Mei-Ling Anderson of the Wars of 1812 on Music and Arts Education

How did you get into making music, and how did arts education (or lack thereof) affect you and your music?

The four of us in The Wars of 1812 have been making music for most of our lives. I think that somewhere, we all have cassette tapes we made as children, playing cover songs through small practice amps. The band as it is now is a result of connections we had made in various music circles that overlapped throughout high school and college.

Our band grew out of an album that Bobby Maher (drums) and Peter Pisano (guitar/vocals) created their last year of college. I had met Bobby in high school (at jazz camp) and he asked me to play bass with them for a live show they were asked to do. We had so much fun rehearsing and playing together that we decided to take a week and record an album that summer. We initially brought in Bobby’s friend from high school, Peter Rosewall, to engineer the album, but we quickly decided that he should also play keyboards on every song. None of us went into recording the album with the intention that we would start a band, but a year later we moved to Minneapolis in order to play music together as much as possible.

I can’t emphasize enough how critical arts education is. I wouldn’t know some of my best friends, including Bobby and Peter Rosewall, without having had an arts education available to me during high school. My father and Rosewall’s father both teach music by profession, so we were really lucky to grow up around people who taught us its value. If my high school hadn’t been able to afford an upright bass, I would never have been able to travel to places like New York and Chicago. Music, theater, singing, liberal arts, and visual arts are all things that have greatly defined who I am and the things that I love.

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