Molly Grace and Melina KB Go to Nashville
Lexington singer-songwriters co-headline show at storied Nashville venue
Located on the famed “Rock Block” of Elliston Place, Nashville, Tenn., The End is a small rock’n’roll bar with a reputation for hosting big bands – including The White Stripes, Yo La Tengo, and The Kills – and launching many musical careers.
On the evening of August 31, two singer-songwriters from Lexington, Molly Grace Zeytoonian and Melina Bertsekas lit up a capacity crowd at The End with an hour-long combined set mixing their original songs with covers of Taylor Swift and ABBA. ABBA’s 1979 disco super-hit “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” (A Man After Midnight) “really got the crowd going,” said Zeytoonian, speaking from Nashville in a Zoom interview a couple of days after the event. “It was just this giant dance party,” she said, “really high energy, really electric, super fun!”
It was not only golden oldies that energized the 150-strong crowd of students, family, friends, music industry scouts, and locals curious to hear new talent. “I was shocked by how many people knew Molly and Melina’s songs and were singing along!” said Molly’s mother Mary Zeytoonian, who traveled from Lexington to Nashville with her husband – and Bertsekas’ parents – for the performance.
The show included recent releases, “Woman’s Intuition,” by Zeytoonian, and “Friends to Lovers,” by Bertsekas, as well as two of their most often-streamed songs, Zeytoonian’s “What if?” – a sassy, comic take on the break-up song imagining running into an ex-boyfriend in the grocery store – and Bertsekas’ hit feminist anthem, “I’ve Had Enough.”
The gig was a high point for the twenty-year-old singers known to their thousands of fans on TikTok and Spotify as Molly Grace and Melina KB, now both juniors in the School of Music at Belmont University in Nashville. With limited live performance exposure, said Zeytoonian, “for both Melina and me, the majority of our following has come from our TikTok presence, and that’s what got us in the door [at The End.]”
“It meant so much just walking into that venue,” said Bertsekas. “Seeing photos of Paramore on the wall of people who had played there was just super-surreal,” she said, of one of the bands she identifies as a “huge influence” on her own music. “I was so emotional, I was just tearing up, seeing it packed, watching Amelia [Day], our opener, perform to this audience,” she said. Day is a Seattle-based indie/jazz/folk singer-songwriter, currently studying at Vanderbilt University.
The Lexington Connection
Although Bertsekas and Zeytoonian are contemporaries who grew up in Lexington and had followed each other on social media in recent years, their paths never crossed in person until according to Bertsekas, “we literally ran into each other’s arms in the Belmont cafeteria” in the first week of freshman year, and instantly bonded over ice cream. “Not as good as Ranc’s!” they both agreed.
“I was the girl who sang at my school,” (Lexington High School), said Zeytoonian, “and Melina was the girl who sang at her school,” (Beaver Country Day School). Each of them was always hearing about the other from friends and friends of friends. Now, said Bertsekas, “Molly’s my best friend, and I am like the biggest fan girl and supporter of Molly of all time!” She admires her friend’s courage in putting her deepest feelings into her songs, in a way that feels “genuine and real,” and her skills as a performer, “great at audience engagement,” humorous, and always fully present in the moment.
On her side, Zeytoonian admires Bertsekas’ confidence in her identity as an artist. “I feel like Melina has been practicing her songwriting craft for a really long time,” she said, “and she is just so strong in how she presents herself.” When she was first finding her footing as an artist, she said, “Melina helped me find the confidence to fully step into my artistry and not be apologetic for pursuing this.”
Early Steps in Song and Dance
Zeytoonian grew up surrounded by music of many kinds, from traditional Armenian melodies to heavy metal and The Spice Girls. Her mother’s father Billy Bennis, was a rock’n’roll and doo wop musician in the 1950s, her father’s father played and sang with the Watertown-based Orientales Band in the same decade, and her father Armen sang in a heavy metal band in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Throughout middle school and high school Zeytoonian immersed herself in the outstanding music programs in Lexington public schools, from musical theater to madrigals, scoring ever-larger parts in musicals from The Lion King to Legally Blonde and Anything Goes. From age 10, when she begged her parents to buy her a guitar and taught herself a handful of chords, she started writing her own songs, inspired by young artists working in various American roots genres, from jazz to country.
That eclectic brew of sounds is reflected in her music today. “My music is definitely kind of genre-bending,” she said. If she had to give it a label, she might go for “pop soul,” with shades of funk and R&B. “I’m influenced by a lot of soul pop bands that are big right now” she said, mentioning Lawrence the Band, Sammy Rae & The Friends and Lake Street Dive, an alternative/indie band formed in 2004 at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music.
Bertsekas’ first experience as a professional performer was not as a singer but as a dancer. In elementary school through middle school she studied ballet at the Boston Ballet Studio in Newton, Mass., and appeared for several years in the company’s annual presentation of The Nutcracker at the Boston Opera House. “I loved it very much and definitely considered it as a career,” she said. Over time, music and music theater exerted a stronger pull, as she performed in many school groups, plays and musicals, bringing her vocal and dance skills together to take a lead role in A Chorus Line in her Junior year.
Outside of school, Bertsekas rounded out her musical education with lessons in voice, piano, and guitar, and courses in audio engineering and emceeing at The Real School of Music in Burlington, Mass. For two summers, she attended Berklee College of Music’s Aspire, a five-week intensive course in music performance that gave her a platform for gigs in Boston, including the Performing Songwriter Showcase at the Red Room in Café 939. Of her current style, she said: “I imagine my music like a pop Broadway cast party,” a mashup of show tunes, musical theater, and current pop music.
Making a Mark in Music City
To make a career in music in the U.S., said Zeytoonian, you need to live in one of three cities: New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville. When mulling her options for college, she said, New York seemed “a little busy,” and Los Angeles “quite far from Boston.” A family road trip to Nashville, combined with a campus tour of Belmont, sealed the deal. “There’s this pulse of music in Nashville – it’s so contagious, and it’s everywhere. I just had the feeling – oh, this is home,” she said.
“The energy of the city and the energy of the school is just uplifting and collaborative,” said Bertsekas, who also fell in love with the city and the campus at first sight. First impressions have proven well-founded, as both singers have found in Nashville and at Belmont supportive communities of fellow artists. They have both interned with Song Suffragettes, a collective of women singer-songwriters who hold a weekly writer’s round in town, featuring mainly female country artists, and offer business retreats and seminars.
Bertsekas currently works for °1824, a Universal Music Group (UMG) division focused on building direct connections between artists and fans through storytelling and experiences. That means editing videos and digital graphics for local UMG artists, as well as those on tour in the city. As a complement to her own creative work, she said, “getting to be part of their journeys is really exciting.”
“My big project now is performing live,” said Zeytoonian, who recently started working with a manager, Myles Hoffman, a Belmont senior. “As much as I love recording music,” she said, “I really feel that where my music shines is with a band on stage.”
As for collaborations between Bertsekas and Zeytoonian, they share their songs-in-progress, bounce back and forth ideas for marketing and cover art, and support and encourage each other as they make their way in an unforgiving industry, in a strange city far away from home. The two have already written a handful of songs together – most recently one about Boston, called “Red Line” – and more are in the works.
“I’m a big believer that comparison is the thief of joy,” said Zeytoonian. “If there’s anything I’ve learned in Nashville,” she said, “it’s that the music industry is ever-growing and infinite. So there’s always space for people who work hard and put forth their best work.” If that optimistic view proves true, for Molly Grace and Melina KB, their gig at The End surely signals a most promising beginning.
To follow Molly Grace and Melina KB, find links to all their social media at their websites:
mollygracemusic.com
melinaKB.com