'We have kind of no boundaries:' 48 hours with sister musicians Aly & AJ
The hotel bed in Silver Spring, Maryland, is perfect: crisp white duvet, plump pillows, woven blanket folded at the foot. And Aly and AJ Michalka, 34 and 32, are preparing to jump on it.
The sisters have been in the chic, mid-century modern hotel room for a little more than an hour showering, ordering room service, and applying makeup. They're about to leave for The Fillmore to play the 12th show of their "With Love From" tour, after which they'll sleep on their tour bus. Which means they won't return to this space — or its bed. And so, in the name of being true rockstars, they've decided to fuck shit up.
AJ grabs a final french fry from the room service tray. Then she and Aly line up and count off: "one… two… three!" On cue, they flop onto the mattress. The blanket stays folded. When they get up, the duvet is barely wrinkled.
Aly and AJ are, in fact, rockstars — there's no denying that when you see them working a crowd. They're impossible to look away from as they strut around onstage, play 16 different instruments, fling their hair and do their funny little dance moves. They have that something that makes them hypnotizing, even to people who don't know their music — the new stuff or the hits they churned out as teenagers for Disney in the early 2000s. But they're also unfailingly sweet and eager to please in an unguarded way — a way that leads them into, say, a 10-minute conversation with an apparently drunk guy on the street in Philly. "If anything, it's almost to our own detriment," Aly says. "We're so open-book."
"I joke that they're like, 'Do you want my shirt and my pants?'" says Stephen Ringer, Aly's cinematographer husband. "Do you want my underwear?" Where some former child stars retreat behind a hardened exterior, the Michalka sisters have done exactly the opposite.
After the Disney years, the sisters took a decade-long break from music while acting on shows like "iZombie" and ABC's "The Goldbergs." They picked things up again in 2018 and haven't stopped moving. For two days in April, I spent every waking moment with Aly and AJ on their current tour. Here's what it was like.
Day one: Silver Spring, Maryland1:00 p.m. EST: When I arrive at The Fillmore, Aly and AJ — or "the girls," as everyone on the tour crew calls them — are asleep on their bus, which I'm told is like being in a sensory deprivation chamber.
1:45 p.m.: The girls are up! I meet them aboard the bus, a luxury number with extra-large bunks (meaning they're stacked in twos instead of threes). They tell me they've been burned by an all-access journalist before: in their Disney era when they invited a reporter over for family dinner. "We were too young," AJ says. "And we said things because we were nervous. And I don't know if we knew the meaning of off-the-record. So we just fucked ourselves."
2:15 p.m.: Aly and AJ acquire coffee, and they, Stephen, and I climb into an Uber to their hotel. The sisters like to book hotel rooms in the cities they visit as base camps for the day. We're accompanied by their two enormous silver Rimowa suitcases (about $1,800 a pop). Aly and AJ bought the Rimowas for this tour and refer to them with the fondness of mothers.
3:15 p.m.: We arrive at the hotel and ascend to the room.
3:20 p.m.: I don't fully understand how Aly and AJ sustain life on tour. Their eating schedule is erratic; sometimes they don't have a full meal until around 11 p.m., after they've played. I suspect Stephen is the one keeping them alive. He orders a room service feast.
3:25 p.m.: Aly and AJ are taking a shower. "You can put in the piece that AJ and I shower together," Aly says. "We don't care about that."
3:45 p.m.: Makeup kits are strewn across the bed and desk. Aly and AJ are in robes applying Bobbi Brown contour, Kossas foundation, Charlotte Tilbury blush. They usually do their own makeup on tour, except if they're in New York City or Los Angeles and can hire a makeup artist.
4:00 p.m.: AJ is sitting on her suitcase, but it won't close. She squashes it down several more times. "It's so hard to close the latches on my Rimowa," she jokes. Finally, they click.
4:15 p.m.: We are running sort of late. "I'm ready," AJ says. "I just gotta…"
"There's always an 'I just gotta,'" Aly says.
"Usually it's, 'I'm ready,'" Stephen says, "'I just gotta put on clothes.'"
4:21 p.m.: The Rimowas have been loaded into another Uber. As we drive back through the Silver Spring suburbs, Aly sees a house she likes and looks it up on Zillow: 2,500 square feet, $1.3 million. She is, says AJ, a Zillow fiend.
4:45 p.m.: Aly and AJ are on stage for sound check. About two dozen people have been let in to watch: the evening's VIPs. They stare up at the women and their band — drummer Ben, guitarist Connor Sullivan, bassist Thomas Drayton — and I wonder what it's like to have a crowd gawk at you while you're working. Neither sister seems to notice.
Afterward, fans line up to take pictures with Aly and AJ in front of a "With Love From" banner. One of them is 30-year-old Justin Pope, originally from North Carolina. He first saw Aly sing on "Phil of the Future" and became obsessed with the band's early albums "Into the Rush" and "Insomniatic," the latter of which he brought for the sisters to sign. "As a gay boy, any blonde girls singing pop music, you were just like, 'Yes,'" he says. "It's very escapist."
"Seeing them from 15 now to 31, I feel like they're like me," he added. "We're experiencing life at the same time and going through the motions and finding ourselves."
7:00 p.m.: Aly and AJ are in the green room signing an enormous stack of vinyl records. I mention my conversation with Justin. "The more we tour, the more I'm like, 50% of this audience is queer," Aly says. "This is crazy. How did we attract this? We're two straight, white women." She theorizes that their uplifting lyrics reached people who were closeted as kids. Plus, she and AJ have been outspokenly supportive of the queer community since their return to music, "and I think that just ramped it up."
Stephen theorizes that queer fans are drawn to Aly and AJ's "underdog" narrative — the way they returned to music after a decade and are growing steadily, though nowhere near the rate of, say, Taylor Swift. The way they continue to reinvent themselves, each subsequent record sounding different than the last.
8:10 p.m.: By now both sisters are dressed for the show in jeans and western shirts, AJ's black with curly white embroidery, Aly's paired with a brown tie. Aly shares that '90s piano goddess Vanessa Carlton will open for them at LA's Greek Theatre. It's a genius girl-power nostalgia pairing. "That was my idea," Aly says, adding that they initially asked Michelle Branch, who was unavailable. She fantasizes about other pairings: The National, My Morning Jacket, Muna.
I ask Aly about doing a sound check with fans there — about being so closely observed. "It's interesting," she says. "It's a little bit like being a zoo animal in a cage just going about your life, but everyone's like, 'look at the monkeys!'"
"We have kind of no boundaries," she adds. "But I think it's because we've been around for so long."
8:45 p.m.: It's time for the mom prayer. Carrie Michalka, also known as "Mamachalka," calls "Alyson" and "Amanda" before each show and prays for them over the phone. For the tour's September leg, she sent a Dropbox folder of pre-recorded prayers labeled by city and date.
9:00 p.m.: Aly and AJ take the stage. Being at one of their shows is kind of like being at the slumber party in "The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement." It's wholesome, bubbly, cathartic, deeply unselfconscious. There are little easter eggs for the queers: the lights at the end of "Love You This Way" flash rainbow.
The sisters have the self-assurance and presence of people who've been performing for 20 years. Their energy doesn't flag throughout the two-hour set, which encompasses every song from their new album, as well as some older hits like "Take Me" and, of course, "Potential Breakup Song," which peaked at number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2007. They're singing "Like Whoa," another classic from "Insomniatic," on this tour, too. But they've stripped down both hits to fit their current California country-leaning sound. Later, AJ tells me she and Aly found new love for the songs in remaking them. "I don't feel angst toward the old material," she says. "We kind of got past all that."
"'Potential Breakup Song' I feel like we have to play till we're dead," she adds. But for the first time, they're not ending the set with it. "It's a really important song in our career, but it doesn't always need to be the apex of who we are."
12:58 a.m.: The sisters are back in comfy jeans and tees. They walk into the venue's parking lot where about two dozen people are waiting for them against low barricades. Both women move along the line talking to people, answering questions, posing for photos. One woman hands AJ a Lowe's business card with her phone number scrawled across it. "I get a lot of lesbian's numbers," AJ tells me, "but I've never gotten one on a Lowe's card."
2:27 a.m.: I can't stay awake for another minute, but Aly and AJ are still up, using their bunks' privacy curtains to film a TikTok. Have I mentioned they're both Aries?
Day two: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania1:20 p.m.: Sleeping in the bunk was rough. I woke up around 5 a.m. convinced we were about to die as the bus careened around what felt like a million curves. But we lived, and we're now parked on the street in front of a different Fillmore — this one in Philly.
1:30 p.m.: Aly, AJ, and Stephen emerge from the bus with their luggage. A heavyset gray-haired man approaches and asks for a photo. He recognizes AJ from the 2014 Lifetime movie "Expecting Amish." They oblige, and the man seems thrilled.
"Some people discover our music from cartoons, some people discover us from TV shows," AJ says in another Uber. "Some discover us from a really bad Lifetime movie where I was a pregnant Amish woman."
1:45 p.m.: We arrive at another hotel, a gorgeous suite with a tangerine velvet couch, a full kitchen, and huge wood-framed windows. Stephen orders food before the showering and prepping commences.
"We like the white noise and the heat," AJ says. It's a comfort thing from childhood, she theorizes, when they spent lots of time in dressing rooms.
"We're really weird," Aly adds. The blow dryer stays on for at least half an hour.
4:00 p.m.: We're back at The Fillmore for sound check by 4, running extremely on time. The same rigamarole ensues, with Aly and AJ again greeting the VIPs.
7:20 p.m.: The sisters, Stephen, and their friend Sarah Nekich, a music photographer and social media manager, decide to go for cheesesteaks. We head to Joe's and order slabs of meat and diary on crispy, chewy buns. Afterward we go back to the hotel, and Sarah and I imagine what the room might cost as a Brooklyn apartment.
8:30 p.m.: The band goes on in 30 minutes. We file out of the hotel…and straight into a youngish, drunkish guy on the street named Eugene. Instead of brushing him off, Aly and AJ engage him in conversation. He asks to buy them a drink, but they tell him they have a show to play and invite him. He can't come, but can he walk them to the show?
Stephen cuts in: "We're actually about to get an Uber." In that case, can Eugene join us in the Uber?
Stephen: "I don't even think there will be room. We're already pushing it." Relief.
A woman named Star approaches next; she's a server at the hotel restaurant. She just broke up with her boyfriend of four years, and Aly and AJ's song "Slow Dancing" became her anthem. "You guys are amazing" she tells both women about a hundred times.
8:48 p.m.: We're back at The Fillmore, and Aly and AJ are dressed in different jeans and western shirts, but neither one is wearing shoes.
9:03 p.m.: And yet, somehow they're on stage by 9.
9:46 p.m.: Of all the songs on the setlist, "Potential Breakup Song" inspires the most hysteria, the most cell phone cameras held up to record. "Who's here because they wanted to make sure they heard that song?" Aly prompts. Some 80% of the audience cheers.
"And who's never heard it before?" One person in the back yells loud enough to be heard from the pit. They're here for the future.
10:40 p.m.: Back in the green room, Aly and AJ go over a harmony they want to adjust in "Rush." It's bizarre to hear them, real human people across the couch from me, bust into songs that shaped the first era of my life. It's like someone getting up to sing "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" at karaoke, except that person is Shania Twain.
12:06 a.m.: Stephen, AJ, and I are back at the lovely hotel while Aly has returned to the bus; she usually goes right to sleep after shows.
2:05 a.m.: We're showered, changed, brushed, and headed out. We pass another door in the hallway, and Stephen and AJ wonder what this other suite might look like. The door is unlocked, so we walk in.
The room has a similar vibe to Aly and AJ's: cozy farmhouse meets industrial chic. And there's the bed, made up in crisp white with a gray flannel throw. AJ and I look at each other, and she walks over to the edge, throws her arms up, and falls backwards into it while I snap a photo. She gets up and grins.