Photo courtesy of Doomtree Records
Allie McIntosh
Allie McInstosh
Welcome to 2021, the year we finally move forward again. The only question now is, how? We interviewed some key Twin Cities stakeholders, community voices, and leaders who will be central to what happens–or doesn't–in the year to come.
Last year was its own sort of ruthless for teenagers, whom it kept in a weird purgatory. Take 14-year-old Allie McIntosh, a singer-songwriter with a classically trained voice and savant-like ability on both the viola and the piano. She’s only halfway through her sophomore year at Breck, but she’s already getting noticed, and with just a little more stage time in front of live audiences, she could be well on her way to becoming Minnesota’s Alicia Keys or Taylor Swift. Instead, she spent most of what was sure to be her breakout year stuck at home with her parents in Eden Prairie. She claims she made the best of it—but what else are you going to admit in one of your first interviews?
“I’d go out more usually,” she says. “But I stayed at home and did some of my favorite things, like writing music.”
She even got accepted to the prestigious Steinhardt program at New York University for songwriters 15 and up this year. And went! Sort of.
“I lied about my age,” she confesses. “Only 42 people in the whole world got accepted, and it was a two-week camp, and it was a lot of fun.”
But wasn’t it on Zoom, I ask, and weren’t you supposed to have gone to NYC, if not for COVID? “Yeah, we were going to go see a bunch of performances,” she says. “And staying in the dorms would’ve been really cool.”
Before I bum her out too much, I ask her about her debut EP, Purgatory Rd, which she was able to record in person at the Hideaway Studios in Northeast.
“It’s named after the road I grew up on,” she says. “Why not?”
She wrote and produced all the songs by herself. She wrote the lead single, “Someday When I Go”—which includes dark lyrics like “Someday when I go, you’ll be free and happy”—as a seventh grader confronting her own despair over being bullied at school.
“That was my seventh-grade self talking,” she says. “After that, I learned to not really care about what people think about me so much.”
So somehow, even in the middle of a pandemic, things are looking up for Allie McIntosh.
“I just looked inside,” she says. “It’s all about self-love and self-confidence—knowing who you are and loving yourself first before anybody else. Not that you have to be selfish all the time, but it’s OK to look inward.”
This article originally appeared in the January 2021 issue.
