Ten years ago, Tiffany told her future bandmate Chad a small lie. She said she could play guitar.

She couldn’t, not really. Chad bought her one anyway, and two months later the pair were onstage together in a Foo Fighters tribute band called Fooey, with Tiffany figuring out where her fingers belonged in real time. Six months after that, the two of them started GrungePop, the band that played the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally this month while marking its tenth year together.

I caught up with Tiffany and bassist Schylar in the green room after their Loudfest set at the Loud American. “I cannot believe I’ve been doing this for ten years,” Tiffany said, and Schylar jumped in before she could finish the thought. “Well, I was in middle school,” Schylar said, back when Tiffany and Chad first started this thing, years before anyone handed her a bass.

A Decade Built on a Dare

This summer marked the band’s first time playing Summer Nights. They came back this year with a full decade behind them and a lineup that took years to settle. Along the way, a friend running their social media landed them a message on TikTok that widened the audience well past the rooms they were used to playing.

GrungePop is Tiffany and Chad, who are married and both play guitar, along with Schylar on bass and Ronnie on drums. This particular lineup, Tiffany said, is her favorite the band has ever had, though she tried to keep that comment off the record before changing her mind mid sentence. “We ride together, we play together, we hang out together,” she said. The friendship, she told me, shows up onstage as something closer to chemistry than choreography. It also cuts down on band drama. Everyone wants the same thing out of this, to keep grinding and keep playing bigger shows, so the usual arguments that break up bands never get much oxygen here.

The band’s name comes from that same range. GrungePop can slide from Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” straight into Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” in the same set, or hand you a Muffs cover of a Kim Carnes song and call it grunge. Bars used to turn the band down over the name alone, worried “grunge” meant something too heavy for their crowd. “It really doesn’t matter what your name is once you get your footing,” Tiffany said. “We cover everything from grunge to pop.”

Reading the Room Beats the Setlist

Schylar’s path here started earlier and quieter. Classical bass at nine, an upright in the school orchestra, jazz through her teens, then a gap year that turned into learning sound production from Chad himself. She worked her way onto this stage as a roadie and light tech before anyone handed her a bass and a set list.

That range shows up in how the band works a room. Chad calls the audible mid-song, dropping tracks and adding others based on how the crowd responds in real time. During one recent rally set, that meant slipping in a Stone Temple Pilots song that never made the printed list. The band also keeps a Tia Carrere cover in rotation, the one from “Wayne’s World,” because it fits the party mood better than almost anything else in the set. Nobody in the crowd noticed the swap that night. That’s the point.

The Songs They Never Get Sick Of

Ask Tiffany which song never gets old, and she doesn’t hesitate: Bush’s “Machinehead.” Schylar picks Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” though her face doesn’t always sell the fun. “I’m a very nice girl, but I have a little bit of RBF,” she said. “They tell me, when we play the heavy stuff, we don’t stop smiling.”

Ten People or Two Hundred

Tiffany has played to a room with more bar staff than customers and still walked away happy, because the crowd feeds off whatever energy the band brings first. She calls it a loop: the room mirrors the band, the band mirrors the room right back, and it keeps building until ten people leave talking about the show for weeks, telling ten more people after that.

A rally crowd tends to match that energy back, dollar for dollar, which might be the best possible pairing for a band built on reading a room for a living.

I met Tiffany the day before this interview, at Homeslice Media’s annual Jack Daniel’s tasting, when I sat down at a table and asked who the talker was. Everyone pointed at her. A few minutes into the conversation, the real coincidence came out: her band plays the Loud American, and I work for the company that owns it. Small town, smaller industry. She ordered a Jack and Coke. The whiskey’s on me from now on.