Working as an arts curator and events planner with nonprofit Cultivate South Park, Melanie Granger served as the point of contact when a band dropped late from the bill at last August’s South Park Summer Party (Sopasupa). Granger, “super pregnant” at the time, took matters into her own hands and opened the show with her neo-soul quartet Push for Love. Her coworkers were floored. “Oh my God,” she recalls them saying. “That’s awesome. I didn’t know you did that.”

“It took me a long time to believe in myself,” says Granger. “Artists are their own worst enemies.” During her pregnancy, however, “I felt fearless, ready to conquer. I understood that I’m talented. Now, it’s all about a good time.”

Granger began playing music with guitarist Xavier Salinas in North Hollywood over a decade ago, but it took years for them to build out a full band. “It’s all about the commitment level,” says Granger. Outside of music, she was no stranger to commitment. Granger became a foster parent at 23 and founded children’s play space We Free Hearts in 2019 after noticing a lack of community spaces—and parental aid—around South Seattle. When that organization closed for an extended period during COVID, music helped to sustain Granger’s momentum and mood.

The best part of her passion? Granger doesn’t hesitate. “Hanging with the guys!” she says. “We have such a good time. We really do like and care about each other.” She dips her chin toward her daughter, four-month-old Anaya Saule. “[My bandmates] are uncles to this little human. How cool is that?”

The first time Aaron Lindstrom sold out a show with his band Lindstrom and the Limit, at the Rendezvous Jewelbox Theater in Belltown, he experienced an onstage epiphany. “My heart was racing,” he says, “and my arms went numb. I realized it was the same feeling I get when I have a panic attack. Except this was positive.”

Lindstrom, who lives with anxiety, says that music has “always been a part” of his life. Diagnosed with vocal nodules in 2011, he abandoned the theater track that he’d pursued in college and focused on guitar to give his voice a break. The camaraderie of a band, he realized, was similar to that of a cast. He’d been working at a candy shop in Oakland, and through a chocolate supplier took tentative steps into a career that recently included eight years at Seattle’s Theo Chocolate.

Lindstrom’s career and musical paths developed in parallel but crossed in Fremont. “Theo fostered a great community for music,” he says. At annual holiday parties, company project “The Theo Band” took the stage to perform covers. Lindstrom recruited members from that group to flush out his own project. “Sometimes almost the whole Theo Band was in Lindstrom and the Limit.”

Lindstrom’s coworkers saw him onstage and said, “Oh, that’s the real Aaron.”

Today, what began as an acoustic trio is a “nine-piece soul-folk-rock powerhouse.” Lindstrom left Theo before last year’s merger but plans to stay in the chocolate industry. With a break from the office, he’s keeping busy in in six different bands. “Emotionally,” he says, “I’m happy.”

In the fifth grade, Will Morgan trudged up and down hilly Magnolia, saving paper route money to buy a guitar from the Sears catalog. It sounds straight out of the 1950s, but in Morgan’s case, it happened decades later. By the time he started gigging around Seattle—in indie rock band Big Plastic Jesus Head—grunge was settling over the city like an early autumn.

“A Pioneer Square bouncer thought our name was too provocative,” says Morgan of that early group. “But I happened to work with his mother. So we got away with it.”

Morgan spent much of the ’90s contracting for Microsoft, wishing he had more time to spend playing guitar. He says he “never” considered music financially feasible. Still, he wanted a healthier schedule and gave up his tech work to join the family business, David Morgan, importers of Australian goods from hats to kangaroo leather whips. A proprietary model of the latter was featured in the Indiana Jones movies and inspired the name of Morgan’s most recent blues group, Willie and the Whips.

Morgan doesn’t keep a guitar at the office—“It would be too distracting.” He remembers that between jobs, “I thought I would have more time to play music. But I’m somebody who needs a structure to do things. I need to get up and go to work.” Regardless of his career, Morgan says that music has “slowly become a part of myself, my image and character. And I’m happy to be a blues musician, because they’re allowed to get old.”

When Adriana Giordano left São Paulo in 1990, she stresses, “I was not a musician.” She’d been exposed to it—“You breathe music [in Brazil]”—but it took more than a decade for her to start performing in Seattle. She wet her feet in an early aughts garage band, and on the same Rendezvous Jewelbox stage where Lindstrom, above, had his epiphany, Giordano encountered her own. “I got lost in my vocalization, in a good way,” she says. “I opened my eyes and the musicians were looking at me, like, where did that come from? I thought, I want more of this.”

Fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese—in which she primarily sings—Giordano had been working as a project manager at Microsoft. Once she started singing, “connecting with people on a deeper level,” she noticed her emotional scales tipping toward art. “I’d been gone 15 years,” she says, “and I was craving Brazilian culture.” She learned of a regular jam session that played Brazilian music and began singing there until the group lost its venue. Giordano took it upon herself to negotiate a new spot for the musicians, on one condition. “I wanted to be the host. Because I didn’t see enough women in that environment.”

Suddenly Giordano was leading a weekly jam session, promoting touring Brazilian acts, and playing in two bands—Entremundos Quarteto and En Canto—all while working at Microsoft. “The corporate environment,” she discovered, was “clashing with the music.” Her out proved a job at Classic Pianos Bellevue, where she works today. “Within two or three years of singing,” she says, “I wanted to live off music. And I still do. There’s got to be a way.”