It is never too late to find a musical career. Despite the rapid proliferation of barely legal bands and musicians storming performance venues and record charts, for many artists, developing a musical voice takes years of false starts, misdirection and frustration.
Consider the career of Ellen Bunch from local band Coins, who first took up piano as a child. Piano always pulled at Bunch, who grew up in a musical household. Her father, a multi-instrumentalist who played the trombone, tuba and baritone, encouraged Bunch and her two brothers to play as children. Even though Bunch was more enthusiastic about music than her siblings, most kids don’t pursue an instrument past late adolescence, and Bunch was no exception, giving up her passion after high school because she was had not mastered other musical instruments, part of her efforts to pursue music performance as an undergrad. Discouraged by her prospects, she instead attended art school at the University of Texas at Austin and studied photography.
For the next few years after graduating college, Bunch floated between pursuits. She moved to New York, then back to Austin before finally settling in Chicago in 2002.
Did she want to maintain her photography work? “It was one of those things where things don’t provide enough fulfillment,” she said. For Bunch, the decision was a relatively easy one: Follow the things you love and worry about the rest later.
For Bunch, the piano beckoned as a freeing, emotionally rewarding challenge, and returning to it as an adult more than eight years after she quit was more than just tinkering with her passions. She first began practicing at a church in the Logan Square neighborhood. “They were fine with it because no one was using it,” Bunch began. “It was just one of those things. You never forget to play.” And now her evenings are filled with piano lessons for people across the city, as her childhood love has become her career.
Outside of her livelihood, Bunch’s dedication to the instrument fueled her investigation of more creative musical outlets. After playing in a handful of local bands, Bunch joined guitarist Angela Mullenhour and created Coins seven years ago.
“Coins just happened hodgepodgey,” Bunch jokes. The two met in Chicago, eventually collaborating on a cover of “I Gotta Move” by The Kinks.
“It’s pretty much like a melding of two brains for Coins. It’s different than what I’ve had,” Bunch says. “We’ve just kept on playing together ever since.”
The project offered a number of new opportunities. For one, they had the chance to create music on their own terms. “We don’t come to practice with very many predisposed ideas,” said Bunch. After acting as primary songwriters for previous bands, Bunch and Mullenhour were able to come together and collaborate.
The duo’s new songwriting process, more organic than structured, allows them to build songs during weekly rehearsals. “With Coins, it just all happens at once,” Bunch said. “If it doesn’t happen when we’re practicing together, it probably won’t happen on its own.”
And just because a song didn’t work initially does not mean it can’t work in the future. “I feel like everything we’ve started that way has eventually become a song,” Bunch said. She and Mullenhour often come back to songs they had once forgotten, finding the right ending or tweaks after working on other tracks. “We come back to it and eventually, we’ll say, oh, remember that thing we were talking about?”
The end results of their collaboration is a haunting, eerie, difficult-to-place aesthetic that sounds unlike anything else coming out of Chicago. Many of the duo’s personal concerns, from the environment to global strife, come out in the lyrics, adding a heaviness and sense of forthright desire for change that feels like music from a different decade, one when songs of protest and lyrical vulnerability were the standard and not outliers. It’s a good relic though, one largely absent from the current musical landscape. Maybe that’s because music is so frequently made by young minds without a lot to say. For Bunch and Mullenhour, who’ve been through numerous curves along the road to their music, inspiration stems from the good, bad and complicated parts of life itself.
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When: 9 p.m. Friday
Where: Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western Ave.
Tickets: $10 ( 21+); 866-777-8932 or emptybottle.com
