You’ve heard it before: “The era of college bands is behind us.” The conventional wisdom goes something like this—music today belongs to the solo bedroom producer, to the Doechii’s, the Clairo’s of the world, to whoever is quietly uploading demos to SoundCloud at 2 a.m. in a dorm room with all the lights off. The days of jamming with a few friends, nervously emailing a local venue’s booking agent, hoping something sticks—those days, we’re told, are relics, dusty as that very garage band’s beat-up Facebook Marketplace amp. But walk into any one of our AU-native bands’ rehearsals and tell them that. See what happens.
Thankfully, I already did that, so you don’t have to. I had the opportunity to sit down with 3.5 members (the missing half being drummer Cal Fitton, who had somewhere more important to be) of the AU-based quartet, PB&J, last Friday.
PB&J is the kind of band that shouldn’t exist by modern metrics, and yet here they are: a collective proof-of-concept that the band spirit isn’t dead, just enrolled in 17 credit hours. The scene has certainly shifted—put that on a tote bag!—but what’s replaced the garage is far from silence. It’s the narrow, comically small gap between major requirements and ensemble rehearsals; somehow, they’ve built a whole sound in there. The band itself has evolved through those gaps—shedding members, absorbing new ones, retaining only the essential nucleus of Grace Ashford’s (‘28) triple-threat guitar-singer-songwriting and Cal Fitton’s drumming while folding in Rafa Posen (‘29) as their new bassist and the warm, restless alto saxophone of Lily Goodwin (‘28). Each iteration since their formation early last year has been a little more deliberate than the last, each one a little more them.
Because the modern student-musician isn’t fighting for stage time or duking it out at a battle of the bands, they’re fighting for time, full stop. Goodwin, the sophomore alto saxophonist, put it simply: “It’s incredibly hard to prioritize which band comes first,” particularly when one of those other bands is a “weekly jazz ensemble worth a full credit hour.” As Posen notes, with the sincerity of someone who seems to have done the math, “you can’t flunk out of one band just cause you’ve committed to another.” Every member of PB&J is accompanied by an overwhelming schedule: academic pursuits stacked against the various ensembles and projects pulling at them from all directions. But they play on—even if they were occasionally late to an environmental science lecture or two.
Ashford described the evolution of the band from something “last minute” to this year’s version, where there’s finally the opportunity to be “a little bit more serious.” The institutionalization of music on campus creates its own strange gravity, pulling young creatives equally toward academic obligation and beautiful, productive chaos, and rarely lets you have both at once. The group calls balancing it all “impossible,” said with the exhausted grins of people who make it work anyway.
So what are they making in those stolen hours? That’s where it gets interesting—and a little difficult to pin down, which is precisely the point. PB&J describes their backgrounds as “very diverse [musically].” Jazz, classical, singer-songwriting. When I pressed them on genre, the best answer anyone could offer was “It’s just different.” Not that they lack reference points—“I’d say Pinegrove, Neil Young, and Black Country, New Road have all shaped our sound,” Ashford paraphrased. Built around the guitar-saxophone pairing at the band’s core, their sound carries the fingerprints of formal jazz training while actively resisting everything that training wants to sand them down into. They’re moving away from the academic structure of “taking wills”—the standard soloing roles, the tidy arrangements, the curriculum-approved approach to making noise together—and toward something that belongs entirely to them. The result is a catalog growing at a pace that suggests they’ve been storing up ideas for years: song after song, eclectic and restless, rooted, as Ashford puts it, in the belief that “great love connects all of us—that’s what most of our songs are about, love, or the feeling of it missing. Whenever I sit down to write, I start with love, and when the love isn’t there, even when it’s supposed to be, I write about that, filling up the absence with the music.”
Nothing captures that blend better than their song “BedBath&Beyond,” which is either the saddest song written about retail liquidation, or the funniest song written about heartbreak you’ll hear all year. It’s a song that transforms the closure of an unloved retail chain into a quietly devastating meditation on rejection and not belonging.
That song was recorded for the NPR Tiny Desk Contest, shot at L’Enfant Gallery—a submission the band has now made two years running, practically a legacy program. “It’s not about winning,” they’re quick to clarify. “For any band that submits, it’s not actually about getting to go on Tiny Desk—although that’d be awesome—it’s about making something you’re proud of, learning how to coordinate filming a music video, all of it. It’s about the experience, the connections, the fun.” Their philosophy is one of process over pride, craft over clout, an ethos that runs through everything PB&J does, and it’s what makes them so easy to root for.
But somehow, in between all of it, they gig, and not reluctantly. With a hunger that would embarrass bands twice their age (and half their course load). Playing live is where PB&J stop being a scheduling miracle and start being a band. “There’s a certain energy in the amazing, proper jam; you can only get it on stage,” Ashford stated. “I remember the first time [we all] played together live,” Goodwin followed up, “I remember being, like, so excited. It felt amazing.” Getting those gigs, of course, is its own ordeal. But they’re doing just fine for themselves. Since forming, PB&J has played Pie Shop, Death Punch Bar, and DC9. Catch them opening for Hieroglyph with Alligator Hands at one of DC’s most prestigious music houses: Songbyrd, on March 22nd @ 7 p.m. Direct yourself to the band’s Instagram @pbandjbandd for more upcoming concerts and uploaded tracks.
Their hunger extends beyond the stage. The band is currently working to get their music onto Spotify—“The age of streaming has made it so much easier to get your music out there than before, but there are so many new things for bands our age to figure out, like, we’re somewhat in the dark about how to do all that” —a step that feels logistical and somewhat symbolic; the difference between a band that exists and a band that persists. That instinct toward permanence has been sharpened, in no small part, by AU’s Songwriters Hub, which has placed PB&J in conversation with countless other passionate young people who want to use their musical education to build something real. Something genuine. It’s the kind of community that reminds bands exactly why they started one in the first place.
What makes PB&J worth paying attention to isn’t just their output, though that is impressive enough for a band that’s barely been together a year. Performing original music, they say, is “Really F***ing Cool”—and in their mouths that comes out as a hard-won exhale. Songs upon songs, written and produced in the margins of student schedules. That’s impressive regardless of how good they sound—and PB&J sounds great.
Forty years from now, members of PB&J aren’t going to remember that they rehearsed between classes, that they missed a few deadlines, that the “impossible” schedule nearly swallowed them whole. What they’ll remember is that they played anyway. The scene isn’t dead. It just had to go back to school.
Featured Image courtesy of Grace Ashford