Deap Vally’s Lindsey Troy is Keeping the Dream Alive

I always had big dreams. When I was a kid, I would fawn over the covers of Rolling Stone that would show up at my house every month. I would pore over each page of those cover stories: Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain, Lauryn Hill, Jewel, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, No Doubt. I would imagine what my cover would look like, posing in the mirror with my guitar. 

When my band, Deap Vally, first started meeting with record labels in 2011, I used to tell A&R people I wanted to be on the cover of Rolling Stone — twice. No flash in the pan one-hit-wonder here. I wanted it all. Creative freedom. Rock-stardom. A Grammy. SNL. A gold record. A tour bus. And, eventually, love, marriage, and motherhood. 

Because, in truth, you need that level of success, or something close to it, to be able to comfortably fit kids into the life of a touring musician. Well, as a woman, at least. You need the tour bus, otherwise your kids are strapped into a car seat eight-to-ten hours a day. It’s possible, but not really practical or pleasant. (Or even healthy, for that matter. Kids need to be running and climbing and playing, not strapped into a car seat all day.) So I prayed for that level of success, so I could have it all, like Gwen Stefani or Beyoncé. The music career and the family. And the next decade-plus was one full of adventures and dreams-come-true, of triumphs, tribulations, heartbreak, anxiety, and joy. All of the above. 

Well, we never got the cover of Rolling Stone, but we got small write-ups in it a handful of times, which I’m very proud of. I have my page carefully preserved, so I can show my kids when they get older, and one day to my grandkids. No, we weren’t on the cover of Rolling Stone, but we were on the cover of a really cool indie magazine called DIY, and I’m proud of that. That one’s saved for the grandkids too. We got a lot of critical acclaim by some of the biggest publications in the world (The Guardian, etc.), but then for some reason, completely ignored by the notoriously aloof Pitchfork, whose support could have given our career some much-needed legs. We weren’t sure why, but thought maybe we dressed a little too trashy in our early years as a band to be taken seriously as women. And maybe that’s why we got a bit more androgynous on our second record cycle — so journalists would stop writing about the way we looked and focus on our music instead. But a lot of the time, we really felt that it was impossible to “make it” being an “all-girl band” playing “rock & roll” (like, actual rock & roll music — not indie rock or pop rock.) Maybe that was our fatal mistake. Maybe all we needed was to toss a dude in our band to give us some much-needed cred. 

But we had so many adventures. We got to play the biggest music festivals in the world: Glastonbury, Coachella, Reading and Leeds, Bonnaroo, Splendour in the Grass. We toured the world — sometimes as headliners, often as openers. We did so many support tours that Julie used to say, “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” But boy did we have fun. We supported many of the bands we grew up loving like Blondie, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Muse, Garbage, Peaches, Queens of the Stone Age. We had adventures all over the world and have books’ worth of juicy stories to tell from it. But for most of those years, we didn’t make any money at all. I’m still not really sure where it all went. I guess it went to our tour managers and our flights and hotel rooms. We used to say our band existed to give other people jobs, but I know that’s just how it is for most bands. 

I gave up my apartment to make the band work — for years, I had a storage unit and relied on the kindness of friends to put me up when I wasn’t on tour, with the occasional sublet peppered in. That’s what a lot of musicians have to do. And that’s fun when you’re young. But it did take a serious toll on my mental health. Having no home base and no stability is very hard, even for a 20-something. And it becomes even more impossible when you want to settle down and have a family. 

So how do you keep the dream alive? This is the question. Sometimes I think you have to have a trust-fund to be an indie musician. This business model just isn’t sustainable or practical. We treat our work like a full-time job, but then are compensated for it like a low-paying part-time job. But we keep doing it anyway. Because we love it. You have to love it. What I’m saying is: if you want to get rich, don’t become a musician. Go into tech or something.

Our first record, Sistrionix, which came out in 2013, sold 50,000 copies, which I’m very proud of. But those weren’t the numbers the label was hoping for. Things got increasingly difficult for us after that. We were on a much different page from our A&R guy when it came to the creative vision of the band. He wanted to be heavily involved with the creative direction of our next record and we weren’t really comfortable with that. It seemed at odds with our ethos as a band. We were terrified of what they might try to turn us into. We had landed our dream producer, Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to produce our second record and we were ecstatic. We went into the studio with Nick and delivered a batch of songs that we loved, but the label wasn’t happy with the direction, so they wanted us to work with their songwriters and producers instead. 

I had already been through the major label conveyor belt as a teenager, and that experience was pretty ick. My first rendezvous with a major label was a demo deal I got with Warner Bros Records when I was twelve, singing someone’s else’s songs. Beck’s band played all the music behind my sister and I, as we vocal-harmonized over quirky, retro folk songs. And that was a pretty wild adventure and a real honor to be working with those guys. But then, when I was 15, we got another deal with Elektra Records, which is a story for another time, but to make a very long very story short — I had serious imposter syndrome that whole time, and I just wanted to be back home having slumber parties with my friends. I was basically a puppet living out someone else’s dream, and my mental health was crumbling, to say the least. I had middle-aged dorks trying to shape my sister and me into the next Avril Lavigne, and I couldn’t wait for the whole thing to crash and burn.

Simply put, I didn’t want to relive that same experience again. We walked away from a very desirable record contract with Island Records to make the record we wanted to make, the way we wanted to make it. Maybe that was career suicide. It’s hard to say. But we went on to make what many of our fans and critics have said is our best record, Femejism, produced by Nick Zinner, which we put out in 2016. And maybe it was also career suicide to name our record Femejism. Hard to know. But in the end, we needed creative freedom. There are no guarantees either way, and if our music career was to end up a failure, we at least needed to be proud of the records we had made. That being said, I’m grateful to Island Records for putting out our first record.

Well, we were industry kryptonite after that point, and even though, from my perspective, the record we made was near-perfect, we had a really hard time finding another deal for it. Then when Julie became visibly pregnant with her first child, things got even hairier. We got ghosted by a very prominent label we were talking to. But by some miracle, we pieced together some territorial record deals around the world. And then we toured the world again with that record and gained a whole new fan base.  

I gotta hand it to Julie. She did the impossible. She toured for a couple of years with a baby, in a van, as an indie band. Almost unheard of. Dads leave their kids at home to go on tour all the time, but as a mom, it’s a whole different ball game. It was no easy feat. She didn’t get much sleep at all during that era. But she got to be with her baby, and her baby got to see the world and hang out with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blondie, and Garbage. A real rock & roll baby. Will her daughter remember any of it? Probably not. But the pictures are there to prove it. Our tour van always smelled like baby barf. We learned how to tune out the crying. Julie would take her signature 30-minute nap before shows, and her daughter would be drinking from her boob while she slept. 

Flash forward several years, and now we both have two kids. I’ve taught music lessons and had part-time jobs and have had to be really scrappy to keep this band going. Julie has pulled the weight on the administrative side to make this thing work: taking on managerial duties the last several years, tour managing us, so that we’re able to actually make a little money on the road, and more recently, running our newly-found record label. But at a certain point, it just becomes too impossible, financially and emotionally, especially when there are kids and families involved.

Julie decided she wanted to go back to school and I didn’t really want to keep the band going without her — that seemed weird. But my heart was broken. I didn’t feel like I had anything else to fall back on. So it was hard to say goodbye to the greatest creative endeavor of my life. The thing I’d poured everything into. But eventually, we decided on a plan—a compromise, if you will: to go out with a bang and not a whimper — to release this final body of work and go on a worldwide farewell tour. 

I think it took me a while to accept that we were actually ending the band. I’m loyal to a fault, and was always too band-monogamous to do a solo project. Besides, being in a band is just so fun. But how to keep this music dream alive when my only band, my baby, is breaking up? Well, I’ve finally started working on a solo record, after all these years, and it’s about time. This record I’ve started working on is pure gold and it’s been incredible for my self-esteem and my creative independence. To do something on my own. But, then, of course, there’s the ever-present stress of having to figure out how the hell to make a living at this wacky job, especially as a mom of two kids.  A dear friend of mine suggested that I start a tour diary on Substack, so I took her advice and have been blogging as Troy on Tour for a couple months now. So I’m doing that right now to help support myself while I work on my solo record. We do what we have to do as artists to make it work. And it turns out I really love writing.

Being on tour with Deap Vally again has made me fall so deeply in love with music all over again, and reminded me how essential this is to my being.  I’ve had a lot of success with this band. More than most bands ever get. I feel like I’ve already lived my dream. I went over a decade without having a day job and I toured the world many times over, playing for thousands of people and seeing the most beautiful cities while sharing stages with the biggest bands. Now I’m in my 30s, and my baby boy, my youngest,  just turned one last month. I was on several tours over the last year — short tours, two to three weeks at a time — but still, it’s so hard to be away from my kids when they’re this little. I’ll never get this time back. So it’s a sacrifice, balancing these parts of my life that I love so dearly.

I’m going to keep the dream alive. I’m figuring it out. That’s what we do as artists. Lord knows we don’t do it for the money. We figure out a way to make enough money so that we can just keep doing it. Deap Vally breaking up is a heartbreak I will always feel, but with every closed door comes another open one. This is the catalyst I needed to push myself out of my comfort zone, back to this love of mine, this time in a different shape.. You have to change and adapt. But we keep the dream alive.