“I love being on the road, and I feel like the fact that I get to go on tour with so many bands and friends of mine at the same time is just the most exciting thing. I feel so lucky to get to do that,” says Sands in a recent Zoom interview.
Sands is co-headlining the tour alongside Taylor Acorn and Rain City Drive. Arrows in Action, BEAUTY SCHOOL DROPOUT, If Not for Me and special guest, Huddy round out the bill.
Eric Tobin of Hopeless Records, Michael Kaminsky of KMGMT and Vans Warped Tour co-founder Kevin Lyman co-founded the tour with an altruistic vision.
“They’re trying to find a way for fans to be able to see more bands, more artists, and also be able to afford the ticket prices. And I think that’s the thing that’s so wonderful about having a bill with so many artists on it. Especially with this tour, because their whole priority has been to make it affordable for everybody involved, the audience as well as the artists,” says Sands.
The singer-songwriter has remained an independent artist her entire career, committed to retaining creative control of the full experience she curates for fans.
Sands is particularly excited to tour with Acorn, with whom she became friends after lending her vocal to last year’s single, “Final Nail,” which Acorn had written with some co-writers and sent to Sands.
The two artists were never in the same room during the recording and production process, but later realized how much they had in common, visiting a farm together after bonding over growing up horse-back riding.
“I was always just like her fan, in the wings, and I’m so honored that she wanted me to be a part of it,” says Sands. “I love her so much. I’m just so excited to watch her and be like a ‘momager’ every night in the pit, taking videos of her and cheering her on, cause she’s genuinely the sweetest, most wonderful, humble queen. We are so similar in the way we tour and are already coming up with craft ideas.”
It wasn’t always so easy for Sands to make friends, however.
“That feeling of being left out, is genuinely what made me want to start building a community and start making music. So, I think ‘on the outside’ is such a good reflection of that feeling and that experience, throughout my life,” Sands says of the track with Point North on her 2024 debut album, can we start over?
The song is one of Sands’s favorites to perform live, since it falls easily into her range, sonically, so she can enjoy herself while performing it, yet the track is constructed in a way that still feels “massive” to her.
“It’s like standing on the outside of a house and watching all these people have all these experiences that you’re not able to have or you’re not invited. And I think that was such a common thread of my life, growing up and being a teenager,” shares Sands.
But the Boston-native found a sharp sense of belonging, simultaneously.
“I started going to shows and seeing that all these people that have felt left out in their own lives were able to create these lives together and this community,” says Sands. “Music would bring all those people together, and they didn’t feel alone anymore. I remember going to all these shows, and being like, ‘Oh, I wanna do that.’”
Sands grew up in a musical household. Music was a big part of both her parents’ lives, and a staple of her childhood. Her dad was perpetually playing guitar and built makeshift studios in the closets of her childhood homes.
“I think I wrote my first song when I was like nine years old and learned how to record it. And I think I still have it, which is hilarious,” she recalls. “It was always such a normal part of my life, and I never thought that that was strange and different than other people’s childhoods.”
She enjoyed being able to portray characters in musicals that began as under dogs, but came out on top, prophetically relating to them. Stage fright was never in her wheelhouse.
“From the jump, I always wanted to be onstage,” says Sands. “I’m also just a Leo and have always loved attention.”
Sands, who says she feels most herself while onstage, credits her family’s good music taste as inspiration. She was raised on strong female songwriters like Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and Alison Krauss.
“All these incredible songwriters and women that all had these similar stories of being kind of undervalued in the industry, and then were some of the best musicians, and best songwriters, and finally getting their flowers and their accolades, but it took them so long,” explains Sands. “I think I just related so much to their music and their words and really wanted to be able to express myself in that same way.”
Another standout track on can we start over? was born from that feeling of not being chosen.
“Honestly, that might be my favorite, as well,” Sands replies in response to praise of the emotionally turbulent, sonically intense ballad “blindspot.”
Sands and her collaborators poured over each line of the song, careful to ensure it was true to her exact experience at the time.
“I really wanted that song to feel like going through that experience of like, you are watching the person that you love fall in love with somebody else. Or like, you’re the friend on the outside,” says Sands. “I wanted it to be relatable to people who are almost watching their friends grow out of them, watching the people they love grow out of them.”
Sands was also set on matching the complete story the lyrics were telling with the frantic sound of the song, building with each verse.
“It’s such a specific feeling, and I really wanted the song to also feel like the anxiety of that. The growing feelings — having the song grow with those emotions as well. And that’s why the end just kind of keeps going,” explains Sands. “Then, we ended up bringing back all the melodies from the beginning of the song in the verse and the pre-choruses and bringing them back into the bridge section. So that, it’s almost like your brain in that feeling of when you’re anxiety spiraling.”
Sands shares that the album came together quickly, once she got into studio sessions with her primary collaborators like co-writer Jutes and producer Keith Sorrells.
“The funny thing with the debut album is, within the first five days, we wrote the first five songs,” says Sands.
The singer-songwriter began releasing her lengthy catalogue of singles and EPs in 2018. Her breakthrough single, “Dress,” was released in December 2020. The song was a quick, clever response she wrote to conservatives referring to the Vogue cover of Harry Styles wearing a dress, announced the month prior, as the death of masculinity.
From there, she kept building her audience, which now stands strong at 140k followers on Instagram and nearly 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Sands had been strategically waiting until she had generated enough devoted fans for a full-length LP to thrive, but had also been waiting her whole career for a gut feeling to tell her it was time to put together a cohesive album.
“That was, for me, the most important thing,” says Sands. “I didn’t want to just have all these random songs that I felt like were telling these different stories. And then, all of a sudden, I was in this environment that we were writing all this music at the same time, about these similar experiences, and just about where I was in my life.”
Sands looks back on the making of can we start over? fondly, a year-and-a-half after its release.
“It just was so easy and fun, and I’m really proud of that album. I still listen to it all the time,” says Sands. “That’s all I could ever hope about anything I do is just to be able to look back and appreciate it still.”
But the catchiest song on the album, which quickly became the fan favorite, out streaming the rest of the tracks by a large margin, “spite,” was written well before Sands had started the process of assembling can we start over?
“I always write a song that I feel like is way too pop or would be a really good pitch song, or I’m like, ‘Oh, lyrically, I don’t know if that’s right for me.’ And I always end up coming back to those specific songs,” says Sands, mentioning that she had a similar experience with her new single, “HUSH.”
Setting the scene, Sands remembers that producer Danen Reed Rector was playing her a track that she really loved. There was a fly in the room, distracting them, as they were working on melodies, which led her to the opening line, “If I was a fly on the wall of your life,/I’d be so bored I would pray every day I could die.”
Sands explains that sometimes she has to remind herself that not everything she writes has to carry the depth of something that feels like it’s never been said before; it’s also her responsibility to help people have fun and escape from their realities.
She had the word spite written down and had been wanting to write a song by that title.
“I’ve always felt like my motivation for most of my career and in my life was people’s negativity,” confesses Sands. “It’s like the resistance. I’m motivated when people are like, ‘You can’t do that.’ And I’m like, ‘Watch me.’ That was such a theme throughout my life and my music.”
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This article appears in Cleveland SCENE 06/19/25 Burger Week.