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The members of sidebody shuffle around a small living room. Their equipment dominates the space aside from an old piano with a Joni Mitchell sheet music book and a worn couch.
“This is 90.9 FM WBUR Boston, your local NPR station,” sings Martha Schnee on sidebody’s recently released single “No Commercial Enterprise.”
Schnee highlights a different local radio station every time she performs the song. (WBUR happens to be one of the band’s childhood favorites.) The track is psychedelic and silly, not adhering to the traditional structure.
It came from the band’s disagreement about hanging posters with QR codes at PorchFest in 2021. Some members wanted to promote the band’s upcoming show, but Lena Warnke says she didn’t want to be commercial.
“ So we decided, ‘Okay, you know what? We can’t resolve this right now…We should just jam,’” she says. “And we accidentally wrote a song, like a full song, about this conflict that we were having that made fun of ourselves.”
sidebody is an art punk rock band composed of high school friends Schnee, Lena Warnke, Hava Horowitz and Cara Giaimo who joined later on.
Warnke, Horowitz and Schnee started meeting every Wednesday during the pandemic to play. They had minimal musical training, but Horowitz’s father collected instruments. The friends experimented with his collection.
“We all just would take turns on different instruments,” says Schnee. The band prides themselves on switching instruments on nearly every song.
sidebody practiced in Horowitz’s mother’s garage before moving to their current studio space in Somerville.
“Hava’s mom would just be like, ‘Honey, you girls are gonna be famous one day. I know it.’ We were like, ‘Okay, mother,’” says Schnee.
One of sidebody’s first shows took place in Giaimo’s basement since Schnee was dating her roommate at the time. Giaimo admired their music.
“They reminded me of bands that I really liked growing up,” she says, “that sort of just like fearless, high energy, like simple but powerful songs.”
Giaimo joined sidebody by offering to fill in on guitar when Warnke couldn’t make a performance. It was a small show at the Lincoln Park basketball courts in Union Square. Warnke sent Giaimo voice notes on how to play the melody and even lent her the jumpsuit she would have worn.
“So Cara wore my clothes and played my guitar parts, and the rest is history,” says Warnke.
It wasn’t just any show — Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers was in the audience. The concert was obviously a success because Rogers invited the band to open for her at Paradise Rock Club last year. The band was given two weeks to prepare.
“ It was one of those moments of like, ‘Oh, somebody thinks we’re worthy of sharing the stage with her,’” says Horowitz. “We were so committed and so focused and really were meeting our songs with a new level of intensity.”
Now, sidebody is preparing to play Boston Calling for the first time this weekend. They will bring songs with their whimsical charm.
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“They’re honest, they’re raw,” says Giaimo. “They’re sort of funny and playful. They have a lot of all of our personalities in them.”
Warnke wants sidebody listeners to realize it’s okay to play around with instruments even if they aren’t seasoned musicians.
“You can be a beginner and make something awesome,” she says.
Aside from creating music, sidebody also runs a printing press and develops their own zines. Schnee and Warnke compiled documents, photographs, essays and poems for “Elfland: A Zine” about an empty lot in Somerville where locals created a small world for elves to inhabit.
The band also designs and screen prints their own merch in their studio. Giaimo refers to the space as a “living archive.”
A scaled down blimp dangles from the ceiling with a sidebody shirt wrapped around it simply because Giaimo loves blimps. A receipt with a hilariously long message is taped to the wall from the time Schnee and Warnke ordered food online and accidentally transcribed their entire conversation in the special instructions section.
And a handwritten note from Rogers hangs prominently in the space.
It reads, “So beyond happy to have you guys here tonight. What a dream.”
Maddie Browning is WBUR's arts reporting fellow.
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