The scene is the Paradise Rock Club in a pre-Bleachers world. Our unlikely protagonist, a strapping 20-year-old Alyse Vellturo — now known musically as pronoun — is being tossed out of the venue by the seat of her pants at a Jack’s Mannequin show for holding her friend’s beer while she was in the bathroom. As the bouncer drags her through the crowd, she cries:
“Who’s this opener?! I really like them they sound like The Format!”
And that’s how Velturo discovered fun. — “We all know where they ended up,” she quips — and missed out on seeing Andrew McMahon in all his emo glory in 2008.
The memory, which she fascinatingly cites as one her favorites from a show, comes from a time when the Brighton Music Hall was Harpers Ferry and the now-while walls of Sonia were coated in of grit and glitter from years and years as T.T. the Bears Place. Great Scott, however, remains relatively untouched by the times, and that’s exactly where Alyse Vellturo finds herself this Monday (June 26) with Funeral Advantage and Deep Secret. It’s the one major venue the Boston native and Berklee School of Music grad has never been to.
“I don’t think I have actually ever been to Great Scott!” the singer says. “Which is insane to me, if I have it was definitely to support a friends local band.”
Vellturo, who was raised just outside of Boston, spent a good chunk of her adult life bouncing around service jobs in Cambridge and attending Berklee, where she picked up a thing for daily $4 pitchers at Crazy Dough’s on Boylston and an addiction to mini Boloco chicken caeser wraps (“I miss Boloco everyday. I could go on for a while on this one, there’s just a lot of nostalgia”). The remnants of her six years in Boston have followed her back to New York City, where she’s now lived since she was 24, but the most important after-effect of her time here is how she learned to record solo at Berklee.
“It definitely taught me how to record my own music at home which is super important to me because I have trouble collaborating with others” she says with a laugh.
The result is her EP There’s no one new around you, a collection of tunes that the singer calls “a heartbroken girl in her shitty apartment in Brooklyn” in the press release. The EP literally embodies bedroom indie, capturing Vellturo’s one-woman show from her confines in Brooklyn via a lo-fi dreamscape.
Vellturo will debut the tracks to a crowd 100 times the size of her NYC apartment in August at the Billboard Hot 100 Music Festival, but for now, she’s keeping it intimate on her East Coast mini-tour.
No one can claim they’re from Boston without having been cramped at a Great Scott gig at least once, anyways.
PRONOUN + FUNERAL ADVANTAGE + DEEP SECRET :: Monday, June 26 at Great Scott, 1222 Commonwealth Ave. in Allston, MA :: 9 p.m., 18-plus, $10 in advance and $12 day of show :: Advance tickets :: Bowery Boston event page :: Photo by Cory Ingram
