Kevin Tihista

Born in Walnut Creek, California, Chicago pop artist Kevin Tihista first picked up the guitar in seventh grade, spurred by his youthful devotion to Kiss. Various odd jobs filled the years after high school until 1989, when a friend living in Naperville, a Chicago suburb, phoned to invite him into a new band. Tihista headed to the Midwest a week later, arriving on his 21st birthday. The outfit, named Maus, lasted only briefly, yet his next group, the grunge band Wood, became a fixture on the Chicago club scene. In 1993 he settled inside the city limits and promptly joined Wes Kidd, the one-time frontman of Rights of the Accused, in the emo-rock outfit Triple Fast Action. Playing bass for TFA, he helped the band issue several indie singles before Capitol released their 1996 album Broadcaster. Major-label cutbacks soon dropped the group, which then moved to Deep Elm for 1997’s Cattlemen Don’t and disbanded the next year.

Tihista supplied several songs to Veruca Salt’s unsuccessful third album, Resolver. Reportedly sitting on roughly 300 finished but unrecorded compositions, he finally yielded to his girlfriend’s urging and launched a solo career, tracking material in neighbor Ellis Clark’s basement studio. Former TFA colleague Kidd took on management duties and forwarded the demo to Wyndham Wallace, who ran the British indie Easy Tiger—the same label that had earlier issued recordings by fellow Chicago pop band the Webb Brothers to notable acclaim. Easy Tiger put out Tihista’s debut solo single, “Lose the Dress,” in October 2000; Rough Trade followed with a six-song self-titled EP in June 2001. Signed stateside to Atlantic’s Division One imprint, Tihista and his backing band Red Terror delivered the September release Don’t Breathe a Word, a striking set of poignant, Beatlesque pop songs. After Atlantic shuttered Division One in late 2001, Tihista inked with Parasol early the next year to reissue Don’t Breathe a Word and soon afterward issued the companion album Judo.