Maybe all of us have had a rock-star fantasy at one time. It certainly explains the hundreds of thousands of people who have tried out for American Idol—and the many millions more who watch the competition on television each week (and think they could do a whole lot better).

Reality TV aside, there aren’t many people who are willing to do all the work that achieving that dream requires: writing the songs, landing the contract, scheduling the tour. Glamorous? Rarely. Exhausting? Always.

Carls who have pursued a career in music often say it’s a life they wouldn’t trade for anything. And on the following pages, a few of them share the triumphs, the struggles, and the joys it has brought.

MEASURING TAPES

Josh Grier’s band, Tapes ’n Tapes, has provided him with more perks in the four years of its existence than most people’s jobs will offer in a lifetime: an appearance on the David Letterman show, a song licensed for a Nissan commercial, world tours, and raves from New York Times music critics.

Still, there’s a reason that Grier ’02, who’s responsible for vocals and guitar in the successful group, has kept his day job analyzing data for a health care company that’s flexible regarding his touring schedule. “The band doesn’t provide health insurance,” he says matter-of-factly.

This practical approach might be expected from a math major who figured graduate school was in his future when he left Carleton. His decision to pursue music in Minneapolis instead was quite rational, as he tells it: “It seemed to be easier to do stuff musically when you’re younger, rather than when you’re older,” he says. “I gave myself a few years to see if I could be in a band.” If that failed, he would reconsider grad school.

Grier assembled the current group of four musicians who make up Tapes ’n Tapes (which originally included his freshman-year roommate, Steve Nelson ’02, before Nelson left for graduate school). After the debut of the group’s self-released second album, The Loon, in 2005, their work really began to pay off. A publicist friend agreed to market the CD, sending it out to reviewers and radio stations.

The band’s indie-rock style—often compared to that of bands like the Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah—had critics and audiences swooning. The Twin Cities Star Tribune named it one of the best local albums of the year. A few months later, at the South by Southwest Festival, a well-known event attended by music insiders including reviewers and label executives, a smitten New York Times reviewer compared Josh Grier’s voice to the young David Byrne’s. In July 2006 the group earned a much-coveted spot on Letterman and then headed out for a world tour that included dates in England, Ireland, Japan, and Australia.

There was little time for sightseeing on the tour, but Grier enjoyed a few international experiences. “I got to hug a koala bear in Australia,” he says. “It was one of the best things ever.”

Grier acknowledges that he has been thrilled by the experience. “My expectations for the band were pretty modest,” he says. “What’s happened is far beyond what I would have hoped.” In fact, he says, his favorite performances haven’t been aired on national television or staged before large crowds; instead, they’re the ones where the group has played for the hometown crowd in Minneapolis. “The most memorable shows I’ve had have been at [Minneapolis hotspot] First Avenue,” he says. “We’ve all seen so many great bands there, and there’s the legend of Prince and Purple Rain. The other stuff is so far beyond that—I don’t have a point of reference. First Avenue is somehow more real.”

After wrapping up their world tour late last year, the group settled in for a Minnesota winter. This spring they’ll be writing another record, which will be released on the XL label. There’s some pressure to build on their recent success, but Grier shrugs it off. “It’s cool that we’re doing something that people seem to like, but we can’t control it or overanalyze it,” he says.

Spoken like someone with the security of an excellent day job to fall back on.

CAMP STORIES

There aren’t too many good stories that start out “This one time at band camp . . .” But Charlie Gokey ’08 (Fargo, N.D.) would like to think there’s at least one.

It was at International Music Camp, just north of North Dakota, in 2001 that Gokey (pictured at right), a standing bass player, met Marie Parker, who played the French horn—and pipe organ, piano, guitar, and cello. “We hit it off when we were talking about music, and when we went home, we ended up trading tapes in the mail,” he says.

Both recorded their own music on four-track recorders, adding to and changing the music they sent to one another. That might have been the extent of their collaboration if it hadn’t been for some friends of theirs, a group called In Ink Please. The group had been invited to do a split record with Fall Records, and they chose to split the record with Gokey and Parker. For this first record, the two dubbed themselves Foliage—a reference to a late 1990s indie-rock band, Olivia Tremor Control, which had an album called Black Foliage.

Gokey and Parker, currently a student at Minnesota State University in Moorhead, didn’t manage to do much touring to support the album, but they did work on material that became the foundation for their official debut, Zurich. The album was released through Fall Records after Gokey’s freshman year under the name White Foliage. One review, which described the music as “neo psychedelic” and “epic space rock,” pronounced it a delightful debut.

Supporting the record in summer 2005, “we played anywhere that would take us,” Gokey recalls. “There were a few respectable venues, a few cafés, record stores, a barn, some houses. Several times, when a venue forgot to promote the show, we would walk the streets with a ukulele.”

Now working on their second full album, Gokey and Parker continue to collaborate via Internet and post office. They’ve added a drummer, Alex Abnos, a student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to their band. Gokey keeps busy musically at Carleton as booking manager for the Cave and host of a weekly radio show on KRLX.

Last fall he spent a term off campus with the ACM Chicago Arts Program, where he interned with the Experimental Sound Studio, an organization that makes audio technology available to people who have innovative approaches to music, radio, and other audio arts. He worked with high school kids recording hip-hop and learning to use different kinds of tools to make music. “Rather than picking up my guitar when I wrote music, I sat down at my laptop,” he says. “I learned how to use samples effectively.”

The experience made him think more critically about the role of music in society: “I’ve been thinking about its impact on race relations and its potential as a tool for cultural discourse,” says Gokey, an American studies major.

If such philosophizing makes him sound as if he’s more likely to head to the academy than to the recording studio, think again: Writing, composing, and performing isn’t just a passing phase for Gokey. “I suppose initially I wanted to play music as some sort of rock-star fantasy,” he says. “But music is what I want to do. It’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was in third grade.”

A LINE IN THE SAND

When Laura Veirs ’97 was a senior majoring in geology at Carleton, she went to the Taklamakan desert in northwestern China to be a field assistant for a few geologists. On one of her last days in Beijing, before she set off on the three-month trip, she realized she might need more than just the two books she’d packed to keep her entertained in the desolate location—the largest sand desert in the world.

Her finances were limited, but she found what she was looking for after scouring a local market. “I bought a guitar for five dollars to take with me,” she says. As one might expect, five dollars didn’t provide much in the way of quality. “It was a horrible guitar—the strings were high off the neck and it was really hard to play,” she recalls. But in that bleak, deserted environment, it was a lifesaver. “It got me through,” she says. “I kind of gave up on science, but I wrote a bunch of songs.”

Veirs had dabbled in music before that trip, picking up a guitar the year before she arrived at Carleton and playing in two bands, but her time in the desert was pivotal: She realized that she would be pursuing music, not geology, as a career.

But dreaming of pursuing music and actually doing it are poles apart, and Veirs’s career has been one of tenacity and incremental gains. She went from playing in other people’s bands in Seattle to performing on her own and touring in small venues in the Pacific Northwest to signing on with a United Kingdom label.

Ironically, Veirs got noticed at home only after she began working overseas. After releasing her fourth album, Carbon Glacier, with the UK’s Bella Union, she attracted the notice of European media, whose critics were spellbound by Veirs’s fusion of folk and blues. The London Independent declared Carbon Glacier “a benchmark by which future Americana releases will be judged.” The attention—as well as a successful European tour with her band—piqued the interest of Nonesuch, an American label with which she’s currently working.

Veirs may be a long way from that geology trip, but her continuing interest in the natural world informs her music. Her lyrics bristle with geological words and phrases—mud floes, spelunking, the Mariana Trench (the deepest location on Earth’s crust)—you’re not likely to hear from other songwriters. But nerdy they’re not: The New York Times described Veirs’s songs as “word-conscious, narrative, [and] neither foggy nor overwritten.” Time Out New York said her talent “borders on the transcendent.”

While she hasn’t been back to Northfield for a while (she’s currently living in Portland, Oregon), Carleton is never far from her mind. “I tour all over the place, and wherever I go—even internationally—Carleton people come out and say hi and introduce themselves,” she says. “I see that community all over the world.”

This spring she’ll finish up her sixth album, Saltbreakers, and work on putting together another tour. “It’s a struggle sometimes, and there’s never a clear path, but it’s challenging and rewarding,” she says. “I can’t imagine another life.”

ERIN PETERSON is a freelance writer and editor in Minneapolis.