Brewing coffee, making music, pursuing the dream

By Stephanie Purifoy

Sun contributor

Morgan Arrowood, 25, Vince Grimaldi, 26, and Levi Garrett, 23, all work full-time, 40-hour-a-week jobs. Arrowood and Grimaldi work as baristas at Leelanau Coffee Roasting Company in Glen Arbor and Garrett works in construction. But after they finish work for the day, they turn their attention to their real passion: music.

The trio’s band—Little Graves—has been working for the past year and a half to develop its own sound and write a series of songs. Their first extended play record (EP), titled “Hedonism” came out June 15 with four tracks, written, recorded and produced by them and their local record label.

The group describes their music as a mixture of indie and alternative, with pop and rock elements to it.

Arrowood said she had been writing songs in college—Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City and University of Massachusetts Lowell—as a hobby and a stress reliever when she showed them to Grimaldi. They sat down to work on the songs together with Arrowood’s piano and Grimaldi’s bass.

“We were both wondering if this could have some potential and decided to give it a go just to see what would happen,” Arrowood said.

From there, Grimaldi convinced Arrowood to pull a drummer into their newly-formed band. Garrett hauled all of his equipment over to Grimaldi’s house for a practice one evening in summer 2017.

“It seemed like it all went really smoothly and we all connected really well,” Garrett said. The trio has been together ever since, developing their sound and attempting to find another guitarist to bring into the mix.

Each of them cultivated their passion for music at a young age. Arrowood grew up listening to her mother’s soul tunes and later latched onto her older sister’s music taste; Weezer and The Cranberries stick out to her the most. She was then in choir throughout school.

After she finished high school a Glen Lake, Arrowood decided to study English and History, even though it wasn’t what she was passionate about.

“Our generation has been told a lot that you can’t make any money doing creative things and I was always told that people from northern Michigan don’t make it in music,” Arrowood said. “But I’ve never felt suited to do anything else, basically since I was a little kid.”

Grimaldi also got hooked on music from a sibling. His older brother began playing music and whatever his brother was doing, Vince had to do as well. He continued playing throughout his adolescence and into adulthood, keeping his style buried in the punk rock scene by vibing with bands like Jimmy Eat World and Sunny Day Real Estate.

“When I was younger, I would say that I was a barista playing music but didn’t know how to make it work for a really long time,” Grimaldi said. “Now I feel like we all have a good grasp on how to not be those people who just play music once in a while but instead how to make it a real career.”

Garrett was pulled into music through a friend who introduced him to the guitar. It wasn’t long before his mother bought him his own and not long after that he transitioned to the drums instead. He’s been playing for about 10 years now. He said he drew early inspiration from bands like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and Blink-182.

“One thing that I think is really cool about this band is that we all have different influences but we all find the mutual connection together and it creates a unique sound,” Arrowood said.

All three of them said their parents have become increasingly supportive of the band as they have continued to show progress.

“I’ve been a barista trying to make it in music for a long time. My parents were a lot more gung ho about it when I was 18. Some skepticism is to be expected but this is definitely the most organized and goal-oriented group that I’ve been a part of.”

Arrowood remembers the reactions of people in the community when she told them she was abandoning her conventional education.

“I know how it looks from the outside. People don’t take a small-town band seriously. I always get the pat on the back with the ‘that’s nice, dear’. We’re definitely very serious about it—we have been from the start—and we’ve been making moves even when people don’t see them from the surface,” she said.

A big step for Little Graves was getting a record deal with Vacant Records, a Traverse City record label run by Brian Chamberlain. Grimaldi and Garrett had worked with Chamberlain on previous projects and said that working with him was a natural choice.

“We always joke about how we don’t want to be local heroes in the music scene around here and that’s it. We want to get out of Traverse City,” Arrowood said. “I do want us to get to the point where we’re touring and I think that’s very possible. It just takes a series of moves to get there.”

Right now, they are focusing on getting comfortable performing live shows around the county. The trio will begin recording their full-length album in August and hope to play more shows around the state and eventually set up small tours.

“You can put as much work into it as you want and that’s going to define your success,” Garrett said, “And this is what we all want to do at the end of the day. This is our passion.”

The Little Graves’ first EP “Hedonism” is available on Spotify, iTunes, GooglePlay and other major music distributors. The band also sells a limited number of hard copies at their shows.