Updated 2026
Begin Again
Emily Grogan began with classical piano and briefly studied jazz at Berklee, but Boston punk changed the direction of her musicianship. While working as a cook at the Rat, she took up electric guitar and made it her principal instrument. Piano, saxophone, drums, bass and harmonica remained part of a musical vocabulary broad enough to move among rock, punk, reggae, folk and rhythm & blues.
Her first self-released album, False-O-Meter, appeared in 1999. “No Hitch” reached the Sony Pictures film Jawbreaker, while “Uranium” entered the One Way compilations Dig the Boston Underground and iO. Grogan also worked across the Boston network: Red Chord, Angeline with Linda Viens and Asa Brebner, Heidi Saperstein, Inky Spoon, Thumb Cramp, the Mr. Butch Experience and Hormone Replacement Therapy, as well as studio vocals for Andrea Gillis, Natalie Flanagan, Josh Lederman and Los Diablos, and the Dirty Truckers.
One Way released iO in 2005. Written and produced by Grogan and recorded with Darron Burke at Makeshift Studios, its thirteen songs placed her voice, guitar and arranging at the center of a wide Boston ensemble. At Sea followed in 2007, produced by Grogan and Ducky Carlisle, with Mark Bowden, Ken Schopf and Stephen Desaulniers forming the core band and a much larger cast adding strings, horns, pedal steel, banjo, organ and voices.
Grogan’s story kept moving after the One Way albums. She continued performing nationally and internationally, appeared in the television series Rocker Moms, and returned to the Boston stage in multiple band configurations. The Route 1 Project recorded her in 2017, adding a new performance to Motherlode’s road archive a decade after At Sea.
Live from the David Bieber Archives completes another circuit. Grogan, Andrea Gillis and other artists once connected through One Way returned to perform inside a collection built from the culture they helped create. The One Way recordings preserve the albums; Route 1 and the Archives preserve the artist in motion.
