For Minnesota Music Month, The Current polled local music fans for April’s edition of The Scouting Report. A total of 245 people filled out this year’s Minnesota Music Month Scouting Report ballot, and 455 unique artists were chosen overall. The top 10 artists who received the most support include Rosie Daze Band.

The formation of Rosie Daze Band was truly luck of the draw. At the 2021 Fall Jam gathering hosted by the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old Time Music Association (MBOTMA), mandolin player Jeanne Marti did something she had previously been disinclined to do: Marti entered the jam’s “draw band” activity, where musicians put their names in buckets labeled by instrument, and then the festival curators, at random, put together ensembles based on the names drawn.

By chance, Marti found herself in a group with tenor resonator player and singer Evonne “Boom” Bilotta-Burke and fiddle player Johnna Lawrence. “We worked out a couple songs,” Marti recalls, “and the audience reaction was absolutely incredible.”

At that same Fall Jam, Boom was in a songwriting workshop with banjo player Beth Young and bassist Julie Kittleson, cementing their musical connections. With the addition of guitar player Adelle Hyrkas, the Rosie Daze Band was born. Marti coined the moniker. “I was thinking that we’re happy people, we’re rosy,” Marti says. “Kind of in a rosy daze, [so] I just came up with it.”

The members of Rosie Daze Band have good reason to be happy. All are lifelong music lovers who seem to have found the ideal partners and chemistry for a new bluegrass, Old Time, Americana, and folk band that is already garnering a lot of attention just a few years after meeting.

In 2024, they released their first album, Due North, and followed that quickly with 2025’s Nobody Here But Us. They’ve played the main stage at the MBOTMA August Fest in Richmond, Minnesota, and at last year’s Southeast Minnesota Bluegrass Association (SEMBA) Music Festival.

At the purportedly haunted Mantorville Opera House the band had trouble with electricity, Lawrence recalls. “We don’t know why!” she says. “So we played the whole set unplugged, and it was great.” Rosie Daze Band opened for local artist Sarah Morris, as well as for nationally touring acts Sister Sadie and The Kody Norris Show. “Those are really amazing moments for us,” Boom says.

Different paths led to shared destination

Marti’s trajectory began at age 10 with guitar and cello lessons. “I didn’t even know what bluegrass was till I was 48,” she says, crediting her sister for introducing her to the genre. “I was probably about 52 when I started playing [mandolin].”

Banjo player Young started on piano but switched to stringed instruments, becoming seriously engaged in the folk, singer-songwriter sound while a teenager. “My guitar teacher at that time said, ‘OK, well, if you want to take this any further, it’s time to learn the banjo.’” Young took the advice, got a banjo, and became skilled at both clawhammer and fingerpicking styles, something that has served her music pursuits ever since.

Fiddle player Johnna Lawrence began playing violin in elementary school, and when the teacher needed to work with other pupils on their instruments, Lawrence and another student were sent to a practice room with a book of fiddle tunes — introducing Lawrence to bluegrass.

Boom describes herself as a “polka refugee. I grew up in polka land, and I sang in a polka band when I was a kid for a few years.” Later on, Boom says she was drawn to bluegrass and old-time music because “it had a soul that other music didn’t, and it spoke to me in a way that when I left [a jam or concert], I felt better in the world.”

It doesn’t feel too far removed from her roots, though. “Without an accordion, polka music just becomes sort of bluegrass and old time,” Boom says, “so they kind of go hand in hand.”

Similar to local acts Durry, Al Church, and Humbird, who are based outside the core Twin Cities, the Rosie Daze Band members also come from the suburbs and beyond. Specifically, Andover, Anoka, Wayzata, Maple Plain, Golden Valley, and Spooner, Wisconsin. Although scattered geographically, Rosie Daze Band feel embraced by the Minnesota music scene. “Especially for women singer-songwriters and musicians, I think it’s fantastic,” Lawrence says. “There’s a really lovely, supportive community of these women to each other, for each other, and we come out and support each other’s music. I think that it’s a really good community that we have.”

“There’s so much energy and creativity out there,” Boom says, “and it just feeds on each other, and it becomes sort of this positive spiral that we get to be part of, and it’s kind of a gift.”

“It comes from a long line, I feel, of folks in this tradition,” Young adds. “[Bob] Dylan and others — it seems like it’s always been a little bit of an incubator for folk and roots music innovation. So it’s fun to be part of.”

What’s new and what’s next

On March 31, the Rosie Daze Band released a new single, “Will Rise.” Written by Boom, the song makes lyrical reference to the folk standard “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” and to Gillian Welch’s album, The Harrow & The Harvest. But the song is no mere pastiche.

Boom says she was inspired to write “Will Rise” after seeing James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, multiple times. Boom took notice of the adversity Dylan faced within the film, then took an autobiographical approach. “There are things in that song that I wrote because of who we are as a band,” she says. “I often introduce the song as, ‘This song is about falling down seven times and getting up eight.’ So it talks about adversity, but also the fact that we as Minnesotans, and we as a band, and we as an all-women band especially, face a lot of barriers and we try to just persevere.”

The song is accompanied by a music video, directed by Zach Swanson, with several scenes filmed on location at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis. “We went through some work,” Young says, “especially Boom, submitting the lyrics to the song so that they, the pastoral staff and everybody, could understand what we were recording in that space.”

The rest of the video features a variety of behind-the-scenes insights into Rosie Daze Band, including rehearsals, pre-concert rituals, and social time. Boom says it’s part of a short documentary that filmmaker Swanson is making about the band. “We’re not spring chickens,” Boom explains, “so at this stage of our lives, we’re like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna make a band. Woo!’ And so Zach was like, ‘Some people might be interested in that.’”

In addition to the forthcoming documentary, Rosie Daze Band will soon appear on an episode of PBS Backroads, set to air on April 30. For upcoming live shows, they’ll play the main stage at the SEMBA May Music Festival in Houston, Minnesota, from May 15 to 17, and in June, they’ll be the first act to play at Bryant Square Park in Minneapolis as part of the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board’s 2026 Music in the Parks series. August 1 sees Rosie Daze Band play the Sioux River Folk Festival in Canton, South Dakota, and at the end of that month, they’ll play one of the free stages at the Minnesota State Fair (specifics TBA in May). When autumn comes, they’ll return to the studio to record their next album, building on “Will Rise” alongside other new songs they’ve been workshopping.

And the aspirations continue. Rosie Daze Band hope to someday play at the Chief Theater in Bemidji, the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis, and maybe even the Bill Monroe Bluegrass Festival in Bean Blossom, Indiana. “Sometimes I set goals,” Boom says, “and then eventually I tell the rest of the band that we have a goal. … I feel like it’s a good thing to focus a band, not only on creating music, learning music, finding out how to create music together, but also to have something else to kind of grow from.”

Related: Minnesota Music Month Scouting Report 2026: The top 10 new local artists

External Link

Rosie Daze Band – official site