Fox Chapel grads opening for Smash Mouth at Hartwood Acres

Cal Tucker and Michael Monahan of IMY2 (an abbreviation for “I miss you, too”) won’t have to miss their hometown when they return for an Aug. 17 Hartwood Acres show.

The trio of musicians — third member Annalise Mahanes is from Richmond, Va. — will open for Smash Mouth at one of the park’s free Sunday evening concerts.

Monahan and Tucker grew up together in Aspinwall, both attending Fox Chapel Area High School.

“We were pretty good friends, even as little kids,” Tucker said. “Then once we got to high school, we started playing guitar together.”

While they had been friends since childhood, music merged their paths again as adults. Tucker moved to Nashville, where he played music on Broadway. That’s when he met Mahanes and the two of them found success writing and making music.

“Michael came down to join us to play guitar, and we found that the three of us actually have really good chemistry,” Mahanes said.

The band has been going strong since 2019, though the pandemic was an interesting trial by fire for their beginnings.

“I feel it really kind of shaped us, starting at that time. We were such a live band … and then everything shut down in 2020.”

All three band members serve as songwriters. As a totally independent band, each of the three wears several hats, from playing instruments to handling social media to creating graphic design concepts and aesthetics for the group.

Luckily, not only do the three play well together, but they also write well together, each serving an important role in the process.

“The songwriting part of our job, I think, is our very favorite,” Mahanes said.

Mahanes is the most conceptual of the three, coming up with the idea around which to build the song.

“Cal’s the melody man over here,” Monahan said. “So he comes up with the melodies and then it starts to become a verse and then it starts to become a song.”

While, as Tucker said, they love writing songs about love, sometimes those love songs are a disguise for other serious topics.

“Our most popular song is a song called ‘Bullet,’ and the main line is “you’ve got a bullet with my name on it/and I’m standing in the line of fire.’ Directly, you know, that’s obviously a violent thing,” Tucer said.

Mahanes explained that the song is usually taken as a love song, but it’s actually about struggling with family members going through hard times and taking it out on their loved ones.

“We do sometimes disguise harder topics with a love song,” she said.

In addition to their original songs, IMY2 records a cover almost every week that they post on their YouTube page. Those covers are wide-ranging in genre and time period, from James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” to Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” to Harry Styles’ “As It Was.”

“It’s a combination of what we think we’ll do well, what we like and what we think will sound good for the three of us together,” Monahan said. “We kind of know our fanbase well now. It’s getting easier to predict what we think we’re going to want. We also get requests and we don’t always fulfill those requests, but if I see a song popping up in the comments often, I’ll bring it up and say, ‘OK, do we think we can pull this off?’”

While they admitted that balancing a DIY independent music career is a challenge in the digital age, they’ve also realized that great benefits can be found from online promotion.

“To be honest, the reason we have a career is social media and the internet,” Tucker said. “It’s allowed us to have a platform that most people can access.”

He added that they have fans from all over the world, which would have been an impossibility in past decades.

“The ability to connect with people on really important topics has been amazing. You can find a community for everything. That part of it has been really beautiful, being able to talk to people about mental health, and we are allies of the LGBT community, things like that, we’re able to connect with that audience particularly and make music for them,” Mahanes said.

Their online fanbase also had a hand in choosing their name.

“We picked four different names, and we had them vote on it, and IMY2 won. We felt like it was really profound at the time because we were really far from our families. We also had been traveling and playing shows every single weekend for years at this point. So we didn’t see our loved ones too much.”

But Tucker and Monahan get to come home soon, though. They’re playing at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 17 at Hartwood Acres.

“Cal and I used to go to Hartwood Acres every Sunday in high school to watch those concerts, so it’s about to come full circle. It’s a heartwarming moment,” Monahan said.

“All our friends and families are going to be there, it’s going to be like a big reunion,” said Mahanes.

Her bandmates have adopted her into the “Pittsburgh family.”

“We’re going to enjoy Pittsburgh a little while we’re there, we’re going to go to a Pirates game, so we’re very excited,” she said.

For more information about IMY2, visit imy2music.com.