Despite a Pandemic, Rising Musician Allie McIntosh Keeps Singing

Welcome to 2021, the 12 months we at last go forward yet again. The only problem now is, how? We interviewed some essential Twin Towns stakeholders, local community voices, and leaders who will be central to what happens–or doesn’t–in the 12 months to come. 

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Previous 12 months was its very own kind of ruthless for teens, whom it retained in a unusual purgatory. Consider 14-12 months-previous Allie McIntosh, a singer-songwriter with a classically properly trained voice and savant-like capability on both equally the viola and the piano. She’s only halfway by way of her sophomore 12 months at Breck, but she’s already finding seen, and with just a minor more phase time in entrance of dwell audiences, she could be well on her way to getting Minnesota’s Alicia Keys or Taylor Swift. As a substitute, she invested most of what was confident to be her breakout 12 months caught at dwelling with her mothers and fathers in Eden Prairie. She statements she made the very best of it—but what else are you going to acknowledge in a person of your to start with interviews?

“I’d go out more generally,” she claims. “But I stayed at dwelling and did some of my beloved things, like producing songs.” 

She even got acknowledged to the prestigious Steinhardt software at New York University for songwriters fifteen and up this 12 months. And went! Type of. 

“I lied about my age,” she confesses. “Only 42 people today in the complete earth got acknowledged, and it was a two-week camp, and it was a ton of enjoyable.” 

But was not it on Zoom, I question, and weren’t you meant to have long gone to NYC, if not for COVID? “Yeah, we were going to go see a bunch of performances,” she claims. “And remaining in the dorms would’ve been genuinely neat.” 

Before I bum her out far too considerably, I question her about her debut EP, Purgatory Rd, which she was equipped to record in individual at the Hideaway Studios in Northeast. 

“It’s named after the highway I grew up on,” she claims. “Why not?” 

She wrote and generated all the tunes by herself. She wrote the direct single, “Someday When I Go”—which features dark lyrics like “Someday when I go, you are going to be free and happy”—as a seventh grader confronting her very own despair more than remaining bullied at faculty. 

“That was my seventh-grade self conversing,” she claims. “After that, I discovered to not genuinely treatment about what people today feel about me so considerably.” 

So somehow, even in the center of a pandemic, things are wanting up for Allie McIntosh. 

“I just appeared within,” she claims. “It’s all about self-really like and self-confidence—knowing who you are and loving yourself to start with just before anyone else. Not that you have to be egocentric all the time, but it is Ok to glance inward.”

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This write-up at first appeared in the January 2021 situation.