Growing up and growing the band: the evolution of Twin Cities indie folk rock group Second Hand Dan
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Musicians Graden Hill and Rachel Scott could not be sidetracked from brainstorming one more thought related to the first song scheduled for a June rehearsal. A cacophony of microphones and level checks, of warm-ups and final tunings surrounds them.
Bandmates George Knier and Collyn Camara complete the players at the Saturday morning rehearsal. The four mid-20s musicians are members of the Twin Cities indie folk rock band Second Hand Dan.
In a half-renovated basement studio that Hill built himself in Eagan, they sit engrossed in their music. It’s a few weeks out from their next show and they are spending the day prepping their set.
“We need a metronome. Why are we not playing with a metronome?” Scott, says with a laugh. She is the bassist and lead vocalist for the song.
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Hill, who plays guitar and provides backup vocals, swiftly moves to play a digital pulse through each bandmate’s headset, setting their tempo for the next run.
The rehearsal is efficient and impressive. The band bounces between phrases of the song fluidly, as if reading each other’s minds. As Scott sings, band members instruct each other to run certain measures again. Without pausing, they repeat it — so smoothly it sounds like part of the song.
Their tight coordination comes from playing together for over a decade. Second Hand Dan, who formerly went by Scalise, was started by Hill after he fell in love with performing at a middle school talent show. The earliest members to join were Knier, who plays keys, and drummer Ben Schwartz.
“You guys did the talent show, but you didn't ask me to play the talent show,” Knier jokes. “I also definitely would have said no if you asked me to do the talent show.”
That was when they were 13. They started to rehearse routinely in high school. Soon after, they met Scott, Camara (guitar and trombone), and Sarah Navratil (saxophone) through a jazz combo they were in.
“Thinking back to it, it’s so funny, because we would have, like, printed out music and stands,” Scott said about their first rehearsals. “It was very rudimental.”
Much has changed for the band since its origins. They released their debut album in 2020 and a second in 2023. They’ve been playing gigs regularly for a decade.
Now, when not performing live, they focus on innovating and curating their sound, workshopping new and old original music.
They’ve recently been reworking a song Hill wrote in 2022, never meant for the band. He wrote the song “Yeah, Good” after a breakup that he was mad at himself for.
One day, when Hill was with the band’s drummer, he fiddled with the song’s chorus without realizing it. Schwartz told him to bring it to the band, and it’s a good thing he spoke up — everyone wanted it in the lineup.
The song has undergone multiple revisions. At first, Hill sang it, but the band decided it needed something different. Scott took a shot at it, and that was when they knew they had landed the song.
They’ve only played it live a handful of times, but now they’re planning to release it as a single.
Like their rehearsals, the creative process has become smoother, with less fear of judgment.
“Everybody's so comfortable throwing out an idea, and if it gets shot down, they won't take it personally,” Hill said. “That's just freeing creatively.”
Even years after learning the song “Yeah, Good,” in their rehearsal, they still give each other notes, tweaking harmonies or correcting each other on when to come in — corrections that are made quickly and without argument.
Part of that comes from their collaborative nature. While Hill is the band’s main songwriter, Scott and other members provide suggestions for melodies and harmonies or notes about lyrics.
By opening up, they found a new creative depth that Scott says brought them closer.
“Every single song that we've started to write together like these are now like my favorite songs that we have written,” she said.
But it wasn’t this easy. They began playing during less experienced teenage years as both bandmates and friends, which sometimes made things personal.
"There definitely was a period of time early on where we would be pretty harsh and shoot down ideas, and it definitely hurt some feelings,” Knier says. “But, I mean, that's kind of a hurdle that every artist would need to get over. I mean, if you can't express any creative ideas, good or bad, then you're not really making any progress.”
They’ve developed a kind of secret language that makes communication easy. After years of growing and learning together — sometimes challenging, often fun — they’ve gotten to know each other’s quirks well.
Camara describes it as a special body language.
“We all are so honest with each other that if one of us hears something wrong and somebody else calls it out, it's like, okay, I know exactly what he's talking about,” he says. “If I mess something up on the guitar and I see Rachel, like, twitch and then somebody says, ‘All right, we're stopping,’ I know why we're stopping. There's looks for good things, and there's looks for bad things.”
Even after all these years, their creative connection still makes Saturday rehearsals feel more like a jam session with close friends than an audition. It’s become something essential — more important than they ever imagined back in eighth grade.
“In school, when we were doing it, it was like, ‘Oh, I'm in a band that's kind of sick.’ Like, let's keep doing this. But once we graduated, it was like, you know everybody needs something,” Camara says. “You need some way to be creative, and you need something to do that isn't work and isn't eating and sleeping. And the band was that thing for me.”
You can see Second Hand Dan live at Padraigs Brewing in Minneapolis on Friday, July 11.
