Every band has to start somewhere, and in the case of American Grandma, all it took was a family laptop, GarageBand and a bit of experimentation. At age 15, that’s where songwriter and vocalist Jensen Keller first initiated the inception of American Grandma.
After learning to play guitar during childhood, Keller spent his high school years writing songs, recording them on GarageBand and posting the results on Bandcamp. The seed of American Grandma was planted in a childhood bedroom and has since germinated into a “slowcore post-rock” trio with a handful of recorded albums, a slew of rave reviews and a solid local support system.
With a childhood friend, Keller got out from behind the screen and played a couple of local shows at Denver’s 7th Circle and Fort Collins’ Downtown Artery in 2015, which involved an “insanely bulky Macbook plugged into the venue sound system and the two of us playing,” said Keller. “Whoever saw those early sets had a ton of patience, to say the least.” In 2015 Keller enrolled in to CU Boulder, where he began volunteering at the student-run radio station, Radio 1190 KVCU Boulder. That’s where he met his bassist and dear friend, Caden Marchese.
By 2016, Keller and Marchese would become the main duo that was American Grandma. That’s when the band was able to level up. “Caden brought a ton of engineering, recording, mixing and mastering knowledge that I didn’t have,” he said. “It had a huge impact on our sound.” In 2017, the duo released their first album together, Sensation / Forever. Adding drummer Bryce Slavick turned American Grandma into the trio it is today and a “more live-oriented band,” releasing EP Nine Swords in 2017 and Superdog in 2019.
In March, American Grandma celebrated the release of their latest album, Rare Knives of Light, which Keller began writing during the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, the band had gotten used to playing live and going on tour “as a main staple of [American Grandma’s] identity and music.” When their 2020 tour got canceled, Keller “ended up reverting back to the oldest form of American Grandma and recording demos alone on [his] laptop as a way to pass the time and process what was going on around [him],” he said. Working back and forth with Marchese, Rare Knives of Light began to materialize. Though most of the album was created remotely, the final product came together in their friend, Madeline Johnston’s, recording studio in New Mexico.
Currently, The band lives across the country. But Denver prevails as founding father Keller’s home base. at this moment, he views American Grandma as “more of a long-term recording project” rather than an active live band. “It brings me comfort that no matter where each of us are located, we can still create things together and keep this project alive,” he said.
Considering the band’s many past iterations, Keller believes they’ll go back on tour and play live shows again one day. Until then, American Grandma lives on not only with Rare Knives of Light but with the local music scene in Colorado, to which Keller says he owes “a large part of our trajectory to — I never would have met my collaborators if not for being part of the community.”
Listen to American Grandma’s Rare Knives of Light here.