Frida, the woman who fronts Cleveland indie rockers Frida and the Mann, says a personal crisis made her turn to singing and performing.
“I picked up a guitar and just started teaching myself chords and singing one day because my life depended on it, and it was my only outlet and the only thing saving me from myself,” she says one recent morning over coffee at Van Aken.
The group will release a new single, “Dancing in the Sun,” on Friday, Sept. 26. It also performs that same day at Cebar’s Euclid Tavern with Apostle Jones and Quentin Rubin. “I used to sit in Sam Ash on Mayfield Road in the guitar room and wait for musicians to come in. I just needed to be around musicians.”
The band formed in 2023 after Frida jammed with her neighbor on a whim one day.
“He asked if he could bring his guitarist friend and if he could find a drummer,” she says. “I have no idea how bands are formed. They started talking about what we were going to call the band. I said, ‘Are we in a band?’ They said, ‘Yeah, Frida, we’re in a band.’ They’ve all been in bands before their whole lives.”
After getting some local gigs under its belt, the group recently began recording at Lava Room and will release six singles over the next six months.
Frida says she loves music from all genres, and the forthcoming songs will reflect that.
“Right now, I love Bleachers, Nina Simone, Natalie Imbruglia, Tracy Chapman and Jewel,” she says, singing “I Put a Spell On You” to show her appreciation for Simone. “In my band, we have one punker and atmospheric guy and all these different genres. I’m more blues-based. When people say our sound is a little bit different, it’s because we have all these different interests.”
The group has released a live version of a Pretenders-like song that it played during a show at the Rialto Theatre in Akron, and Frida chronicles a good friend’s recent struggles in the new single, “Dancing in the Sun,” that comes out next week.
“’Dancing in the Sun’ is about disassociation,” Frida says. “It’s about fantasizing. ‘Daydreaming is my cocaine’ is one of the lyrics. It’s the addiction of living in your head in a different world when being here is too hard. It’s inspired by a friend of mine who was being sexually violated by her partner. She would say to me, ‘It’s okay, Frida. I just got somewhere else.’ That chorus is she’s dancing. But she’s in this situation.”
While Frida says she had a terrible case of stage fright during one of her first performances, she now loves the stage.
“Playing with my band feels amazing,” she says. “The stage is the only place I want to be. It’s the most comfortable place for me. Performing is my favorite part of being in a band.”
Coming up, the group will release another single, “Let’s Get Carried Away,” at the end of October, and play a Halloween show. And Frida will continue to work both on Frida and the Mann tunes and on her solo material.
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