Music majors take local scene by melodic storm

Chrissie Loftus, left, and Nina Prendergast are songwriters, pianists and vocalists for the acclaimed local band Trace Fury. Best friends since high school, they came to Temple independent of one another and are now among Philadelphia’s rising music stars.

Temple students Chrissie Loftus and Nina Prendergast are just like many college underclassmen. They go to class, study hard, practice a lot (they’re music majors) and daydream about being professional musicians someday.

Well, those daydreams are a few steps closer to reality. Prendergast and Loftus front the local band Trace Fury (www.tracefury.com), a band that’s getting a lot of attention from local promoters and press lately.

Best friends since high school, the pair are songwriters who duel pianos and create harmonies that clash, twist and soar into experimental pieces that challenge and uplift the listener. But, they swear, it’s totally by accident, and they couldn’t do it without each other.

“If I get stuck, Chrissie comes in with new ideas, and I try to do the same for her,” said Prendergast, a second-semester freshman piano major who has been at the ivories as far back as she can remember.

“It doesn’t make you tired,” said Loftus, adding that the two of them would often toil late into the night working on a new piece. “The whole creative process gives you so much energy.”

Loftus and Prendergast were attending North Penn High School in Lansdale when they met at a school production of Fiddler on the Roof. They then found themselves in chorus class together.

“We didn’t really get along at first,” said Loftus, a sophomore studying voice. “But we ended up hitting it off one day when we realized we had a lot of common interests, especially in music. The first time we hung out, we ended up writing our first song.”

At that time, Prendergast, who’d had many years of classical training, had no idea how to improvise. Loftus, whose interests lean more toward jazz, encouraged her to think outside the box.

They joined up with Matt Buckley, their drummer, about three years ago, and went on a hunt for other people.

“We had ads up at every store, every Internet ad you can think of, and that’s how we met Dave [Kasper] and Mark [Gallagher],” who play bass and saxophone respectively, Prendergast said. “We weren’t looking for a saxophonist. But it worked.”

Part of the reason that they were able to get an early start on their musical careers was because of the support they received from their high school teachers.

“The music program at North Penn was amazing,” Prendergast said. “Our music teacher knew how we were, and would give us special passes to go to the auditorium and practice.”

After graduation in 2000, they played their first live show at a coffeehouse in Scranton, Pa. They played a few other small gigs along the way, but their big break came earlier this year when they were booked at the Khyber, a bar in Olde City.

“We had never even sent them a press kit,” Prendergast said. “My cellphone rang in the middle of a piano lesson I was teaching and it was [the booking agent] from the Khyber.

“To this day they won’t tell us how they heard about us—they just got a tip to book us,” she continued. “Since then we’ve been playing in Philadelphia about once a month.”

One of the few challenges facing Trace Fury is finding complementary bands with whom they can play local shows.

“We’ve played at the Khyber and the Grape Street Pub, but we don’t really fit in with other bands,” Loftus said. “They’re all great people and nice, but because we played a different music style, I think their goals are a little different from ours.”

But now, they’re pulling in their own audience, thanks to word of mouth and their own aggressive marketing tactics.

“We’ll just leave CDs wherever we think people who like our music might hang out—coffeeshops, bars, whatever,” Prendergast said. “The word got out and we didn’t even know it was getting out, and by July, all these people were showing up for our shows and we didn’t have to do anything.”

In the six months since they started playing locally, they’ve played the Y-100 local music night at the Grape Street among other gigs, landed a cover feature from the local music magazine Origivation, and, most recently, were featured in the local music issue of the Philadelphia City Paper.

Trace Fury’s first album, Ankle Deep, is a dynamic, experimental blend of rock, classical, jazz and avant-garde, with dizzying 16th notes that trickle out at you from the singer/pianists’ fingertips like a punk-rock lullaby.

The band writes the music together, but Loftus and Prendergast often plant the seeds by composing first and then letting the other members add to what they do. The quintet is very close and shares many activities beyond songwriting and performing. Recently, they went skydiving together.

As close as the band is, Loftus and Prendergast are sometimes taken aback when they are assumed to be just “singers,” instead of musicians and composers within a team.

“People sometimes assume that the guys write all the parts,” said Loftus. “Or that the guys had the band first and added us because they needed singers. It was discouraging at first, but now we find it empowering.”

“We’ve had other, younger girls come up to us and say ‘you inspired us to start our own band,’” said Prendergast. “I think it’s an honor to have been given this gift—and to have found each other—and be able to share what we do with others.” — Helen H. Thompson