Eliza Abernathy is the drummer of Blank Newspaper’s Local Band of the Year for 2016, The Pinklets. In the past year, she and her sisters have played Waynestock, Bonnaroo, WDVX’s Holiday Ho Ho Hoedown, BLANKFest and begun work on their first studio album.
Eliza Abernathy is 12 years old.
Along with her older sisters Lucy, 14, and Roxie, 16, Eliza has navigated some of the area’s biggest stages while navigating adolescence. But surely the pitfalls of middle and high school are easy to avoid when you’re a budding rock star? The other kids are all super-impressed, right?
“I’m in seventh grade,” Eliza deadpans. “No one even knows what Bonnaroo is.”
“One day is was announced, and they were all like ‘what?’” Roxie, the band’s bassist/keyboardist says. “And then they got over it really quickly.”
No, The Pinklets have not been immune to issues of teen angst, even while taking on ambitious creative projects like the band. In fact, their blooming notoriety has already produced their first encounter with an infamous archetypal character of today’s web-driven music world: The Internet Troll.
“He made fun of my pedal board,” guitarist Lucy fumes. That was over two months ago and she’s still angry about it.
“It is just a piece of plywood with a distortion pedal and a tuner,” her dad Kevin Abernathy, a Knoxville legend in his own right, quips at her, winking as he gives his daughter a hard time.
“Hey, I like to keep it simple,” she says, defensive. “I go for a grungy thing.”
Kevin is a Gen-X-er; he was already active on the scene during grunge’s advent in the ‘90s and it seems to inform his own style, a tongue-in-cheek mix of indie, power-pop, folk and Americana rock that has delighted area crowds for years. That his daughters are rocking flannel and playing alternative rock 20 years later must be a point of immense pride. But is it produced, calculated?
“They don’t try to run the band,” Lucy says. “Our parents give us a lot of freedom.”
All the girls wanted to stress that in no way are their folks “stage parents,” Lucy says with air quotes and a cringe. Kevin says they don’t even sit in on practices. They don’t encourage the girls to play more or less. Once Lucy was complaining to her mom about something band-related and she says she asked her, ‘well, do you want to quit?”
“I feel really supported,” Eliza says. In a From the Living Room house concert where Kevin and The Pinklets both played their own sets, there were a few songs in the middle where the girls joined their father on his songs, and it was apparent they sincerely love him and his music and he shares his love and passion for it with them more in the form of organic influence and encouragement.
The girls even appeared on some studio tracks of Kevin’s: “Drama House” and “Locked Up in the Keys,” from his 2012 album, Some Stories. They’re recording a few tracks with him for his upcoming new album, Family Hour.
Roxie says she remembers a show when she was a little girl where Kevin flicked a pick off stage at Lucy and being jealous.
“He always looked like he was having a great time, and it turns out he was,” Eliza says, laughing. “[Now] I’m all in.”
How did the band initially form? I asked.
“Well, first we were band-mates, then we became sisters,” Lucy says, with perfect sarcasm. With teenagers, stupid questions get stupid answers.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Roxie says, and since she was little she’s been drafting her younger sisters into the fold and they’ve all learned their instruments as they’ve gone. They’ve each had lessons of some sort, official or from Kevin, but as a band they say they’ve grown like any teenage garage band, by listening to music they love, looking up tabs for favorite songs and jamming in the room together to figure out their sound.
The striking thing about The Pinklets at first glance is their natural vocal talent; all three sing and harmonize beautifully and powerfully. Their voices are mature and controlled and they can do power or they can do nuanced softness. But perhaps the more impressive thing for their age is they’re playing original stuff they wrote, and it’s hooky as hell.
So what’s the endgame? Are The Pinklets going for the gold, fame, all that?
“We just want to play music and share more music,” Lucy says. The girls are working on their first studio album, likely to be self-titled, with John Baker and Gray Comer in The Arbor studio in South Knoxville.
Blank has named The Pinklets Local Band of the Year partially for what they’ve accomplished in 2016, but also for the immense potential obvious in the group. Who knows, by 2020 or beyond, readers may be seeing them as Paste or Rolling Stone’s band or album of the year nationwide.
“The best compliment someone could give to us, Bill Foster told us,” Lucy says, paraphrasing: “He said ‘you’re not just good for kids, you’re good for anyone. You’re a good band.’”
