Somerville’s Sidebody has grown from a garage rock gag into a major festival act that will represent the Somerville scene on Boston Calling’s Orange stage this May. As the band prepares its festival set, members must reconcile their experimental and humorous ethos with the demands of a major stage. Because much like the band itself, the pursuit to play Boston Calling began as a joke.
“Oh, Boston Calling has been a long time coming,” Sidebody lead singer and synth player, Hava Horowitz said in an interview Tuesday. “I found the Boston Calling talent buyer’s LinkedIn and asked to be considered way back in 2020.”
It’s a familiar tale. Boston’s largest music festival receives countless emails from artists and agents sharing press kits, ticket sales, streaming statistics, and reviews. The road to playing a festival of this caliber is long for any act.
But in 2020, when Horowitz sent her first email to festival organizers, Sidebody had just formed. “We were also still learning our instruments,” Horowitz said with a sly smile.
But the band had already mastered a contagious form of creative freedom. Experimental to its core, Sidebody created an entity, space, and platform for four friends to learn, explore, and joke without the guardrails (or tensions) of a typical band.
Former high school classmates Hava Horowitz, Martha Schnee, and Lena Warnke formed Sidebody in 2020. Lead guitar player, Cara Giaimo, joined shortly before the band’s first show after the pandemic.
The band’s creative process and live shows center experimentation, humor, and curiosity. Members sometimes write songs on stage, switch instruments in an exercise they call “beginner's mind” to avoid muscle memory limiting creative exploration, and sing or find alternative noises when instruments can’t quite translate their ideas. And to no surprise, the band tends to steer clear of conventional song structures and textures.
Every Sidebody show has a theme, too. Past show themes include the MBTA (featuring an MBTA announcer as an emcee), Red Sox Reverse the Curse, Back to Office, Magic (featuring an actual magician), and a Halloween show featuring a psychic who “read the energy of the crowd,” explained Horowitz, over laughter from other bandmates.
The 2024 album full time job provides a range of tunes and textures from the quirky synth pop and absurdist lyrics of “quantumly entangled” to the gentle folk confessions of “not dead (in natick).” There’s a bit of art-punk in the vocals, Wire in the guitars, Yo La Tengo in the harmonies, and wherever LCD Soundsystem can meet Beastie Boys on the art-pop synths. It’s massively entertaining, mind-opening, and chiefly fun.
Based in Somerville, the band has become a staple of the local scene, drawing hundreds to their PorchFest sets, opening for major local and touring acts, and headlining a host of local venues.
All of this made it into annual emails Horowitz sent to Boston Calling talent buyer, Peter Boyd, as the band grew its local following and dialed its sound.
“I made an annual Google Calendar reminder: annoy the Boston Calling promoter,” Horowitz said. “We’d send Peter updates like we headlined the reopening of the Cantab Lounge or drew 300 people at PorchFest. And he was surprisingly responsive and supportive!”
Over time, the emails evolved from a tongue-in-cheek introduction to sincere casemaking for a festival slot. Meanwhile, local press was catching onto the band’s success. Sidebody was on the cover page of The Boston Globe’s PorchFest photo gallery; Cambridge Day reviewed the band’s 2024 release show; Boston Hassle wanted a profile; and local PopMatters writer Chris Ingalls shouted out the band after discovering them live.
When Sidebody had its first big break, an opening spot for Maggie Rogers at the Paradise Rock Club, Boston Calling talent buyer Peter Boyd was in the audience. After the show, he asked to speak with the band regarding their Memorial Day Weekend availability. It was an invite to play Boston Calling. The band was stunned.
“I don’t think any of us consider ourselves formally trained in music,” Giaimo said. “We tend to focus on other things, rather than precision, or the perfect guitar riff, or other considerations you might associate with a big time musical act,” she said laughing. “But we really wanted to be that act for this show,” Giaimo said. “So we practiced really hard, locked it in, and tried to put on a good show.”
It was a major inflection point, not only for the band’s success, but their performance philosophy: how to incorporate creative freedom, humor, and spontaneity into their live show, without compromising on quality and tightness.
“We’re at a point where we’re trying to balance the fact that this started as a joke with all the opportunities we’re getting and the potential impact on people. That tension keeps us honest and helps us stay present, as opposed to getting ahead of ourselves,” Giaimo said.
“Levity is a big part of how we interact and function as a group,” Warnke added.
One would assume an invite to play Boston Calling would feel equally exciting and daunting to a band. But Sidebody has found a way to harness its light-spiritedness, treating practice as a means to preserve creative freedom on stage, rather than kill it.
Horowitz compared it to a Mark Twain quote: “You won’t believe how much rehearsal it took to feel this unrehearsed.”
“In order to feel free and connected on stage, you need to feel rehearsed,” Horowitz explained.
Since the band received the festival invite, they’ve spent hours reflecting on how to translate crowd energy, performance art, and music into a show that will resonate with their audience.
“The best part of any artistic experience for me is feeling present and inside of life with people,” Schnee said. “Larger audiences with energy we can respond to is new in the last year for us. It’s such a special feeling that we’re trying to think about holistically: how to portray ourselves, who our audience is, and how we’re going to make this a really fun and present experience.”
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