The making of Stereo Jane and the hopes of intergalactic pop-rock stardom for a set of 17-year-old twins from Bloomfield Hills

"Sometimes I'll stay up until 4 in the morning writing songs — yes, I'm nocturnal. I'll even wake up in the middle of the night and start writing," Sydney says.

The girls miss their friends, but they get to hang out on the weekends. Emilia went in to take the ACTs recently and bumped into several teachers in the hall that seemed unaware of what to say. "Are you still doing that band of yours?" they said.

Emilia stopped by the lunchroom after taking the tests. "Looking around, I see kids jumping on tables in the lunchroom and throwing stuff. I don't miss this. I'm so grateful to be doing what we're doing now." she says.

"I'm always intrigued by sibling bands — they're usually very locked in, and it's fun to watch decades of making music together play out onstage," Kathy Vargo, who does PR for Rustbelt, says. "It's obviously really unique to have twin girls as lead singer and drummer. Not to mention the fact that they're stunningly beautiful, and they have a freshness about them."

Their father asks that people do consider how young they started, and how serious they take this stuff. He never calls them prodigies, but I would.

"People might think they're 17 and this just happened. But they've been doing this since they were 6 years old, at least three days a week," their father says. "They've been going into studios since they were 9 or 10. There have been the disappointments of people promising them things or contacting me and saying they want to do this, that, and the other thing. The biggest disappointments have been where they think they're gonna get a show that somebody offers an opening for so and so. They do thrive so much on playing live. And when you're young, a little disappointment seems like such a bigger disappointment because you don't have the context yet. I come from a business background in the construction business. I have that perspective, and I have the perspective of playing music. Thankfully, I've been able to make a lot of good moves for them."

There are a lot of stories about their early development, but I like his story of the first time he noticed Sydney could sing.

"I believe she was 2 years old, and watching the The Little Mermaid," Mark says. "I heard this crazy voice so I went in to see what was going on, and it was her, singing. I'm not sure she could string sentences together at the time. It was a booming voice and word for word the song from the movie, and right on pitch. I remember looking at her thinking, 'Wow, I've never heard a little kid sing like that.'"

Her first song came a few years later.

"We were at a family dinner, hanging out. It was called 'Girls Night Out,' the song," she says. I ask what it was about and she says, "Just me and my friends on a girls night out."

Because this word is ridiculous, let's only say it once: Dadager. It's not only a poorly constructed term, but the reputation for fathers who help run the careers of their talented kids is not the best one. The dads of Brian Wilson, Michael Jackson, and Jessica Simpson all spring to mind. Mark strikes me as imposing, intense, and focused on helping his kids. With how they've all worked toward this goal for so long, and the way that music is incorporated into everyday life, he's far closer to the parent of girls about to go to Olympic Village for the first time, more than anything.

"He never left them alone in here, the whole time they recorded with us," Sutton at Rustbelt says. "He definitely gave a fair amount of input during the sessions, but he is an experienced musician. And he hovered around, but isn't one of those hovering parents."

Mark is from Detroit, Seven Mile and James Couzens. His dad was in construction and even built one of the shopping malls the family frequents today. Mark's band Nailing Betty played around town a lot in the '90s and early Oughts. They sounded like Led Zeppelin meets Stone Temple Pilots; Mark sang, with a bit of a Vedderesque swagger. They were good, and they released one CD, but they never broke out much beyond regional coverage and gigs. He talks of always having to work real hard to be a decent singer. When he realized while they were very young that his girls might be more talented than he, there was a mixture of pride and humility.

"The pride I feel when I see them onstage, even sitting in the basement as a fan and listening to a song, it's so much more rewarding — for them to be the stars means so much more to me," he says.

When the twins were brought home from the hospital 17 years ago, their parents decided they were not going to tiptoe around and whisper all the time. Even when it was loud, they figured when the kids were tired enough, they'd fall asleep. This often meant that they fell asleep while their father's band was playing, as their bedrooms were right above the basement practice space. Mark and Holly split when the kids were 4, so the Nailing Betty practices stopped in that house when Mark moved out. But it wasn't too long before the kids took over the practice space beneath their bedrooms and made it their own. And their father was there for any lessons, drum heads, or anything else they might need.

Mark took his kids to Florida when they were about 10, not long after they'd started to play out. (Their first shows were at the Nu Wave, at 9 years old; they were called See Jane Rock at the time.) Mark somehow arranged for the kids to open for the Four Tops. They were originally asked to play five songs. That got trimmed to three, which upset Sydney. The group liked them so much, they invited them to go record a demo at their Harmonie Park Music studios in downtown Detroit.

"The demo didn't quite work out; they just weren't as tight as they needed to be," Mark says. But as a result of the Florida show, the twins played at DTE the following year, opening up for the Four Tops and the Temptations. "And they flew us out to Hollywood and did the Gibson's Amphitheatre, warmed up for them there. We've become very friendly with them, and still stay in touch. Duke Fakir, he's the only remaining original Top. And his son, Duke Jr., we've become very good friends with. We still talk to them a lot."

When they were 12 years old, the twins won best new artist at Summerfest in Milwaukee (which calls itself "the world's largest music festival"), voted by the audience out of 700 local and national bands. Around this time, back at school, Sydney started to get hassled. Other kids were teasing her because she could sing. That might sound trivial to adult ears, but it traumatized a young Sydney. "I just never understood why someone could be bullied for being talented," Emilia says.

With a bit of time, Sydney was able to write an inspirational song about the experience.

"I figured they were bullying me because I was a bad singer," she says. "It came to the point where they bullied me outside of school, and I was afraid to even go out. I was thinking about quitting singing until a few friends stood up for me at school. Some teachers got involved, and eventually the bullying stopped. It was around then that we went to Atlanta to write some songs, and 'Sing It' just came to me."

The tune caught the attention of Detroit production team Exxodus Pictures, who were looking to branch into music. Over the course of three days, Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad at Exxodus filmed the girls in the Masonic Temple and then added a bunch of special effects in post. The song went viral, and, as of this writing, has 1,235,445 YouTube views (they don't sound anything like it anymore, though, if you're curious).

I spend an hour and a half watching the group record a demo for a song called "The Antidote" in Garage Band on guitarist Joey Gaydos Jr.'s laptop. A scratch guitar take plus Emilia's drums were laid down in one or two takes. Then bassist and backing singer Randy Martin got his bass part done in six, as he was still figuring out some transitions. Sydney needed three run-throughs to get her vocals right. It was a relief to hear the lyrics, as I'd misheard one bit as "James Brown lips," which is lame. The real lyric was "James Bond slick."

"Joey played a guitar lick that reminded me of the James Bond movies, so I decided to go along with it," Sydney says.