Singer-songwriter Jenny Scara returns to home turf this week, headlining Gender Envy Friday night at the Coffeehouse with a new EP in tow.
The Batavia native moved to Bloomington-Normal for school, goal tending for the Redbird women’s soccer team and sticking around for graduate school at Illinois State. She cut her teeth in Normal's underground music scene, where her current iteration of bandmates started to gel.
“I’ve been writing music since I was like 15,” Scara said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
She put a few acoustic songs out on SoundCloud in 2018. An early version of Mine got 22,000 streams. A studio version of the same song was part of a 2024 EP called Love You Always.
Rhythm guitarist Tom Harlovic joined in 2023. Bassist Nick Kobler came on board shortly after that.
“Me and Nick were working at Maggie Miley’s together for a couple years in Uptown,” Harlovic said. “That’s how I met Jenny. We had some of the same friends.”
“I remember you telling me about Kobler,” Scara said to Harlovic. “He was like, he’s a god at this.”
Kobler did not confirm or deny god-status. He first picked up a guitar in elementary school.
“It’s just been a love story ever since,” Kobler said. “It’s all I want to do.”
Near the end of grad school, Scara realized she wanted to give music a shot.
“I had this weird vision of myself when I was super old, laying on my death bed, filled with regret and anger at my past self for never having tried,” she said. “It was that day I was like, OK, I need to try.”
Scara moved back home to the Chicago suburbs, for now. Bandmates are scattered between here and there. They’re making a go of it in Chicago’s indie rock scene — and figuring it out.
“I’ve always had big hopes and dreams in music,” Scara said. “The first goal is to be able to do it and not need any other job to sustain myself.”
She’s not there yet, but Scara’s music is catching on. The band will have played shows in Kansas City and St. Louis shortly before Friday’s set at the Coffeehouse. They have a house show in Chicago on Saturday. Then it’s back to the Twin Cities next week to open for a fledgling psych rock band, Blind Baby, on April 10. Blind Baby won the judges' vote in that venue’s Battle of the Bands last fall and is celebrating their one-year anniversary — aiming to follow in Scara’s footsteps.
And she signed with Broken Record Music Club’s Tyler Witt, who, like Scara, is a sportsy multihyphenate. Witt played pro football before diving into artist management and is particularly passionate about promoting Central Illinois’ music scene.
Out on streaming platforms Friday, Listen Up! is a prime example of Scara’s eclectic sound, culled from the whole band’s encyclopedic, cross-genre listening and try-anything attitudes. It’s somewhere on the indie folk/indie rock spectrum, unafraid to flirt with a bit of Midwestern twang.
Best of all, they’re really nice. And dreaming big.
“I would love to have enough money to buy my mom a nice house in the woods,” Scara said. “I’ve been thinking about that since early high school.”
“My parents are my rock and have always supported every hope and dream I’ve ever had,” Harlovic said. “Making it big, I would definitely pay it forward to them, show that love and support back. I just love that journey aspect of it. You just keep getting bigger and boom. You wake up one day and you’re like, wow, we’re like pretty famous.”
Gender Envy, a festival celebrating underrepresented communities, takes place from 6-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Coffeehouse, 114 E. Beaufort, Normal. Tickets are $10 per night, or $15 for a festival pass at ticketleap.events. Listen Up! drops Friday on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music. Jenny Scara plays the Castle Theatre April 10 with Freak, Beetlewing and Blind Baby. Tickets are $12 at thecastletheatre.com.
