West Michigan's Fake Baseball tour includes date in Charlevoix with local Charlie Millard
CHARLEVOIX — One of west Michigan's newest bands is already hitting home runs and setting off on a tour that will bring them north through Northern Michigan.
Fake Baseball is an eclectic art-pop band out of Kalamazoo that started in the midst of the pandemic's beginning. It formed as a sort of senior project for band member Maggie Heeren to complete her undergraduate degree in audio engineering.
"She organized the project with the goal of writing and recording what ended up being our demos at the time," said band member and multi-instrumentalist Grayson Nye.
"We definitely leaned on the fact that we're all either engineers or pretty tech savvy to make this work in the beginning. We all became masters of the file transfer," he said.
At the dawn of the project the group started as a four piece and regularly met outdoors to social distance themselves while working on arrangements and writing their songs.
The band worked together and valued their arrangements and the production of their songs, which fleshed out strong demos that set them up perfectly for recording their album.
"This process and releasing demos made us an enviable candidate to get onto a label but it did get people to know us and that a new project had formed even through everything else was getting canceled and shut down," said Nye.
Fake Baseball — which flaunts musical inspirations including Elton John, Oingo Boingo, Prince, Stevie Wonder and King Crimson to name a few — has its bases loaded and is now poised to take off on a six date tour around Lake Michigan.
The tour has been a goal of the band since its inception and is one that finds themselves in Charlevoix sharing a bill with local favorite Charlie Millard.
The show will take place at 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 21 at the Dhaseleer Events Barn in Charlevoix and is open to everyone with the band only asking for a donation for entry.
"Charlie and his band are great and some of our members' other projects have worked with them in the past," said Nye.
"We're so stoked that we get to play with him. It feels like an honor to know he's excited about our stuff as well," he said.
The rest of the band's tour finds them heading north to Marquette on Sunday, May 22 and then out to Dubuque, Iowa on Friday, May 27 before heading back toward home with a show in Chicago on Saturday, May 28.
"Our shows are so fun. We have a lot of fun and we hope that helps everyone else have fun too," said Nye.
"There is a special, new appreciation for community celebrations and that's kind of what we hope all of our shows are; expressive celebrations."
You can listen to Fake Baseball's album "In with the Id Crowd" and find more information on its upcoming tour online at www.fakebaseball.bandcamp.com.
Contact reporter Sean Miller at smiller@petoskeynews.com. Follow him on Twitter, @seanmillerpnr, and Instagram, @sean_everest.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: West Michigan's Fake Baseball tour to stop in Charlevoix
