Meet the Students and Grads of Interlochen's Singer-Songwriter Program

These famous (and soon to be) musicians share their origin stories from northern Michigan

By Kierstin Gunsberg | Aug. 30, 2025

It was the early aughts when, thanks to a little luck and a whole lot of talent, Courtney Kaiser-Sandler’s demo landed in the hands of John Mellencamp. The “Jack & Diane” singer was so impressed with Kaiser-Sandler’s vocals that he invited her to be one of his backup performers. In the years since, she’s toured with her own band, KaiserCartel, finished her master’s program, and during the 2012–2013 school year became integral to the launch of Interlochen Center for the Arts’ Singer-Songwriter program.

“I was living in New York at the time that Interlochen was thinking about this [program],” recalls Kaiser-Sandler, who by then had carved out a teaching career between gigs and album drops. “I thought, wow, what would it be like to teach students who had to audition to be my student?”

A former Interlochen alum herself, she saw how her experience as a working musician could help the school expand beyond their long-running classical voice program, made famous by alumni like Jewel Kilcher. “Classical voice gives everyone a wonderful foundation,” says Kaiser-Sandler “but it doesn’t necessarily develop the artistry or songwriting abilities of young artists.”

Now a quarterfinalist for the Grammy’s Music Educator of the Year Award, Kaiser-Sandler focuses as much on the mental and emotional side of songwriting and performance with her students as she does the technical.

“All the things we make up about how we think an audience is feeling—whether they like our music, whether they like us—being a songwriter, an artist on the stage, performing your own music, it’s a lot harder than performing someone else’s [songs],” she says.

And while greats like Bob Dylan and Stevie Nicks never studied music at an academic level, instilling an inner confidence and strong sense of self in her students before they hit the big-time is one way Kaiser-Sandler hopes to steer them away from the pitfalls of putting themselves at the whim of audiences, “to be criticized and judged, for better or worse, night after night after night.”

Thirteen years in, the program (which is also offered to middle schoolers as a three-week summer intensive) has spurred young musicians from all over the world to vie for a chance to study in northern Michigan. Meet four of them as they share what they’ve learned from their time at Interlochen and where they’re headed next.

Sydney Kassekert, Interlochen senior

Sydney Kassekert’s parents like to remind her that music has always been part of her identity—something they first noticed when Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” was on repeat back in 2011. “They say I knew it by heart by the third time we had played it.”

Influenced by bands like The Chicks and Sheryl Crow, Kassekert grew up on the West Coast where she accumulated piles of journals filled with lyrics. So far, she’s written more than 60 original songs. But it wasn’t until she arrived at Interlochen at 14 that she felt like a bonafide musician.

“I was so nervous,” she says of her audition and moving across the country to attend the academy, “but the second I arrived, I knew it was home.”

While she may have quickly settled into life on campus, it took Kassekert a bit longer to feel at home in the spotlight. “I remember my freshman year coming onto the stage, just shaking,” she says. With Kaiser-Sandler’s coaching and Interlochen’s Performance Shangri-La class, she learned “the importance of repetition and self-confidence,” and began seeing each show as a way to build on the successful parts of her past performances.

She carried that mindset into a recent show at the City Opera House where, for the first time ever, she stood under the warm lights for a vocal solo without the safety net of a guitar or any other instrument. “I had a full band ready, a microphone in hand, and an audience before me… I told myself to have fun because I’d made it so far and deserved that at least,” she says. “I left the stage feeling so proud of myself.”

Wesley Stoker, Interlochen senior

This past fall, when Wesley Stoker learned his grandmother was passing away, he did what writers often do when life gets tough and began to process through words. In just 30 minutes, the Interlochen senior poured his grief into a complete song, creating a kind of thread between his dorm in northern Michigan and his family back in Texas.

“I was struggling with this feeling of division,” he recalls. “I felt so far away from what was going on and out of touch with the situation.” The result became, in his words, “a time capsule” of how he felt in that brief moment.

Stoker credits the last few years of built-in collaboration at school for helping him develop his voice. “I realized that showing people your songs can give you a completely different idea to what you’re doing,” he says. “Whether that’s chords, lyrics, or form, someone else’s input could give you something that you love but never would’ve thought of on your own.”

A multi-instrumentalist (vocals, guitar, cello, upright bass, ukulele—the list goes on), Stoker hopes his songs can offer the same comfort they’ve given him. “My goal is that my story can be a stepping stone to someone else’s way of processing their life,” he says. “I think songwriting has the power to have one person’s story create a universal healing experience for those who listen.”

Rett Madison, 2015 Academy graduate

“Write the songs and tell the stories that feel most authentic to you.” That’s the advice 2015 grad Rett Madison says they’d give to today’s Interlochen students.

Madison, who has appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers and earned praise for her albums Pin-Up Daddy (2021) and One For Jackie (2023), is now recording a third project, continuing to explore the themes of childhood, grief, and identity that have won over critics.

“I’ve always felt very connected to music, and singing has been my creative outlet as early as I can remember,” says Madison. “It wasn’t until I was 12 years old that I began writing songs and short stories and eventually considered myself a writer too.”

Originally from West Virginia, she still remembers the nerves of auditioning for Interlochen and then, the surreal thrill of getting in. “It was a dream come true,” Madison says. “It validated to myself that I was supposed to follow the path of music more seriously.”

After graduation, Madison was homesick for the woods surrounding the northern Michigan campus. “It was one of the few places that I felt happiest and understood as a young person.” But, like any true home, Interlochen keeps calling Madison back. Just last summer, she returned to the Kresge stage to open for Melissa Etheridge and fellow alum Jewel, taking to Instagram to share: “I feel so lucky to have this reason to come back.”

Lauren Jones, 2014 Academy graduate

As one-third of the pop trio Trousdale, Lauren Jones has spent the past year on the road (and in the sky), hitting soundchecks and her pillow between performances promoting the band’s album Growing Pains.

“2025 is probably the heaviest touring year we’ve had yet,” says the “Wouldn’t Come Back” singer as she wraps up the tour’s European leg before heading to Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina venues this fall.

For most singer-songwriter students, this is the ultimate goal: to rack up seven figures in streams, book gig after gig, and, as Trousdale did this summer, perform for the Kelly Clarkson Show’s 1 million+ viewers. But as Jones—who says she doesn’t think she’d be a working musician without her Interlochen education—admits, no amount of live-performance training could have fully prepared her for the grind of touring.

“It’s something you can’t quite figure out until you’ve done it a couple times, and even then, it changes constantly,” she says. “Anything that can go wrong on tour probably will at some point, and you have to learn how to roll with the punches.”

As Jones spends the summer crossing international date lines, her time Up North not only helped her hone her talents but also gave her a wider perspective than her Bay City upbringing alone could have.

“I grew up in a really small town, and hearing experiences from people who have totally different walks of life was pretty limited,” she says. “The diversity of students and teachers at Interlochen really helped me obtain a broader understanding of the world… it was like going to college two years early.”

More Stars to Follow

Interlochen’s halls have launched more than a few household names. Consider this your highlight reel of the school’s latest breakout acts.

Sofía Valdés: As Valdés told Interview Magazine in 2021, leaving home for boarding school isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. In a poetic act of spite spurred by teasing from some of her Interlochen classmates while she learned English, Valdés—who grew up in Panama speaking Spanish and moved to the U.S. at 15 to attend the arts school—released her dreamy beach-pop debut EP Ventura, written entirely in English. Critics hailed the songwriting as “prematurely wise” and “introspective,” proving it doesn’t take a native speaker to capture the nuances of engaging storytelling.

Grace VanderWaal: For Grace VanderWaal, attending Interlochen as a Singer-Songwriter student during the pandemic was a follow-up to a meteoric rise to fame that began just a few years earlier, when, at 12 years old, she won season 11 of America’s Got Talent. Since that win, she’s starred in the Disney+ musical Stargirl, performed an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and watched her hit ukulele ballad “I Don’t Know My Name” rack up over one hundred million streams on Spotify. This past April, VanderWaal released her second full-length album, Childstar, where she explores an adolescence shaped—and sometimes strained—by the limelight.

Claud Mintz, aka Claud: The first artist signed to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, Claud was connected to northern Michigan long before attending Interlochen. In a 2020 piece for the school, they recalled summers spent exploring Traverse City with their mom and her best friend. The duo ended up convincing Claud to audition for the Singer-Songwriter program. Since graduating, Claud has opened for Bleachers (Jack Antonoff’s on-stage moniker), formed the indie-pop band Shelly with Clairo, Josh Mehling, and Noa Frances Getzug, and shot a hilariously sweet music video with Paul Rudd for Claud’s 2023 single “A Good Thing.”

Sav Madigan and Katie Larson of The Accidentals: After meeting between classes at Traverse City West, Sav Madigan and Katie Larson joined the inaugural year of the Singer-Songwriter major in 2012, where they formed The Accidentals. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind of touring nationally, opening for acclaimed artists like Brandi Carlile and Andrew Bird, and releasing eight full-length albums, including their latest, Time Out, which dropped this August.

Chappell Roan: As musician and Interlochen collaborator Seth Bernard recalled to sister publication The Ticker last year, when Chappell Roan attended Interlochen’s Singer-Songwriter summer camp a decade ago, he couldn’t come up with a single note of constructive criticism to share with her, she was just that good. After spending the next decade as a relative unknown, the “Pink Pony Club” singer saw her career explode with the 2024 release of “Good Luck Babe,” and, well, the rest is very recent history.