Some girls just wanna have fun, and some just wanna rip off their first communion dress, sit naked in the backseat of the family car and throw a tantrum.

 

This was a young Connor Zwetsch, a forever tomboy who hated dresses and anything girly in her small suburban town of Lutz, Florida just outside of Tampa. The twenty-eight-year-old singer-songwriter explains how that adorable first communion photo on her new album cover for Girls of My Youth reminds her of crying the entire day and how it’s emblematic of the first moment fighting who she was and who she wanted to be.

 

Back in 2015, Connor released her debut EP “What Comes After”, with the lead single “Candy Bars” receiving heavy rotation at SiriusXM’s The Coffee House and garnering millions of streams across DSP’s. “What Comes After” was somewhat fortuitous as Connor had sent out a cold email to Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling producer Ryan Hadlock (The Lumineers, Brandi Carlile, Vance Joy). Hadlock was on Zwetsch’s dream list of producers to work with, and after exchanging a few emails, Hadlock found a single week he had available in his schedule for the year, and agreed to record “What Comes After” at his legendary Bear Creek Studio in Washington, the site of The Lumineers’ self-titled debut.

 

Connor is on the cusp of a musical breakthrough and she’s about to save music the same way it saved her on more than one occasion. She grew up loving music and playing sports, and had she never picked up a guitar, she could have gone on to play professional soccer.

 

Music was always something that she so effortlessly crawled back to, despite what was going on in her life with family, adolescence, relationships or being a sensitive and artistic soul. Her voice and music is ushering in a refreshing take on 90s-tinged pop-rock that has been missing from the musical soundscape for a while. There’s an irreverence in her voice like that of Pink, perspective from a modern rocker like Alanis Morissette and warm guitar-led melodies reminiscent of bands like Goo Goo Dolls, R.E.M. and Matchbox Twenty.

 

But comparisons aside, Connor Zwetsch’s story is one of overcoming adversity and rejecting what others expect you to be. She came out to her family at sixteen and felt misunderstood and ashamed. The chaos that arose during that period of her life sparked the creation of songs like “Apollo” and “Take Me Back”, both about discovering and fighting with oneself to figure out what is right and what is wrong. Connor was a bit of a loner, but she channeled this alone time into writing songs. Music was her medicine, her therapy.

 

“I became a really bad student, I never went to school”, says Connor. “It was a joke when people would see me there. I fell away and started to play music and started failing in school and disconnecting from soccer. All I wanted to do was play music”.

 

It all started when Connor was young, she became hooked on lyrics and would sit in front of her boombox memorizing the words to her favorite songs. Growing up during the 90s pop era, she was enamored with the Top 40 music of the time and became obsessed with melody.

 

In fifth grade Connor got a pink drum set that ended up collecting dust in her room. As her parents navigated a volatile relationship, drum lessons never became a priority. So in middle school she joined the school band and discovered her love for the trombone. Fast-forward to eighth grade, Connor and her friends cleverly joined the school chorus because they thought the recital dresses were comical. The joke was on Connor because this would be the moment she’d discover her love for singing.

 

In high school, at sixteen, Connor’s mom gifted her a guitar and she’d sit alone in her room for hours teaching herself to play. Music was where Connor could look inward and be alone with her thoughts free from pressure and outside influences. She eventually went on to play college soccer at Florida State University where she struggled to find time to create music in the dizzying world of collegiate athletics. So she quit soccer, dropped out of college, and moved to LA where she bussed tables while working towards the musical dream. But with very little money and no knowledge of the music industry, she moved back to Florida to figure things out.

 

Connor was in songwriting rooms with people and her process was to write songs out of introspection, not to write a hit. She quit music and moved back home to Florida to focus on studying philosophy and psychology. She naturally picked up her guitar again after having taken some time away and an entire album started rolling out during study breaks. 

 

Girls of My Youth was born.

 

What led up to the album’s inception was a total grind, but one that paid off. Connor performed gig after gig, playing up to five, six nights a week in Tampa, improving her voice and growing her confidence and her wallet. She would play three to four hours and didn’t have many of her own originals so she played the same twenty covers on repeat until she could grow her repertoire. People were drawn to them and what was once embarrassing for Connor ended up paying the bills for eight years of her life. It was a blessing playing everything from Oasis to Nirvana, Tracy Chapman to Bob Dylan. It was a lot of 90s music like Radiohead, Alanis Morissette, and her all-time favorite band New Radicals.

 

Girls of My Youth seemed to fall into place naturally for Connor. She was in a groove gigging, playing the bar and restaurant scene and music was allowing her to return to the peace and quiet of her own thoughts. She started writing songs with her best friend. With the much needed break from music, Connor was no longer feeling the pressures of the industry and she picked up the guitar again for fun, just sitting in her room with her best friend. She would have a melody and write a song. Some songs were written alone. Eight songs later it felt there was a theme forming. “The reason it happened is because I wasn’t trying to make anything happen”, recalls Connor. “It was like a full circle moment again where I was doing this for the exact same reason I started doing it. It was the first time I felt at peace with it, I didn’t have managers or the ambition to have a hit project, I just had fun with the process and I wasn’t trying to create it with the intention of getting signed”.

 

This form of expression inspired Connor to discover herself again and the emotions that she had repressed for years. “‘Loud Songs For Lost Girls’” kind of embodies that feeling of being alone in your room and listening to music and letting yourself feel your feelings, that existential loneliness and anxiety of wanting to be heard and wanting to be seen”.

 

Lucky for Connor, she’s going to be seen and heard for years to come. She hopes the album Girls of My Youth speaks to others in a way that she wished she had when she was a young, clueless, naive, kind of sad person who wanted to understand the world and herself. Sometimes rebelling can have a happy ending - it’s about going for what you want and what you need. It’s just the beginning for Connor Zwetsch.