From 1994 to 2001, Speak in Tongues served as Cleveland’s DIY outpost for unrestricted creative expression. The space hosted the city’s debuts by then-unknown acts such as Modest Mouse, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Neutral Milk Hotel, U.S. Maple and hundreds more bands, artists, filmmakers and other creatives. 

A new book, Where Shit Happened: The Paper Trail to Speak In Tongues, documents Speak in Tongues’ history with over 500 pages of fliers, photos, newspaper clippings and other preserved ephemera.

At 8 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 14, Spotlight Cleveland will host a pre-party gathering featuring performances by five bands whose members had close Speak in Tongues connections: AWESOME*QUEST!, Murderous Vision, Blue Antidote, the Stephe DK Band and Heavy Rains Stringband.

On Saturday, Aug. 15, Visible Voice will host the book’s official release. The event will start at 3 p.m. with a performance by Uno Lady, Cleveland’s one-woman choir. A panel discussion will follow at 4 p.m., moderated by Cleveland historian John Skrtic, featuring SIT archivists Sean Carney and Ken Blaze, former SIT residents Danny Noonan and Jake Kelly, and book creators John Delzoppo and Ron Kretsch. Later that night at 9 p.m., Happy Dog will feature a lineup including Harriet the Spy, Beckett and Friends, and Applejuice, all closely associated with SIT. 

John Delzoppo, Jake Kelly, and Ron Kretsch, all of whom worked on the book, recently met at Proof Public House to discuss the project.

How did the idea for the book come about?

Delzoppo: I guess the origin was cleaning up my closet and sorting through old fliers, noticing that I had a bunch from Speak in Tongues and appreciating how different they were from each other. There was a lot of variety, despite being from the same place and time period. It got me thinking it would be fun to expand the collection, so I reached out to a few friends, including Jake, to see what they had. It started to take shape from there.

Kelly: John had been doing a weekly Flier Friday post on Instagram. I was working on flier books of my own at the time and while I was looking at one of his posts I thought, “I would like to see a Speak in Tongues flier book.” Five minutes after I had that thought, John texted me and asked if I’d want to publish a book of them. It seemed like a natural “yeah.”

Can you each talk about how you were involved with the club?

Kelly: The first time I went to Speak in Tongues was when I was playing a show there. It was early on, like in the first 6 months. I was instantaneously intrigued by the place. It was unlike any other club. Then, I just started going there as much as I possibly could. My friend Danny and I lived in the Western suburbs. He was in Rocky River, and I lived in Fairview. We used to ride our bikes down Lorain all the way to Speak in Tongues. That Walrus statue at the library at 117th was our half-way demarcation point. I was still in high school and went to see Crash Worship, and the show got out at 4 in the morning. I went home and took a shower and went to school, and I remember sitting in study hall and going, “I am done with all of this. I’m dropping out of high school.” I barely graduated. After high school, I lived in a couple of different places, and the guys from the band Grain, who lived at Speak in Tongues, were moving out. I moved in, and I was there on and off for a few years. At a certain point, you have to get out of the Speak in Tongues basement, so I was living upstairs for a while, and then right down the street. It was a huge part of my life until I moved to New York, and then it closed three months later.

Kretsch: The guy who ran the Pieta upstairs was a roommate of mine in college, so I was used to going to that building to see shows. When Speak in Tongues opened, they booked a lot of the kind of stuff I liked. Much of it was stuff that regular clubs didn’t want to do because you couldn’t sell a lot of beer at shows like those. There were always spaces that would do those types of shows, but Speak in Tongues weirdly seemed the most stable. At Speak in Tongues, you walked in the door, and you could tell it was different. It was its own thing, it was home to more than one scene. Euclid Tavern was one scene and one kind of music. I loved that scene, but Speak in Tongues was all over the place, and that was more exciting.

Kelly: It’s a “blind man and the elephant” thing. People often say it was the home of the noise scene, or it was where all the emo bands played, but it was a lot of things all at once. 

Krestch: I was also a musician and played there a bunch. When it became a cooperative, I joined the collective as soon as it was a possibility.

Delzoppo: I started going there the summer before my senior year of high school. A few friends who were more involved in the scene started taking me along to the Grog Shop, Euclid Tavern, VFW Halls, and some shows at Speak in Tongues. I felt a strong connection to Speak quickly because it was so different. It was hard to process what it actually was on my first few visits. I just didn’t have a reference point for it, which was exciting. It felt like a place where anything unexpected could happen on any given night. It was just a very special place to be exposed to a lot of new music you couldn’t hear anywhere else. 

Kretsch: There is a lot about the place that comes down to vibe. You hear it a lot from people that the first time they went there they felt something. There have been a lot of show houses, and there still are, but I don’t think there will be three books about the Tower. And that’s not a slam, I liked that place, too.

Delzoppo: The lore is so massive and we’re still talking about it for a couple main reasons. For one, it truly pulled in world-class artists from many different scenes to this one place that was kind of separated from reality. And it ran for seven years, an eternity in terms of illegal DIY venues. The best of many worlds were converging in one place, and it ran long enough to make a lasting impact.

Kretsch: Never once did it cross my mind that it was illegal.

What kinds of challenges did putting this book together present?

Delzoppo: The biggest challenge was finding the individuals who had the pieces I was missing to fill in the gaps. Reaching out — either directly or by proxy, hoping for a response, then continuing to remind them to look through their stuff and get it to me. All the tedious legwork comes with a very real level of mental exhaustion. I’m not great at being a pest, but the nature of this project requires it. I really had to overcome my own politeness, badgering people to keep looking and send what they found. In most cases it eventually paid off, but there were a lot of dead ends that still irk me when I think about pieces that never turned up. 

Kelly: Almost everyone who saves fliers also has interesting photos. Initially, it was like, “Okay, we’ll include a few photos.” Then, it became, “Okay, we’ll include two or three hundred photos.” The size of the book kept expanding, but somehow never felt big enough to include everything.

Kretsch: For a flier book, there were a lot of photos of shows for which we had no fliers. It kind of ballooned into a different project with the material we received really dictating the scope of the book. 

What was it like to do the layout?

Kretsch: It was a lot. The last really visual coffee table book I did was 300 pages. That was slim compared to this one. John and I talked about how every spread has to be its own work of art. You’re addressing a different subject on every page, but they are all thematically linked. It was a matter of creating 250 really complex spreads.

Delzoppo: And puzzling everything together while trying to treat every piece with the care it deserves. Looking at fliers or photos from legendary gigs that are still talked about 30 years later, we wanted to give them their deserved real estate without shortchanging other things. Five hundred fliers can’t all have their own full page, so it was a constant balancing act between significance and available space. This was initially just going to be a flier book, but I wanted people who’d never been there to get a feel for what it was like, and the photos really help to paint the full picture.  

Kretsch: The first chapter is really heavy with broad photos of the space. We needed to give a sense of what it was like to be in there, to shape the context for the rest of it.  

Kelly: For a book with no words, there is a lot of narrative drive, especially in sequential photos. There is also a lot of humor. There are funny page turns and humorous punctuation in the form of a photo or flier. It’s dense. For an art book, you sit, and you read it.

Delzoppo: The goal was to bring someone into that world and tell the story from start to finish. I felt like the only way to really accomplish that was to lay it out chronologically. That added a ton of extra work to get everything in its proper place, but without sticking to the timeline it would have been too chaotic — both to create and to digest.

What are some of your best memories of the place?

Kretsch: There are hundreds.

Delzoppo: I was in a band called Oblongata at the time, and Speak was the first actual venue we played. As a young band, getting to play there felt like the older cool kids inviting you into their inner circle. Mike Rodemann and Sean Carney liked what we were doing and invited us to play some shows they were booking. We were honored to be included and it gave us a lot of confidence. It wasn’t the kind of place where local bands would submit demos to get on shows, so it felt special just to be welcomed into the fold. 

Kelly: There were a ton of amazing bands that played there that always blew your hair back like Lightning Bolt and Federation X and Crash Worship, so it’s hard to pick favorites. One that stands out was a noise band from Pittsburgh called the Warlocks. It was a bass player and French horn and drummer and some guy making noise on something. Their whole set lasted four or five minutes as part of a big day-long noise thing. They came out and exploded. I probably looked like the guy in the old Maxell commercial. The singer shoved a bunch of newspaper into a toaster and turned it on, burning newspaper flying out. He ran from the stage to the front wall, which was a fake thin wall. He jumped off the couch and onto the wall, and it bent down to where it almost touched the front glass and it sprung back, and he went flying through the air and landed, and there was fire everywhere. It was a good thing I was 22 at the time, and it didn’t register as something that was really dangerous. I remember thinking, “This is our house. What are we doing here?” There were tons of shows like that.

Delzoppo: I’m sure everyone who went there has a mental inventory of their craziest experiences. The oral history book that Microcosm published touches on a lot of that. With my book, I wanted it to be more objective and less story-based.

Kretsch: One person’s totally insane show is another person’s average Tuesday. One non-show night, a bunch of us were just hanging out there. I don’t know why this happened, but there were golf clubs, so we turned the place into an ad hoc mini golf course. We played putt-putt all night using bullshit around the room as obstacles.

Delzoppo: It’s a shame there are no photos of that.

What fliers are some of your favorites?

Kelly: For me, I had done cut-and-paste fliers for my friends in high school and would occasionally draw a flier. I started drawing fliers when I was living at Speak in Tongues. Now, I am in year 30 of making fliers. There is a Wolf Eyes flier that I drew, and that’s one I showed to Kathy [Blackman] at the Grog Shop and Cindy [Barber] at the Beachland that convinced them to let me start doing fliers for their clubs which lined up every other domino in my life. 

Delzoppo: In 1998, Al Karpinski from Six Parts Seven had a unique style of fliers he was making at the time. There’s a Bedhead one, Ariel M, Songs Ohia and some others. They were very simple two-color fliers he made on his night shift at Kinko’s, featuring hand-stamped lettering and simple imagery. They’re super clean and bold. Their simplicity makes them stand out and they match the music really well — the perfect aesthetic for the vibe of those bands. On the other side of the spectrum, I love all of Shaun Filley’s hand-drawn cartoonish violence fliers, especially the first one he drew for Spazz in 1997. It was important to me to get a wide variety of favorites in the flier collage on the cover. 

The club abruptly closed in 2001. What would you hope someone who never went there gets out of the book?

Delzoppo: I hope it can be something like the experience I had with the Jabberjaw book, It All Dies Anyway, covering the legendary ’90s venue in L.A. They made a beautiful hardcover document with fliers and photos covering the history of the place. Jake gifted me a copy early in this process and it was really inspiring. Even though I never went there, I can flip through that book and get a clear idea of what it was like. I would hope that someone could pick up our book and have that same kind of feeling. Even if they’ve never been to Cleveland or weren’t alive in the ’90s, they can get an idea of why it was important and holds significance. And for the folks who did spend time there, I hope it can open their eyes to everything they missed that was happening in parallel with their time at Speak. 

Kretsch: I say this in the book: I wanted the experience of flipping through the book to be as overstimulating and chaotic as it was to exist in the space. I think we accomplished that. 

Kelly: The only thing that’s missing is the smell.

Kretsch: We talked about scratch and sniff.

Delzoppo: Sadly, the logistics of scratch and sniff cards just didn’t work out.

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Local singer-songwriter and actor Vig Norris, who records and performs as Vigatron, says he was drawn to art and music when he was just a child.

“It’s always been in me,” he says one evening from the back patio of the B-Side, the Cleveland Heights club where he’s performed on numerous occasions. “I remember when I was 4 years old being in the living room dancing to the Jacksons’ records. As I got older, I wanted to emulate Michael Jackson, and then, Purple Rain came out, and I was all about emulating Prince.”

Dressed causally in black pants and T-shirt emblazoned with the comic book character the Hulk, Vigatron is actually a theatrical performer, and Norris often dons wigs and outrageous outfits for his music videos. He’s been an active part of Cleveland’s hip-hop scene for more than 20 years now.

Hollow Apologies, Vigatron’s latest effort, comes off as a terrific mix of funk, rock, soul and hip-hop, and Vigatron plays a release party at 8 p.m. on Sunday, July 26, at the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights. Locals Marcus Smith, Crazy8thegreat, J. Smith and Honasty Blade share the bill.

Norris cut the record with long-time collaborator and friend, Burner, who’s produced various songs for him over the years. He met Burner in 2001, and they worked together for a short time as part of a hip-hop group. As Norris contemplated his next release, he realized working with Burner made the most sense since he already had some beats he could use.

“It was 2025; I had just moved,” Norris says. “I hadn’t put anything out in a while. I had maybe nine beats from him. I said, ‘I’m just making a whole project from your beats.’ It evolved into something way better than that. I built another ten around what we had. In this particular scenario, Burner produced it all and recorded it and mixed in his studio, which is essentially his man cave in his basement.”

Norris and Burner don’t necessarily share the same musical sensibilities, but Hollow Apologies sounds cohesive nonetheless.

“I’m a Prince guy. [Burner] is not as much so,” says Norris. “Most of my inspiration comes from Prince and Michael Jackson and standup. I don’t get a whole lot of inspiration from hip-hop. When I think of things, I’m thinking of the perspective of a rock star.”

While Norris has cut concept albums in the past, the songs on this album do not follow a theme other than the free-wheeling approach.

“It became a concept, but it didn’t start off as a concept,” Norris says. “In me working on it, I let the things naturally progress to where I thought it should go. The reason why it’s called Hollow Apologies is because people expect certain things out of me and might think it’s not hip-hop enough. I’m going to do whatever I end up doing, and it’s ‘hollow apologies.’ This is me saying, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’ It’s a free album of me saying I’m not going to worry about it and make what I want to make.”

While recording, they employed what Norris describes as the “Wack Burner Beat Hour.”

“[Burner] would play a bunch of things for me, and I would pick things from that,” says Norris. “Every idea I came to him with, he was on board, even when I was singing. I was nervous coming to the studio. He’s on board with all that. This is the freest I’ve been. I wrote everything last year and up until the first couple of months this year.”

Norris promises the live show will be “fun and funky.”

“In my mind, it’s all party,” he says. “This project feels more upbeat, which wasn’t upbeat. This will the most fun thing I’ve done. There will be some funny parts in it. Burner will be there as a backup. I will do the songs through my machine like I usually do. Working with a band might be cool, but I’m a stickler, and I want my show version to sound exactly like the recorded version.”

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Three years into it, things have finally started to click for local rockers Houdini’s Code. Earlier this month, the group played a couple of shows in Akron. In addition, the local alt-rock station 107.3 just played the band’s new single, “Believe,” for the first time (the song arrives on all streaming platforms on June 26).

“I originally thought ‘Believe ‘was about being angry that little things can get in the way of relationships, but I realized anger wasn’t really the truth underneath it. ‘Believe’ is about family and losing touch and friends,” says singer-guitarist Kevin Cedar over coffee one afternoon at Mojo’s, a coffee shop near his Bay Village home. The group’s new album comes out on Aug. 8, and the band will embark on a small tour to support it. The trek launches on Aug. 1 at the Northside Tavern in Cincinnati and then includes stops in Chicago, Green Bay and Geneva (for a private release party). The group will play in Columbus, OH, Bowling Green, OH and Youngstown later this year. “The truth is that I love these people and believe in them. I think the purest form of love is genuinely trusting and believing in someone, even when things are complicated. The song is about believing that people can find their way back to each other, but it is also about believing in this band and even just learning how to believe in myself.”

Cedar, who grew up in Ashtabula County, originally befriended fellow bandmate Shawn Davis back in fifth grade; the two would eventually start the rock band Green Tea when they were in high school.

“I was the drummer,” says Cedar. “But when we went to college, we went on our ways. We stayed friends throughout the years. I went from drums to playing guitar and writing songs.”

Last year, the group finally got around to recording songs that it written over the course of  a decade. The resulting album, Escape, came out in March of 2024 on what would’ve been Houdini’s 150th birthday.

“There are versions of some of the songs we can’t show anyone,” says Cedar. “But as we got better, the songs progressed.”

The group recorded the album in basements and small apartments. It even rented out an AirBNB to cut some tunes, which recall ’90s alternative rock acts like Foo Fighters and Local H.

“It really was a DIY project,” says Cedar.

The group took a DIY approach to the music videos for the album’s three singles, too.

“I’m a videographer, and a lot of it was me positioning the camera and getting in front of it,” says Cedar. “It got awkward at times. We always make the videos funny because we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

Cedar grew up listening to his father’s classic rock collection, but hearing Nirvana for the first time introduced him to a new sound and ethos.

“I was obsessed with them,” he says of the grunge group from the Pacific Northwest. “It never made sense to me how they broke through to the mainstream. They broke the whole system. The whole story is fascinating to me. Obviously, the Foo Fighters are also a huge influence.”

Houdini’s Code recently underwent a lineup change, and Cedar says the current lineup, which also includes guitarist Juan Lopez, bassist Clarissa Cuomo and drummer Miqe Smith, is particularly motivated. The new album also features drum performances from Kent Slucher (Luke Bryan) and Nik Hughes (Bush).

“We finally found the right lineup that matches the vision,” Cedar says. “We all have the same dream and the same delusions, which I think is the only way a band really works. We now have three guitarists and a bassist and drummer. We don’t just play the songs now. We jam and try to be a good performing band now.”

Cedar says the difference with Believe is simply that the group has gotten better.

“As a musician, the evolution of becoming good takes a long time,” he says. “You suck for a long time. I didn’t know how to sing or play guitar. I’m actually starting to learn. People around us now have the same passion.”

The group has employed publicity stunts in the past — it has embarked on more than one farewell tour — to promote its music, and Cedar says that will be the case with the new album as well.

“We thought about hiring magicians to perform with us,” he says. “We want not good ones. We want ones where people are stunned by how awkward it is. We’re still thinking of weird things we could do.”

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For the past two decades, the Lottery League has brought random Cleveland musicians together and given them two months to rehearse and come up with 10 minutes of original music they then perform at a culminating concert dubbed the Big Show.

This year, founders Michael James and Jae Kristoff have again staged the event and the newly formed musical groups will perform on Saturday, June 27, at a day-long concert that takes place at Ingenuity Cleveland. Local breweries Butcher & Brewer, Market Garden, Immigrant Son and Collision Bend have collaborated to make special beers related to this year’s event, and local graphic artists have designed six different posters for the truly unique concert.

One recent afternoon at Visible Voice Books, James and Kristoff talked about the show’s origins and the way it takes local musicians out of their comfort zones to collaborate with strangers, something they say works particularly well here in Northeast Ohio.

Talk about the beginnings of this event. I think it dates back to 2006.

Kristoff: At the time, I was doing a collaboration project called Land of Buried Treasure. We were collaborating with different musicians, including Michael. We did a CD at the time with 50 to 70 musicians who came in over a 72-hour period at Zombie Proof Studios downtown. Musicians stuck around, and you’d great these weird combinations of musicians. We made a CD, and after, that I was approached by more musicians. We were thinking about what we do next. There was a MySpace message that [local musician] Ed Sotelo put up after seeing a local band with an amazing drummer at the Beachland. And he said he wished every band in town would break up, and we could pick bands all over again. That got the wheels turning. We could do something like this where we could have musicians come together and have an NFL-type draft. We could randomly place musicians together. A council was formed, and it evolved into musicians that never played together before. In 2007 when we were really planning it out, that was when we had the idea of having a baseball card for each musician. They could learn about other musicians and also promote what they were doing and what groups they were performing with. Back then, we didn’t know how it was going to go.

That first year produced 33 new bands from 144 local musicians?

Kristoff: Yes, and we didn’t know if they would all make it to the Big Show. That two-month period prior to the show was magic. All the bands stayed together and played the Big Show. Since then, there have been 275 bands that were created, and they all made it to the Big Show.

James: The only band that didn’t perform was Ted Flynn’s. He passed away in 2013. He was a legend in our scene and passed away a day before the Big Show. We did a video tribute to him.

Are any of the original 33 bands still around?

James: None of those bands, but some of the combinations of musicians still play together. The oldest band that’s still around is Hiram Maxim from 2013. They’ve recorded with Martin Bisi (Sonic Youth) and done some significant stuff. They’re killer live, too.

Kristoff: Each season, there are a half dozen bands that are still around when the next Lottery League happens.

Was it always the intention to do it every two to three years?

James: We started every two years and then went to every three years. But three years feels like we’re starting all over again. We wanted to make tickets free. Since 2013, with the third season, we have made it free. Three years gave us a break. We did that from 2016 to 2019. We were raising funds trying to get sponsorships every three years. After 2019, we decided to go back to the two-year model. We made that announcement that we were going to do that in 2020 and then everything fell apart. The nature of what we do is each band is assured a drummer and a rehearsal space, so the idea of us trying to get musicians rehearse during COVID in a tight rehearsal space was difficult. We had to make sure people felt safe, so that’s why we returned in 2024.

Kristoff: When this one is over, we’ll be working toward 2028. We need to know that we have our sponsors at least a year in advance. Being every two years now, we are meeting on a regular basis..

What have been some of the wilder ensembles that have played throughout the years?

Kristoff: Because we work with Chuck [Karnak] from All Go Signs, a lot of the times the bands will bring creative visuals and videos. We have screens on the stage. We had bands score videos and people in costumes. When there are 44 bands performing, the bands like to stand out if they can.

James: When Queen of Hell played in 2016 in druid robes with a cross with string of Christmas white lights around the border of the cross and having a player come out and turn it upside down because it was on a swivel, the audience was packed. They then ripped into this Black Sabbath-meets-Thin Lizzy riff. I still get goose bumps to this day thinking about that performance. It was unreal. We appreciate the time musicians all give. They have to attend an orientation and check egos and bring an open mind to their group. We stress all that, but what has organically grown out of this is that we can tell when the bands have been working on this throughout the two months from the draft to the Big Show. You hear countermeasures and added instrumentation that can only be outgrowths of the added time spent rehearsing. When are 39 to 44 bands, you aren’t likely to get an earworm stuck in your head from a song you’ve never heard before. They’ve put so much more the visual presentation. There is costuming, staging and props and video elements. They take on personas within their projects. You have to come up with your band name and identity. You have to get people’s attention, and they’ve just watched 44 other bands. At first, our advice was to write your best 10 minutes of material. The songs have been there, but capturing people’s attention in a sea of unfamiliarity is hard.

Kristoff: We’ve had over 700 local musicians perform as a part of this. We don’t expect them to click. So many of us musicians can go back to when we’re teenagers and the people we make music with are usually in our comfort zone. It says about Cleveland musicians that they can take themselves out of their comfort zones.

James: People in L.A. and Buffalo have done their versions of the Lottery League. They’re not the same. There’s something special with Cleveland. I think a lot of it has to do with Jae and his reach to draw people into this challenging idea. You form bands you have interests with and not with people you don’t know. It’s such an unnatural way to put musicians together. The magic we felt immediately in 2008 was there from the beginning. We’re all in the same music scene and that’s the thread we all share, and it’s enough. It’s been wild and always gratifying. The commitment from the musicians is staggering. A friend of mine is in [the local band] Tetraviolet. They performed in 2024 and are still together. He’s come up to me and said, “This is the best band I’ve ever been in, and you have given me three best new friends.” Man, that is great. What do you say to that?

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For seven years, from 1994 to 2001, Speak in Tongues existed in a liminal space — DIY venue, art space, commune, nonstop party, and breeding ground for Cleveland creatives and musicians. That era will live again through the pages of a new book that captures the visual history of the seminal period.

John Delzoppo, the DJ and pinball champion, spent years collecting archival material with the help of those who were part of the fabric of the underground spot for Where Shit Happened: The Paper Trail to Speak in Tongues, which will be released this August by Pave the Ocean.

Through troves of hand-drawn concert posters, gig calendars, set lists, punk zines, show photography and—yes—police reports, the book is a trip in the wayback machine to a place that defined an era and left its fingerprints on the local scene for years afterward.

“I think the lifespan was a big part of why Speak in Tongues is remembered so well,” Delzoppo told Scene. “I mean, there were probably a thousand shows over seven years. So, it gave them a lot of time to make an impression on the community.”

It’s a snapshot of a moment in time when a ever-evolving amorphous group did, well, just about whatever they wanted and built a community in the process around West 43rd and Lorain, long before chic restaurants and breweries defined the west side of Ohio City.

Delzoppo’s book documents an underground space that managed to stay underground, one where local and touring bands could pull a crowded room without much fanfare.

And while there’s been work in recent years to put the history of Speak in Tongues down on paper — former Scene staff writer Eric Sandy penned an oral history for this outlet in 2016, which he later expanded into a book, and photographer Ken Blaze compiled his archive into a retrospective in 2015—Delzoppo says his aim was a more thoughtfully curated and arranged collection of primary documents.

A “reference book,” he said.

Of a wild time, even if some of the wildest were left on the cutting room floor.

Delzoppo laughed. “I didn’t want anyone, you know, having their professional career tainted by something that happened all the way back in 1996,” he said. “Maybe it’s just better to be left out of the publication.”

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When it came time to write songs for a new album, AJ & the Woods singer Alison Tomin and guitarist Joshua Alan Collins had plenty of real-life experiences that they could reference. Both have experienced significant emotional turmoil during the past few years. 

“I went through a very miserable divorce,” says Collins over beers at Suds Maguire’s Bar & Grill, a watering hole near his Berea home. Tomin, who lives in Twinsburg, has joined him for the interview. “I now have full custody of my 9-year-old daughter, and I lost my grandmother who raised me. That all transpired while we put this record together. That’s why it’s named ‘for her’ because it’s about the important women in your life.”

Tomin says the songs could also be for a woman’s younger self or for a female family member. 

“We wanted to reflect on [women and family] with the songs and the album art,” she says, adding that the album art features a photo of Collins’s daughter taken with a 1907 camera. The gatefold includes a collage of photos of family members.

For her part, Tomin channeled her feelings of frustration coming out of COVID into the songs. 

“After COVID, I was trying to build the band back up and get national attention,” she says. “I asked myself, ‘Should I keep doing this? Or should I just move to the woods and not deal with people?’ The song ‘Send Me on My Way’ is about that. I wrote the lyrics, and Josh wrote the melody for the mandolin. The songs aren’t on the album in the order we wrote them, but if you think about it, there is anger, sadness and then hopefulness. The overall theme of the record is resilience. Not everything is sad. There are happy songs and angry songs and songs that will make you dance.” 

The tunes all have a moody, Fleetwood Mac-meets-Appalachian vibe to them. Album opener “Hope” balances electric guitars, mandolin and soaring vocals, and the title track has a haunted feel to it as Tomin sings about being dragged down to hell and back. The twangy “Send Me on My Way” features a veritable choir and evokes the folk hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” 

The group recorded the album locally with producer Mike Brown at Lava Room Recording.

“We really like working with him,” says Tomin. “He’s super-professional and really good at pulling out something from you if you are not sure of what to do. If you really want something, he’ll make it work. He just wants to make the best songs for our records.” 

“And he lets you create in the studio,” says Collins, who handled some production for the record as well.

The group has already released a music video for each of the songs. 

“We wanted to do the videos more as a publicity campaign,” says Tomin. “When we started doing that, our monthly listeners on Spotify were just in the double digits. Now, we’re at almost 8,000. That fluctuates, but our streaming numbers are up. Many of the music videos were filmed on our phones. I edited them, and Josh has the artistic eye.” 

Both Baldwin Wallace College graduates, Tomin and Collins first met through a mutual friend back in 2014. When they wound up at the same open mic night at the Eastland Inn in Berea, they realized it might be fun to jam together. At the time, they were both looking for writing partners, and it just kind of worked. 

They did their first show at one of [local singer-songwriter] Brent Kirby’s 10X3 showcases. It was ’80s night, so they played two originals and a cover of the Phil Collins track “In the Air Tonight.” Eventually, they’d formally christen their band AJ & the Woods. After releasing an EP in 2017, the group put out its first full-length, Stay Steady, in 2022. 

For Her officially drops on June 5, and a free album release concert takes place the following day at Lake Affect Studios. You can RSVP at ajandthewoods.com. Local acts Lea Marra & the River Boys and Maura Rogers & the Bellows open.

“We’ll play the whole album plus three covers we’ve been working on,” says Tomin. “We always do [Johnny Cash’s] ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ and we’re working on two others we just started playing. They’re wildcards.”

The group will also perform on June 27 at the City of South Euclid Food Truck Park, on July 24 and 25 at Frosty’s in Put-In-Bay, on Aug. 7 at 8th Day Brewing Company and on Aug. 22 at Gibbs Butcher and Brews in  Olmsted Falls.

“We kept our summer schedule light, so we could be available to open for national acts,” says Tomin. “We’re also applying to play at local and regional festivals.”

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The post AJ & the Woods Explore Theme of Resilience on Latest Album appeared first on Cleveland Scene.

Sometime after 1 a.m. in Midtown, bodies pack themselves tightly into Crobar as a DJ guides the room and the crowd hums like a hive. 

As night creeps to morning, The Birds Nest awakens a few blocks away. A space transformed by sound and light, music reverberating from concrete floors and steel walls as a curated lineup of DJs feed music to people that found the space via friends of friends and word-of-mouth.

Perhaps on this night there are even more surreal moments, like a “Sunsets” pop-up at the top of the Terminal Tower where a crowd of twenty move high above the city, the skyline stretching out before them, the moment feeling weightless.

Scenes like these are becoming more common across the city as Cleveland’s dance music ecosystem flourishes – offering people a chance to disconnect from their everyday and online lives and connect to something deeper.

“People find dance music when they need it the most,” said Le Schlippy, a DJ and local radio host who says they’ve met all of their friends on the dance floor. 

After years of stagnation and pandemic isolation, the scene feels positively rejuvenated and eclectic. New venues and dance-focused events are showing up across the city at a rapid pace. The concerts and parties, found on social media or shared through apps like Partiful, are happening almost daily. Meaning there’s never been a better time to hit the floor or find a place to groove.

With all of the uncertainties and anxieties in the world right now, “people are craving that human connection,” Le Schlippy said.

***

In a dark warehouse just steps from AsiaTown, the low and melodic thumping of bass spills onto the street.

If you step inside, you’ll find Brian “Blackbird” Conti – a DJ, event production aficionado, and owner of The Birds Nest who has been in the electronic music scene since the legendary raves of the ’90s.

“What I’ve tried to do is recreate what we did back in the 1990s and 2000s, but in a safe, legal environment,” Conti said. “I’m giving people that experience again.”

The venue, which hosts electronic music artists from Ohio and beyond, sits across the street from the only large-scale record pressing facility in Ohio, a fact that may seem unimportant, but to Conti, seems fitting.

“There’s like this little hidden music pocket of Cleveland that people don’t realize it’s there.”

The Birds Nest is a part of a small but mighty wave of new dance music venues opening in what some have called Cleveland’s “House District.” The pocket Conti described has seen four electronic music spaces open in recent years, making it a one stop dance shop for Downtown Cleveland’s east side.

At the center of this growth is Crobar. 

“They have brought a revival of electronic music to Cleveland,” said Le Schlippy, who hosts ‘Over the Hump Radio’ and has become an essential guide to finding local places to dance. 

The small venue, which opened in 2022, consistently brings in “legendary” national and international acts, while also showcasing local talent, prompting leading electronic music culture platform Resident Advisor to call it, “one of the most forward thinking clubs in the Midwest.”

“Until just this past year, the only [local] venue [on Resident Advisor] was Crobar,” said Lamar Z, a DJ and event producer. Now there are many. To him, that’s an indicator that the last year has been formative.

Joey Sardelle says Crobar is the ideal home for his dance party PERF, which he says is the venue’s most attended event. The night spotlights queer, trans, and people of color DJs performing “unpretentious“ underground electronic music to any and all who want to show up.

What began as one hundred or so people attending a month has ballooned into sold-out shows and over five-hundred people at their largest event, according to Sardelle. This response also inspired him and scene veterans Disfunktional to start 10SHN_, a heavier techno event, at metal/punk bar No Class.

From the start, he says, it was clear that Crobar’s priority was as a space where care for the community and safety came first, above everything else. 

“[Safety’s] something that [the owner] and I take very seriously,” says Sardelle. “As well as our security and staff.”

“We don’t have to answer to any corporate bullshit,” he adds. “We have unlimited creative freedom.”

Sardelle’s only requirement for newcomers, besides respecting yourself, the space, and others, is participation.

“If you’re on your phone for, like, 30 minutes at the front of the dance floor, like…live in the moment, take your one video and then get your ass back on the floor!”

Navy Jayde, who began DJing in 2020, says Crobar was among the first venues to reflect a changing appetite for expanding music tastes.

“It ignited something,” she said, “that I don’t think most people were even aware Cleveland could have.” 

Her monthly Crobar party, ‘ENIGMA¿’, is centered around celebrating Blackness and cultivating Cleveland’s Black and queer electronic music culture.

“I surprise a lot of people, because I don’t think they realize how Black electronic music could be, or that it could actually have a rhythm,” she said, suggesting that broader awareness of dance music’s ties to Black culture is still developing in Cleveland.

As the scene continues to grow, inclusive and innovative spaces like Crobar are becoming central to its continued success.

“It’s not a gay bar, it’s not a white bar, it’s not a Black bar, it’s not an electronic bar, it’s not a live band bar, it’s all of that,” Navy Jayde said. “Crobar is malleable, because it’s a place that is music first.”

***

What’s happening with dance music in Cleveland isn’t necessarily unique. According to producer and DJ Sound on Tape, Cleveland is mirroring the current global appetite for electronic music.

“We’re just experiencing a resurgence of the genre altogether.” 

And he’s right. From electronic music dominating festivals, to its influences showing up in the music of pop royalty like Harry Styles, Beyonce, and Charli XCX, the genre is having another moment – the industry having grown by nearly 50% between 2019 and 2024.

But in Cleveland, Sound on Tape, who also throws events at venues like Crobar and Smoke & Mirrors, confirmed that the momentum is definitely having an impact.

“We are commanding these huge audiences, bigger audiences than I’ve ever seen before.”

The Midwest, and Cleveland, is no stranger to dance music. In the 1980s, genres like house and techno – born from working class Black, brown, and queer communities – were cultivated in Chicago and Detroit, pulsing through gritty, underground clubs. Electronic music picked up speed in the ’90s, reverberating throughout warehouses and unofficial venues across Ohio as they began to fill with people from all over the region.

“On a normal Saturday night, it was nothing to go to a show with a thousand to two thousand people,” said Brian Conti. “You had to find out through friends or word of mouth. It was a culture that we harbored and we grew.”

Efforts like the RAVE Act of ’03 sought to quell these underground events for a perceived threat to America’s youth, and Cleveland’s dance culture changed shape once again.

Dance music didn’t fully hit the mainstream until the 2010s. Acts like Calvin Harris, Skrillex, and David Guetta brought ‘EDM’ to the surface by headlining festivals and topping charts around the world. In Cleveland, venues like FWD Day + Nightclub, which opened in 2015 and was bought by partners in Ethos Hospitality Group in 2025, began popping up to feed Cleveland’s appetite for the evolving genre. 

During the pandemic, the city’s DJ population skyrocketed. For those who felt less inclined to stay isolated during lockdown, dance music events found their way back to the city’s warehouses, picking up a new audience on its way.

Lamar Z, who runs event brand “Don’t Funk the Groove,” said it was during this time that he was first turned on to electronic music.

“I think that it started from COVID…people had to throw pop-up events and these underground parties in warehouses,” he explains. “Especially in Cleveland, because we weren’t doing much like that at all. But then… it was happening every weekend.”

Today, it’s apparent that electronic music has always had an audience here and what’s changed is its reach. Catapulted by technology and experimentation, this expansion has brought new people to the region’s dance floors.

***

On the city’s west side, Sam McNulty is bringing electronic music to Ohio City with two dance venues — Smoke & Mirrors and Bird of Paradise — that are, quite literally, underground.

“I’ve always been a big fan of subterranean dance clubs,” said McNulty, who owns Market Garden Brewery and a bevy of other hospitality businesses in the area. “It just feels kind of celebratory and apropos to end your night in a subterranean dance club.” 

McNulty is leaning into more intimate dance and house music experiences, with both clubs, which opened between 2022 and 2023, intending to fill a void left by larger nightlife spots in the city. Their success is evident by lines out the door on any given Saturday or Sunday.

For promoters like Matt Ambrose, who runs events brand Mainstage Cleveland, having a space like Smoke & Mirrors that understands their vision, and gives them the freedom to execute, is an exciting change.

“I’m really optimistic for the scene…excited for Cleveland venues that didn’t traditionally buy into this kind of scene to do so,” he said. “I have their trust. They have mine. It’s gonna give people that are new or are interested a chance to experience that.”

And those experiences are going beyond venues. Dance music’s explosion has inspired people to create their own unique pop-up experiences across the city, dodging the barriers of opening a brick-and-mortar spot.

“There’s a community and subgenre for everyone, which is a great part of dance music,” says Ambrose. “Those new subgenres are really carving out their own community space between DJs and also the attendees.”

One pop-up in particular, Happy Endings, has become a staple of Cleveland nightlife.

Started by popular DJs NicNacc, Eso and Theo at Cent’s Pizza, the event gives them a place to play the music they enjoyed, NicNacc said, at a time when other venues wouldn’t welcome their style.

“People were just craving that comfort of being able to go out and actually dance and feel comfortable doing that,” she said, noting that traditional clubs may make people feel like they need VIP status to belong. “Here, the whole room is VIP!”

Theo, a producer, label owner, and all-around music aficionado, is now part of the duo SmoothTalk. He loves that the pop-up is bringing a different sound.

“You’re not gonna go to Happy Endings and hear a bunch of top 40 stuff,” he said. “Especially when they have the freedom to play whatever.”

Other parties like güdtaste bring a “roaming, culture first music experience” to the city. Recent shows included the takeover of the Market Garden warehouse, a hair salon, and art space Mini Box Studio – all replayable through impressively produced social media content.

“I just really want to bring people together to dance,” said Just AJ, DJ and creator of güdtaste. “That’s the main objective of it. It’s not a profit thing. It really is a community-driven thing.” 

Then there’s Sunsets, whose sets range from that party on Terminal Tower to brunch-time DJ sets in coffee shops, proving that electronic music doesn’t always have to be enjoyed in a certain way or at a certain time.

With the pair’s “güdsets” collaboration for 216 Day amassing over 700 RSVPs, Bobby Booshay, DJ and co-creator of Sunsets, said that he feels like the city is building something big.

But a quickly changing culture isn’t without its challenges. Americans are spending more time alone. So much so that the U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness an “urgent public health issue” in 2023. 

Simultaneously, habits like throwing and attending parties and drinking have declined immensely, especially among young people. This, along with skyrocketing costs for venues and party-goers is being blamed by some for the death of nightlife.

Cleveland is not immune to these struggles, judging by closures of popular nightlife spots in The Flats last year. 

The downturn has inspired staple clubs like The IVY to lean into electronic music, among other genres, and hosting dance-forward events like Happy Endings.

But Navy Jayde says nightlife is shifting, rather than dying, and that people only know what they’ve been exposed to. Venues with rude bouncers, VIP sections, and the same DJ for the past five years playing the same fifty songs – in her opinion, that is the nightlife that is fading.

“If people would take a moment to try listening to something else,” she said, “or go somewhere where it’s not about the profit, you may get a different experience.”

Joey Sardelle echoes these sentiments, saying a lot of people in the scene don’t want to pay for high door prices and overpriced drinks.

Some say other groups are just an extension of traditional clubs, promoting “rave” experiences to keep up with the trend, but critics feel that the inauthenticity shines through.

“It’s not supposed to be like this $75 a ticket… experience,” said Lamar Z. “It was always meant to be something that was affordable and open to everybody in all different walks of life.”

DJ Bobby Booshay said the community needs to work together and hold one-another accountable. 

“If we’re all doing the right thing, and we’re all going about it and with the best intentions, we all grow, it only creates a bigger thing for all of us,” he said. “Rising tides lift all ships.”

As with any fast-changing culture, the sustainability of Cleveland’s dance music scene will depend on the resiliency of the people, places, and community that fuels it.

“You have to let go of the ego,” said Le Schlippy. “Because at the end of the day it’s not about who has the best parties. It’s about the community… We’re either all in this together or we’re not. And if we’re not… it’s gonna fall apart. It’s gonna crumble.” 

***

Despite growing pains, the joy and connection are far more important, no matter what exactly you’re looking for, those who spoke to Scene said.

For Lani Smith, co-organizer of the queer/woman focused party Sapphic Soiree, “Dancing is just fun!”

For some it’s about presence in your body and in the community.

“Getting people out to move, getting out in the community, in a space that you wouldn’t otherwise find yourself,” says Mary Beth Marks about a recent “earlybird” dance party thrown by her and Heather Frutig at the Morgan Conservatory.

“We had a social work instructor, she said, ‘I worked all day teaching at Case, I have to go back and teach all day tomorrow, and I saw the sign, and I thought, that’s what I want to do with my body at the end of the day.’”

For others, it is a way of life. “[Music] makes me feel grateful, ” said Theo. “It’s a very, very good feeling that kind of makes you feel like you’re not alone.”

For most, it is a much-needed refuge. 

“We’re kind of like the USO shows,” said Matthew Blevins, one half of goth dance party Dark Wave Dance Cave. “You know, people come in and get relief and then they can go back to the trenches.” 

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Local singer-songwriter Lea Marra started out on piano when she was 7. When that didn’t take, she switched to guitar and was on her way to what would become a career as an independent musician and music teacher. She was only 10.

“My dad showed me a few chords, and I made a song out of it,” says Marra over coffee once recent morning at Metropolitan in Old Brooklyn. She plays a release party to celebrate her latest album, Raccoon County, on Friday, May 29, at the Beachland Tavern. Local singer-songwriter Cory Grinder opens. “It just happened. Piano enable me to read notes, but it wasn’t that appealing to me.”

At the time, she listened to what she calls “a vast array” of music. Her parents introduced her to ’50s and ’60s music. She also loved pop-punk star Avril Lavigne and old school country singers such as Dwight Yoakam and Randy Travis.

“I really liked Avril, and I was trying to get into that, but what came out wasn’t too much that,” says Marra. “Eventually, my brother showed me [indie rockers] Paramore, and I was hooked, and then, the emo phase came in.”

After circulating on the open mic circuit, Marra formed the indie pop act the Tom Katlees. Cardinal High School in Middlefield held a music event, and the band played its first public show. It would go on to release its debut in 2013 and would follow it up with another release in 2018. In 2019, it would splinter, and Marra would form Lea Marra and the Dreamcatchers.

“People said we were alt-pop country,” she says of the Dreamcatchers. “It had seven people in the beginning because I wanted to try the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes thing.”

She changed the band lineup and rebranded it as Lea Marra and the Riverboys in 2023.

“I changed lineup to four people and turned into a string band,” she explains. “It went from alt-country pop to more of a heavily bluegrass-influenced band.”

Marra and the Riverboys released their debut, Ace of Cups, in 2024.

“It was cool,” Marra says when asked about the release. “We worked with [Bay Village’s] Plastic Dino Records. It was a fun experience. It got the job done. As soon the Dreamcatchers were done, I needed new music. I thought that people needed to listen to how it’s different.”

The group added a fiddle player in 2025, and Marra began writing the songs that would fit the new lineup, which includes banjo player Chase Franklin, bassist Spencer Paul, mandolin player Joe Haugh and fiddle player Forrest Britt.

“I started writing some stuff about a year ago,” she says. “I collected the songs to see what fits.”

Local singer-songwriter David Mayfield heard the band play last October at a benefit show at Beachland for victims of North Carolina’s flood and said he wanted to record their next album at his home studio in Akron. Marra agreed that it was a good idea.

“David is a known bluegrass guy on the scene,” she says, adding that the group cut the music tracks live at his studio and added vocals later. “The album is more of the grassy genre. The title track is a folky ballad that focuses on storytelling. The rest are storytelling songs, but they have the grassy energy. I write about life and encounters. I was reflecting about the past. I just write about life, honestly, but I was reflecting on the past. I thought it would be cool to tie it in with everything, even though some of the songs are not about my time there. Each musician has an animal. The boys wanted the artwork to be a map, so I made it a map of Raccoon County. Mark Graibus did the artwork, and he did a poster too. It features the band members as animals in a canoe.”

With its haunted vocals, the title track is just one of many highlights on the album. Bluegrass-inflected tunes such as “Virgo Moon” and “Dimes & Pennies” come off as traditional ballads.

For the upcoming release party, the group will play the album, which will be available on both vinyl and CD, in its entirety. It will also debut a new music video animated by local artist Sally Francis. The animation will screen when the group plays the tune.

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Last month, local singer-songwriter Corry Michaels had a “viral moment” with Swedish singer-songwriter Zara Larsson when she performed at the Agora. He danced and sang along with her on-stage, and posts with Michaels across social media generated some two million views.

“It was crazy,” he says via phone. He performs at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 17 at the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights as part of a national tour that even includes a West Coast stop in San Diego. “Zara, who is having a moment, selects one person from the audience to come up and dance with her.”

Michaels positioned himself in front of the stage, so he had a chance that Larsson would pick him.

“Out of the 3,000 people at the Agora, she picked me,” Michaels says. “It was serendipitous. I waited in line since 11 a.m. and dressed the part. I saw her last year with [singer-songwriter] Tate McRae at Rocket Arena and loved her performance. I performed at the Agora the year prior with a burlesque event. I went early and did what I needed to do and got picked. It’s been such a whirlwind since then. It’s connected me with people all over the world.”

Adopted when he was 8 years old, Michaels wound up with a family that pushed him to pursue his musical ambitions. He took piano lessons at 8 and started writing songs when he was only 10.

“I don’t want to say I was spoiled,” he says. “My mom wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but somehow she always found a way for me to do whatever my heart craved. I was in my bedroom writing songs on notebook paper and then writing tracklists and drawing album covers in pencil and putting them in a binder. My intention was to write songs.”

In 2013, Michaels started releasing music and posting music videos on YouTube.

“That allowed me the time to develop,” he says. “I became Corry Michaels in 2016, and COVID was a moment for me. I received so much love and could do a lot of things and connect with my audience with televised performances. If I didn’t do those things in COVID, my resume wouldn’t be what it was. In 2022, I did my best to perform in front of anyone and everyone. I really wanted to perform and started applying for Pride festivals and connected with Sofar sounds.”

Since 2022, he has gone on regional tours that took him to places such as New Hampshire, where he performed for a Pride festival and had the coveted closing slot.

He’s also taken to singing the National Anthem at sporting events and will sing at a Columbus Crew game this summer.

And he’s constantly writing. The upcoming Grog Shop show will give him the chance to debut new material.

“I’m going to play a lot of new stuff,” he says, adding that he’s currently working with a vocal coach and dance coach. “I’m really excited about that show. I’m excited to have that Cleveland moment and I want to make sure the Grog Shop show is a lit show. At this point, it’s a national effort. I always want to make sure that I gave my heart and attention to my hometown show. I love how Machine Gun Kelly does that and makes sure he does Cleveland right. I’m going to give my all at that show. I’m so inspired right now.”

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Kiss Me Deadly singer Jen Poland has drawn a timeline to show all the different musicians who’ve performed with her group over the past 15 or so years. But despite the rotating cast, Kiss Me Deadly has steadily played gigs and released new music over the course of that time

With a stable lineup now in place, the group has caught a serious second wind. Next month, it’ll release its latest album, Ship of Theseus, on vinyl. It’ll celebrate the release with a show on Saturday, April 25, at Brothers Lounge.

“I had started writing the songs through COVID, and then, John Scully became our full-time drummer, and as soon as that happened, our songs started to lock in,” says Poland recently over coffee at the Metropolitan, one of her favorite local coffee shops. “But then, I broke my hand, and I had to get an extra guitar player, and that’s how we ended up with Chris Frohring.”

She took that lineup down to Ohio University, where she teaches in the music production program, and recorded Ship of Theseus at the state-of-the-art studios located on campus.

“I engineered the album, and I’ve been mixing it,” she says. “It’s just now finally coming out on vinyl via [Cleveland’s] Gotta Groove. I had [Cleveland’s] Chris Keffer, who mastered our first album, master it for vinyl and digital. It’s a total expression of all my artistry.”

Poland also wrote and directed the music video for the single “Biosphere,” a breezy, ska-inspired number that came out of a songwriting session hosted by local singer-songwriter Brent Kirby.

“Making the music video was very challenging,” she says. “My saxophone player, Matt King, and I put all the work into it and Emerson Santuomo was my co-director. We ran multiple cameras through the whole set. It was in this abandoned observatory on the East side of Cleveland. It’s cool because it has all this graffiti all over the walls. I wanted the art of local artists in the video. We spray-painted ourselves to blend in, and I wanted this visual, colorful look at human art.”

As a child, Poland listened to the radio like any other kid growing up in Northeast Ohio. But music runs in her family, and she quickly began writing her own tunes while still in elementary school.

“My mom and uncles were folk singer-songwriters,” she says. “I had a guitar when I was a kid and because of them, I just thought I could write my own songs. When I was an adolescent, I loved hip-hop and rap. My first songs were bad because I was playing my guitar and rapping over it. It didn’t mix well. I had to find my sound. I finally found more of an indie rock vibe.”

She went on to front a band when she was at Kent in college and then taught herself to play electronic mandolin; she joined another band before setting out on her own with the Poland Invasion in 2008, a group that would morph into Kiss Me Deadly, which played its first show in 2009 at Around the Corner in Lakewood. That group featured local bassist-singer Evan Lieberman.

“My group has gone through all kinds of iterations,” she says, adding that “ship of Theseus,” a reference to the thought experiment about whether an object is the same after having all of its original components replaced, seemed like the perfect title for an album. “That’s why I called the album Ship of Theseus because it’s always been me and it’s always been my songs even though the other musicians have changed. Even though I’ve had different players and musicians, it’s still the original. I’ve also changed and gotten better and grown.”

While mixing Ship of Theseus, the group connected with Jim Ellis, who’s supported the Cleveland music scene for years as a journalist. He was interested in putting out new Kiss Me Deadly tunes on his CLE Records and will release a new Kiss Deadly album later this year (a CLE Records showcase takes place on June 27 at Brothers Lounge).

For the upcoming release party at Brothers Lounge, the group will play Ship of Theseus in its entirety.

“It’s just us that night,” says Poland. “After we play the entire record, we’ll play some other stuff, including songs from the next record just to tease people with what is coming out next.”

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