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Crisp trumpet notes soared over the packed crowd of students in the house. Overhead, thin slices of dried lemon peels hung from fishing line that glimmered in the spotlights. A few minutes earlier, senior Sarah Gross finished her set, and it was now Peter Groppe’s turn. He had taken to makeshift stages dozens of times at house shows as the guitarist for the student band NONEWFRIENDS. But this time, all eyes were only on him.

The trumpet solo waned, and Groppe softly sang the opening lyrics to his first song with an embarrassed grin, his bandmates cheering him on from three feet away. By the night’s end, though, Groppe would be belting out the lyrics to his lead single “Nice Guys.”

“It’s just one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me,” said Groppe, a multi-instrumentalist and senior music industry major. “I have no idea who these people are, but they’re singing the words to the song that I wrote.”

For those in attendance on Saturday, Sept. 4, Groppe gave fans a live taste of his debut solo EP, “Sugar Water,” which had been released at midnight. Produced over the course of 2020, the album is a nostalgic love letter to childhood summers, be it a rain-soaked day or a warm summer night.

Cooped up in a house at Syracuse and without opportunities to perform due to the pandemic, Groppe said his album came together while reflecting on better days. There to help him bring his vision to fruition was fellow NONEWFRIENDS. bandmate and senior Jack Harrington.

“Most of this we recorded in my bedroom,” Harrington said. “We were both really happy with the quality of it. So, it’s definitely a testament (that) you can always see your vision fully through as long as you’re in the right mindset.”

Harrington not only cowrote the five-song project but served as the producer, recording engineer and mixing engineer. Right from the beginning, Groppe knew his album was going to be centered on summer, he said, though not in a “Beach Boys summer pastel” way. He largely credits Harrington with adding an airy, synth-heavy sound to the album.

“Jack is so good at putting what you need in a song, like instrumentation wise, but not overstepping that line. It doesn’t ever feel like too much,” Groppe said.

Groppe said that part of that spacious sound comes from the contributions of former and current string players in the Syracuse University Symphony Orchestra. Without any rehearsals, the string players arrived at the Diane and Arthur Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive, near Bird Library, and performed the arrangements for the final recording.

Also in the recording studio watching the creative process unfold from afar was Groppe’s photographer-turned-manager, Nicholas Peta, an audio arts graduate student at SU. Peta said he dealt with the social media and marketing strategies for the album, which included booking live gigs and designing merchandise.

Peta’s knowledge in photography helped to create a visual concept for the album that revolved around, of all things, lemons.

“We’re talking about potential ideas for album covers,” Peta said, “and I was like, ‘Man, we’re going to need to have a lemonade stand or something in order to raise money for that.’ And then we were like, wait, but this is a concept that could be really cool to work with.”

During the development of Groppe’s album, his bandmate and friend Jack Harrington cowrote the songs and did much of the production and sound engineering.
Nicholas Peta

Soon, the name “Sugar Water,” a reference to lemonade, became the working title, and the team decided that everything was going to be lemon-themed in the rollout. “We definitely are Tops’ greatest client when it comes to purchasing lemons,” Peta said. Some fans dubbed Groppe the “lemon boy” in the lead-up to the release.

But social media played another important role: It gave Groppe the confidence to share his voice for the first time. When he was younger, he remembers singing along to Beatles records. Then middle school started and he stopped singing altogether out of embarrassment and a belief that his voice wasn’t strong enough, he said.

Aside from singing to himself, Groppe refrained from singing again until college, when his music industry major required him to work on his vocals. He remembers being a “nervous wreck” for the first few weeks.

“I had so much faith in the kind of work that [Groppe] was doing,” Peta said. “And I very much wanted to be a part of it. I felt like, seeing someone that cared so much about their craft, I wanted to be able to offer my particular skill set in a way that benefits them to keep doing the thing they are best at.”

Like many others at the height of the pandemic, Groppe found respite in TikTok and began posting covers of his favorite songs by artists including Paul McCartney and Rex Orange County, two artists Groppe said he channeled on his project. Today, he has over 10,000 followers on TikTok praising his voice and guitar chops in equal measure.

“I’ve finally gotten to a point where I’m comfortable with how I sound,” Groppe said. “A lot of people are mean on the internet, but I don’t know, I felt kind of lucky because a lot of people were saying very nice things. And sometimes it’s just those anonymous opinions that help something click.”

Groppe was one of the main songwriters for NONEWFRIENDS., but along the way, some of the songs he had penned felt too personal, and the idea for a solo album sprouted. Most of “Sugar Water” is firmly rooted in Groppe’s own emotions and college experiences, he said, except for the track “Nice Guys.” Groppe wrote the chorus but struggled for a time to find material for the verses from his own life.

Ultimately, he looked to stories from his friends and even borrowed a verse from the handful of songs he decided not to release on the EP. Groppe and Harrington recorded 90% of the song in one afternoon, going from an unpolished demo to the album’s energetic lead single. Harrington said it was the highlight of the album-making process.

Groppe’s album is a departure from the indie-pop, R&B sound that he helped to curate with NONEWFRIENDS. He said the album is for people like him, who enjoy meditating over a cup of peppermint or peach tea.

“It’s not like ‘sad boy stuff,’ because I don’t really like that term or the music, but just stuff that is not all sunshine and rainbows, more of like the darker, end-of-summer feel,” Groppe said. “A lot of the songs came out of last summer when a lot of the normalness of life was changed.”

Published on September 12, 2021 at 10:03 pm