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Amy Abts is a Rochester musician who has been performing for 

. But her impact stretches across the state. 

She got her start performing in Duluth, including opening for the band Low, and helped launch the city’s Homegrown Music Festival.

Abts is still making music today, now based back in her Rochester hometown.

MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with Abts about her new EP, “IRL,” her musical beginnings and learning to trust herself again after hearing loss.

Press play above to listen to their conversation, or read a transcript below, edited for length and clarity. 

So let’s start with the title track of this EP, ‘IRL.’

This whole EP is kind of about the online dating experience. So, this particular date wanted to explain the album “Pet Sounds” to me, which, if you’re a musician, you’re pretty familiar with the Beach Boys and “Pet Sounds,” because it’s a seminal recording.

And can you talk a little bit about your musical influence growing up here in Rochester?

Sure, so I was really big on like Elvis Costello and, of course, the Beatles. I was involved in a local theater group, a youth theater group called The Mask Theater, and that was my really only artistic outlet as a kid growing up in Rochester.

And it sounds like Duluth is where your career really kind of took off. 

Yeah. So I started at the University of Minnesota in Duluth studying theater, and one day I was playing guitar and singing while my friend was on the phone talking to his friend, and his friend was like, “Who is that playing?” 

And it turned out that this guy on the phone, Scott Lunt, owned a pirate radio station in the central hillside of Duluth. And Scott Lunt is very well-known in Duluth. He’s known as Starfire, which is his DJ name — which ended up being a Low song — and he introduced me to Low. My first demo was at Low’s home studio with Alan Sparhawk playing the drums, which was odd for me, because I was a big fan of Low. I was at their first show.

You’ve been back in Rochester for some time now. Do you feel like you’ve settled in and found a creative community here? 

Yeah, I do. I moved back in like 2014 and I was dealing with a lot of health struggles at that time. So the first five years I spent dealing with the health stuff, and then I started playing out a little bit more and started meeting younger people that had stayed in Rochester and are now playing around. I had a surgery, a brain surgery, in 2020 that helped me a lot. 

Unfortunately, I went deaf in one ear because of that surgery. But is kind of a trade-off, because I have a lot less extreme pain than before. So things are going in the right direction there. 

Has that changed the way that you create music, or has it brought a new appreciation to the art? 

Absolutely. This was the first time I went into the studio with my hearing gone, and it brought up a lot of doubt. You know, part of losing your hearing is remembering what it was like before and when you could hear. 

And the way sensory loss is, I can kind of remember, but the first couple of years were the hardest, because it was like, I had to grieve that loss of that hearing. 

But now I can kind of trust myself a little bit more as to, am I hitting the right notes? I can still hit the notes if I listen, if I hear them in my head, I can match that tone outside of my voice. 

Are you working on anything else right now? 

I’m writing a new album. I’m about five songs in, and I’m trying not to write all protest songs.

Well, I have a bucket where I put on my protest songs, and then I get that out of my body, and I’m able to write a little bit more. 

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Amy Abts is a Rochester musician who has been performing for more than three decades. But her impact stretches across the state. 

Rochester musician Amy Abts on online dating, performing with Low and trusting herself after hearing loss

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