery Nevins ‘25, a music education major and founding drummer of rock band noslo., the realization that the band could still play after the Hill came earlier. 

noslo. formed through personal connections and friendships between musicians on campus, and by Nevins’ senior year, he was the only current student in a band made up of recent alumni. During that time, the group played twice at the Pause, performed regularly at The Contented Cow, and gigged at various venues in Minneapolis. 

“I never really thought of us as a ‘student band,’” Nevins says. “It felt more like a real band that happened to start while some of us were students.”

That distinction mattered. Playing in bars and small venues, Nevins says, taught him a different kind of musicianship than any large ensemble could. 

“There’s a rawness to performing in a social setting like that,” he says. “You have the freedom to improvise, to change things on the fly, to really live in the moment with your friends in a way that’s not possible when you have 95 people on stage and everything has to be perfectly organized.”

Now a junior high music director, Nevins finds himself bringing that mindset into the classroom. 

“I want my students to know how to follow the structure of concert band and orchestra, but I also want them to know what it feels like to create something of their own — to plan a rehearsal, to build something from scratch, to make music that’s theirs,” he says.

Looking back, noslo. — like Undergrad, Higher Ground, and all the others — was more than another extracurricular for the CV. It was a reminder that making music at St. Olaf doesn’t only happen with sanctioned rehearsal rooms and concert halls. It can happen in the margins of everyday college life, and in those spaces, students can learn how to build, share, and carry music with them, long after they leave the Hill. 

---

Across decades, rehearsal spots shift. Posters fade. Band names blur into half-remembered stories told years later at reunions. What remains consistent is not a single sound or style — but the impulse itself: students finding themselves or one another, picking up instruments, and building something that didn’t exist before they arrived. Someone will overhear a song in a bowling alley. Someone will lend an instrument. Someone will say, “We should start a band.”

And the cycle will begin again.