Phoenix Art Museum is launching a new live music series this month called SOUNDCHECK. It kicks off Thursday, Oct. 16, with 76th Street — a band that was one of the musical guests at last year’s Stonewall Inn Brick Awards Gala in New York City.
The Show caught up with the Phoenix-born, Nashville-based pop duo.
Guitar player Spencer Bryant’s 19-year friendship with keyboardist Haley Gold has involved songwriting since the very beginning.
“Quite literally in fifth grade, when I went over to Haley’s house, we started writing our first song together, and we just never stopped,” Bryant said.
“We wrote a song called “Duet” about, like, looking for a person to sing with,” Gold added, “which is really ironic because that was the first time that we ever hung out and we did not realize that we were setting ourselves up for, quite literally, the rest of our lives.”
Their senior year at Pinnacle High School, the pair officially became 76th Street — named after the Scottsdale road they lived across from each other on growing up.
“We went on a walk and we sat down in the field of our elementary school and we decided, like let’s make this a real thing. Let’s write. Let’s write and record music together and really pursue this,” Bryant said.
“We came up with a band name and then we were like, this is it. This is what we’re doing. We are going to put our entire selves into this. And that is exactly what we did,” Gold said.
“We started taking gigging more seriously, we started taking gigging more seriously, we were going to anywhere that would let us perform, whether it was restaurants or hotels or events, coffee shops, battle of the bands, like anywhere we could get on stage, (yeah) we were gonna do it.”
In 2021, 76th Street moved to Nashville.
“We felt like we had kind of reached our, kind of like a ceiling, in Phoenix,” Gold said. “We pretty instantly found an incredible music community here. We’re surrounded by other people with dreams similar to ours, which is very motivating and inspiring.”
This past summer, 76th Street played at six pride events in six weeks. It’s fitting that they’re performing here during Phoenix Pride month, and their opener at the Phoenix Art Museum is the local drag artist Benaddiction.
“We’ve played in a lot of cities over the past year, but, like, there’s nothing like a hometown show,” Gold said.
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