Savanna Woods
Raine Stern: The Greta Thunberg of music?
For the last few years, Raine Stern has called Madison home, having moved to the city from New Glarus when she was just 18. Her sublime guitar skills turned heads; many called her a guitar prodigy. Now in her early 20s, the singer-songwriter and guitarist has grown beyond those labels into someone comfortable speaking her mind on important issues both in and out of music. She is as passionate about environment and climate activism as she is music.
“I am going to be known as the Greta Thunberg of music,” says Stern, referring to the famous young Swedish climate change activist. “I will meet her someday, and we will throw an event where I play for free, and we raise millions and millions of dollars to help clean up the oceans, or to bring awareness and attention to help stop some things that politicians are trying to do to continue screwing over poorer countries and stealing oil from them,” says Stern. “Whatever it is, I’m here to learn, and I’m here to talk about it, and I’m here to make art about it.”
Stern hopes not only that her music will promote good causes, like environmental awareness, but that her audience will trust her as a voice for good.
While indebted to her time in Madison — a community that supported her as a contestant recently on The Voice — she says she’s looking for new challenges and scenery. To take her craft to the next level, she’s moving to Los Angeles later this year.
“Madison’s much smaller pool, much smaller network, was a really good practice space,” says Stern. “I know it’s going to be different, and I know it’s going to be harder, but I feel like I’m graduating. [My] networking and music abilities, they’re ready for L.A.”
She hopes to build a new band in California, “half men, half women, and just a group of unique, different people who are all just as good or better than me. I don’t want to be the best player in the room anymore.”
Before she leaves, she’s throwing herself a send-off party Nov. 13 at the Barrymore Theatre. The event is a fundraiser to help her finish the new album she’s working on, as well as to aid Clean Lakes Alliance, a nonprofit devoted to improving the quality of the Yahara River watershed.
“I can’t do any of this stuff alone, and I never will be able to, so this has to be a group effort,” she says.
She currently has three album concepts mapped out and planned, which she hopes to self-fund with help from the Barrymore event. The first will be called Into the Light, which she describes as a “coming-of-age album where I address my own feelings, my own relationships, and what it’s like to be a smart, earnest, young person” and encompassing her growing awareness of environmental issues.
She’ll follow that up with Pop Cult, a collection of pop songs focusing on the “vapidness and shallowness that’s in a lot of pop culture and a lot of pop media,” she says. The third album will be called Lonely Together, with lyrics focusing on the climate crisis, feminism and equality, among other things.
She’s ready to flip “some tables on those kinds of old-school ways of doing things, and these super corporatized ways of doing music, and to make caring look really cool.” She’s already challenged The Voice’s recycling practices, which she found wasteful. Much of the plastic and paper products created for use for the show, including food packages for contestants, was “just not being used at all, or was never even being taken out of their packages, and then completely just thrown away.”
“I calculated how much money that they were wasting and they could be saving,” she says. “I emailed it to every single person who works in the show, including all of the contestants, and forced them to actually make some changes, and then they did. “There’s a way to get everybody to shake their booty and, at the same time, leave feeling wholesome and empowered,” she adds. “They can go hand in hand.”
