We recently connected with Nicole Strahm and Mackenzie King and have shared our conversation below.

Nicole and Mackenzie, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

One of our most meaningful projects is our EP we released this year “So…That’s It?” We first started working on the EP the summer of 2021. We had been wanting to create some sort of album/EP for a while but due to the circumstances, we could never find a time to work on it. We went song by song one at a time to perfect each on to our liking. We would come to the studio with a single idea and expand from there. We’ve had rough ideas for possible EP themes but one certain idea always stuck out. Originally we wanted the EP to be about the stages of grief you go through in a break up. After writing all the songs we decided a theme on what we came up with rather than trying to make what we wrote fit a certain narrative.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

A Way Out of Ordinary is an all girls group from Kansas City Missouri that started back in 2018. We started as an all girl trio but now are a duo. Nicole Strahm is the singer/bassist of the band and Mackenzie King is the drummer. The latest project we have released is our EP “So…That’s It?” in April and we have also released 3 other singles before that. In March we had a featured story in VoyageKC magazine. We have played at various open mic nights and shows in Kansas City.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Something that we had to realize as a band is to stop comparing our work and what we’ve done to others around us. With platforms like TikTok, you see all these people blowing up over night. We had to learn that our content isn’t worse than others just because we weren’t one of those bands on social media who get recognized so quickly. There are so many more factors that go into creating a name for yourself. It takes more time than one might think because of people getting famous so quickly from social media. It doesn’t make the value of what we make any less. We’ve had to learn that those factors don’t define our work.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Early into writing our songs for our EP we unfortunately lost a member. At the time we had only had one song done and were in the process of a second so it wasn’t too detrimental to that process. When it came to shows, we now had to find people who we could hire to rehearse and play with us. This made things difficult because if the people we would normally contact weren’t available we would either have to find another person last minute or have to cancel the gig all together. We couldn’t just play the shows by ourselves either because we wanted to quality of our sound to still hold true and not be lesser during live performances.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/awayoutofordinary/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/awooband
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpXaAbRIViFuEKIrw6cv80w
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/album/64nW41o92fE1mqBf9dSjFY?si=zpFs94ENQUip74NRh9pHLA (EP Link) https://open.spotify.com/artist/6Gn53msmrRK6res8d42Vl6?si=TlBrhIHsSymz9jWUvMoirA (Spotify Link) https://music.apple.com/us/artist/a-way-out-of-ordinary/1485326647 (Apple Music Link)

Image Credits
Christina Nguyen