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Amy Heidemann of Karmin has got a primped and perfect pin-up look with bright red lips and a neatly kept suicide roll atop her brunette head at nearly all times. She says Nick Noonan, her duo partner on stage and in life (the two are engaged), has got a “dapper” look to match. The two met while attending Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music where Heidemann was studying a mixture of vocal performance and music business and Noonan was paving the way to become a jazz trombonist.
“I knew he was top dog as far as the brass department and trombone, and he thought I was a hot shot singer,” Heidemann says of their Berklee days. “I don’t know if I agree with that,” she clarifies.
“I just say that to make her feel better,” Noonan jokes.
Heidemann came from a very Christian family that resided in a small town in Nebraska while Noonan had similar teensy roots in Maine. But from their modest beginnings and distinguished educations comes an unexpected sound. Not only are the two multitalented as instrumentalists and songwriters, but Heidemann is one hell of a rapper.
“The rapping started a long time ago in Nebraska,” Heidemann recalls while painting a picture of her youth, “but a scrawny white girl trying to rap in Nebraska? I did a lot of practicing in the shower and my parents made sure I wasn’t listening to anything with curse words. It wasn’t until after college when we {Heidemann and Noonan} started doing covers that Nicki Minaj became a huge artist and we were like, ‘We gotta rap.’ Nick heard me do it and was like, ‘I think it’s legit. Let’s post it and see what happens.’”
The duo had been posting a cover song video each week on YouTube.com for 38 weeks in 2011 before their covers of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” and Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now” blew up big time. Now the duo is in the running for a Rolling Stone magazine cover, with the hit single “Brokenhearted” on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and more than 200 million views on YouTube.
Karmin is also touring like mad, including opening the Chevy Court slate of free shows at the New York State Fair on Thursday, Aug. 23, 2 p.m. The musicmakers are riding the wave of their dream, one only realized after post-graduate frustration had set in.
“We finished in 2008 right around the time of the big recession,” Heidemann says. “We had a really tough time finding jobs or income. It was a rough couple years.”
Heidemann was piecing together wedding gigs and projects with other bands and Noonan was trying his hand as a jazz musician when the two made a major decision. “Screw it,” Noonan recalls, “Let’s start our own group because we were in all these different bands playing everyone else’s music and nothing, not one single thing, was taking off. So we were like, ‘Let’s just make our own group and just do everything in-house. New instruments, start completely from zero and do a modern Simon and Garfunkel.’”
They started out performing originals. “As expected, no one cared,” Noonan says frankly, “because it was a group they’d never heard of playing songs they’d never heard.” They tried classic rock covers, but that just made them one in a million. So they tried taking more recent songs and putting their own twist on them, stripping them down and dressing them up with hip-hop beats and raps.
After nearly 10 months of weekly covers on YouTube, it worked. Their smooth, tight delivery juxtaposed with their distinct and conversely sweet, clean appearance has captured the eyes, ears and hearts of YouTube watchers and pop music-lovers. And not only did their clever covers spanning TLC to Chris Brown catapult them to fame, but they’ve allowed them to expose their own music as well.
“We’re kinda covering Karmin right now,” Noonan says. “Everything is focused on the original material and we feel really strongly about it and so do the people at {record label} Epic. It’s all hands on deck with the original material right now and eventually we will go back to covering some songs and having fun with songs here or there. But right now we’re trying to focus on us.”
However, they’re not focusing quite enough on themselves to head down the aisle anytime soon. “We’re working on a wedding,” Heidemann admits. “I don’t know when or how. We need a week off to really do it right and we don’t foresee that happening for a while.”
Until then, the group has a full schedule. They issued their debut EP Hello (Epic) on May 4, appeared on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, played Lollapalooza in Chicago and are embarking on a tour of the United States and Australia with their backing band. And they are excited that their high-energy touring show stops at the New York State Fair.
“I wanna get some great fairgrounds food,” Heidemann fantasizes. “We love the local fairs and activities. We both came from towns of like, 6,000, so this is definitely going to be a first for us as far as bigger fairs go. In the Midwest it’s all about cattle and quilting. It just reminds you of where you came from and gives you a chance to celebrate where you’re from.”Youtube
