Sweet Sounds: Amanda and the Pastry Shop Girls

A television personality once admonished a show contestant for aiming outside of the box but completely missing the target instead. It doesn’t take a mathematician to find that funny because anyone knows that something can only be either inside or outside of a closed space. Unless, of course, there is a second box around the first, and that is probably what the show’s host meant: Be different, but stay within the defined boundaries of an acceptable eccentricity.

No matter how many boxes you put around the original square — that metaphorical enclosure representing everything mundane in thought — you won’t find Amanda Standalone in any of them, even if that means creating a magical number that is always one step beyond infinity. Some try so hard to be unique that they just end up a different shade of normal, but Standalone doesn’t work at individuality: She’s a natural; just ask her band mates Abby Swegarden and Minda Ringdahl, also known as The Pastry Shop Girls.

“The thing about Amanda is that she just doesn’t give a [bleep],” Swegarden said. “But she’s not the type to go around saying, ‘I don’t give a [bleep].’ She just really doesn’t.”

Ringdahl added: “And those who say they don’t are the only ones who don’t like her. She drives them crazy.”

The distinction here is a critical one. Standalone may not worry much about what people think, but that’s because she spends so much time focused on how they feel. Hardly the brooding rebel type, she’s more a quirky prototype: humble, passionate about her craft and compassionate toward other people. (Small ego plus big creativity multiplied by tireless effort and divided by essential collaborators equals something pretty exceptional.) 

Nichole’s Fine Ladies

The chemistry between Amanda and the girls is created with three parts talent and one cup pure sugar, a recipe first created when they all worked at (where else?) a pastry shop. It was at Nichole’s Fine Pastries where Standalone more or less drafted Minda and Abby into compulsory service.

“I had this show to do and I said ‘you’re coming with me,’” Standalone said. “Performing is one of the best feelings in the world, and I wanted to share it with them.”

At that point she knew they could sing from the times they were all messing around, having fun hanging out after work, but more important than their vocal harmony was the synthesis of their personalities. In order to be tuned in together on the stage, they first had to be in sync off of it. 

“I wanted it to be fun, and I have a lot of fun with them,” Standalone said. “It’s unbelievable what happens when the voices all come together, and there is no one else I would rather share that with.”

She then added: “They make sense.”

Sad in Sweet’s Clothing

When you combine this personal blend of amicitia with performances that capture three beautiful voices and various instruments blending in harmonia, a delicious musical confection brings pleasure to the ear the way rich chocolate truffles please the appetite, but beneath such fluffy praise lies the catch: How can these sometimes bitter songs taste so sweet?

“Amanda writes about things that some people would make sound cheesy,” Swegarden said. “But she never goes there.”

Tightrope walking the line that divides the qualities of fine sentiment from the frivolity of being overly sentimental, Standalone and the girls make it easy to think and smile at the same time. While many writers’ songs fall into opposing categories such as serious-but-depressing versus fun-but-empty, the rare few can make the audience feel inexplicably good about being poor or brokenhearted. Standalone takes on a hopeful, defiant tone that refuses to sugarcoat the harsh realities but never surrenders to them.

It’s a live show that stimulates the mind and warms the heart, bringing even non-believers into the realm of soul, and if this translates half as well onto their first recorded album (due to release before Christmas), everyone will have a can’t miss present they can give to loved ones both young and old, climbing up or beaten down, in or out the box.

The Three Wise Women

Both Abby and Minda use the word genius when they talk about Amanda, but equally impressive is the social genius needed to put their own egos aside without losing confidence in the significance of their contribution. Instead of being threatened by Amanda’s bright fire, they are warmed and illuminated by it, and perhaps they don’t realize it, but they are also fueling it.

Now as for the question of whether Standalone is a genius, that would require a concrete definition of an indefinable word, but she does have three qualities you will find in almost everyone who gets the burden/reward of that label: talent, soul and the aforementioned fire. Everyone probably has some talent in greater or lesser abundance, and everyone definitely has soul buried under a thicker or thinner emotional armor, but fire seems to be the variable that separates potential genius from kinetic creation.

A small campfire is threatened by a lack of wood and by all the naysayers who want to extinguish the flames, but an atomic inferno feeds off of everything and cannot be stopped any more than a fireman can put out the Sun. Standalone devours her environment and takes advantage of what it has to offer: be it traveling the country on next to nothing and performing in the streets for food money, joining forces with like-minded musicians, or spending hours and hours listening to the record collection at the public library in Minneapolis. She hopes to one day gain access to the Smithsonian’s collection of American folk music but says she doesn’t listen for the purpose of breaking it down and analyzing it.

“I don’t need to see the music’s guts,” she said.

And why would you when you can hear them so well?

To learn more about the band, join them on Myspace or Facebook and catch them on WDAY 970 AM on Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 10 a.m. and at The Winery on Friday, Nov. 27 at 7 p.m.

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Who: Amanda Standalone and the Pastry Shop Girls
When: Tues, Oct 27, 10am & Fri, Nov 27, 7pm
Where: WDAY 970AM & The Winery respectively