Little Big League: The Dynamics of Team Spirit.

Text and top image by Megan Matuzak. Bottom images by Jonathan Van Dine.

Michelle Zauner, lead singer and guitarist for Little Big League, has never seen the movie her band is named after.

“I don’t like sports, I’m an indoor kid,” states Zauner, who is miniature in stature compared to her three male, sports-loving bandmates: drummer Ian Dykstra, guitarist Kevin O’Halloran and bassist Deven Craige.

But Little Big League’s name refers more to the dynamics of their personal brand of melodic pop punk and their “team spirit.” The oxymoron was intentional and humorous for the Fishtown foursome. They’ve even considered getting mesh band jerseys.

O’Halloran and Zauner met in a creative writing class while the two were college students. At the time, Zauner was in a band called Post Post, a melodic-pop, all-girl band. O’Halloran joined the band as a bassist two years later.

In 2011, Post Post broke up, O’Halloran graduated from Haverford College and Zauner graduated from Bryn Mawr College. They decided to move to Philadelphia and start a new band together. They picked up Dykstra, who had played drums for several bands, including Titus Andronicus.

“I was attracted to the diversity that we were all mutually into, from hardcore to pop punk and melodic music and being interested in the possibilities of converging all those things,” Dykstra explains. “I feel like our band has a lot of different flavors of those things in it. It’s diverse.”

By October 2011, they added bassist Deven Craige, and Little Big League began working on their 7-inch record, which they later recorded with Kyle “Slick” Johnson at Fancy Time Studio.

“Our only other release was a two-song, 7-inch that we recorded not long after we were a band,” Craige says as he strokes his sizable beard and adjusts his Misfits T-shirt. “By the time we got to writing and recording this, we were way more comfortable with each other as players and we had a more realized vision of what we wanted the band to be.”

They began writing their first full-length album in 2011 and performed most of the material live before they even entered the studio. Songs transformed and congealed with each performance and then went under the knife everyday, for 12 hours at a time in practice.

“What am I supposed to be feeling at every single moment of this song?” Zauner says, explaining how the band used a chalkboard to document evolution of their songs. “Do these two seconds playing this one thing have a purpose and what does this purpose accomplish?”

They recorded the album in a small, now non-existent home studio in the Berks Warehouse, and it wasn’t completely finished until February. Their debut album, These Are Good People, dropped in July.

These Are Good People, as a record title and mantra for the music, has three different story themes – power dynamics in relationships, why bad things happen to good people and realizing the wealth of friendship they have found. Songs like “Lindsay” and “My Very Own You” personify these concepts.

“I sometimes wonder if I am writing love songs for women in a way of trying to embody a male body,” Zauner says about writing songs from a male perspective. “I think that songs that men write for women are a lot better and more romantic than songs that women write for men. I wanted to do that.”

These Are Good People was the skeleton key that unlocked Pandora’s Box and there’s no turning back now.

“It’s one of those things that you have to remember when working these shitty jobs: to support this really great band instead of the other way around,” Zauner preaches earnestly about keeping positive initial perspective. “You want the security of having a job when you get back from performing or you have to remind yourself that you’re not destined to be a barista, pizza delivery boy or a waitress.”

Little Big League