CHICAGO — Growing up, Tanner Dane and his best-friends-turned-bandmates used to spend hours and hours jamming in his Elgin, Illinois, attic. Like any aspiring musicians, they started with covers. But it didn’t take long to cultivate their own sound: a bluesy, alternative rock, soul-inspired sort of mix.

Soon enough, they were self-producing their own music on GarageBand. They’d burn the tunes onto CDs, scribble them with — admittedly — terrible handwriting immortalized in Sharpie and drop the discs all over town.

It wasn’t a full-blown marketing campaign by any means, but they paid no mind. They just loved to play.

Some two decades later, Dane is still embodying that homegrown approach, one free lake show at a time.

Today, he is a Chicago-based artist pursuing his career both as a solo performer and with his band, Hollyy. And for the past summer and a half, Dane and his bandmates — including a few of the people he grew up playing with in Elgin — have been gaining local notoriety busking at AIDS Garden Chicago in Lakeview. Since the impromptu shows started just over a year ago, they’ve garnered so much traction that fans by the hundreds turn out to see them perform.

“We’re literally just busking,” Dane said in an interview, speaking to the sensation of it all.

Crowds have comprised people young and old, parents with their kids, even commuters from Indianapolis and Wisconsin. The street performances are consciously announced on short notice, usually a day or two before showtime on Instagram or TikTok — a true modern pop-up, if you will, despite expectant fans flooding the musicians’ social media lately with inquiries into when the next installation will be.

They have staged three performances this summer, the most recent earlier this month. The latest show had attendees packing Belmont Rocks as far as the length of a city block, picnic blankets lining the stone steps like patchwork.

“I love Chicago,” 25-year-old Jade Hart said mid-set from the audience, grinning as she cast a glance at the crowd around her. “I love the community.”

After all, what’s as quintessentially summertime in Chicago as some free music in the sun.

‘We did it’

Dane — in the “least corny way” possible, he remarked — has been in and around music pretty much forever. He and his older sister got their first instruments, a guitar and drums, when they were 11 and 13 years old. They were sold from the get-go. The musical inclination runs in the family.

Dane’s mom sings and plays the piano, and taught him and his sister how to play when they were little, an introduction to music not unlike her own.

Jean Bednar recalled music always being a part of her life. Her dad loved classical music. A Chicago-born plumber who worked for himself, he built a sound system from scratch so he could listen to his favorite pieces while he did billing from the basement of their Edgewater home. Her mother dabbled in radio, including stints on a Chicago show when she was young. She went on air to sing.

So, it was par for the course that Bednar took piano lessons herself. What she loved more, though, was to put on a record and sing along. Sometimes, she’d stage at-home shows for her parents.

Without realizing it, she passed the sentiment onto her kids. Bednar remembers them gravitating towards theater early on and that Dane especially was “very much of a showman.”

Around the time he and his sister acquired that six-string and the set of drums, Dane remembered, their friends got instruments, too. Even better, they all lived close by. Suddenly, they had the makings of their own neighborhood band.

The troupe packed into Dane’s attic and nearly every day, they’d practice for hours. They lost time up there. It’d be summer and blistering hot (there was no air conditioning in the attic) and they’d go on jamming, no heeding the heat.

“You don’t even think about that,” Dane said. “You’re just having a blast, somehow.”

After practice, they’d walk to the local bodega. That was essential.

Musically, they were old souls. Dane, the youngest of the group, owed that to his bandmates.

“They were so wise with their taste,” Dane said. They loved Motown, B-side blues, vinyls. Those influences shaped their sound, as kids and for Dane still today.

“(I) owe a lot to my 75-year-old, 13-year-old (friends),” he chuckled.

Their band, dubbed The Reverends, put out its first real record when Dane was 14. The namesake album was recorded in a Chicago studio, thanks to free recording time they’d won in a battle of the bands competition. They handed the album out at school and put it in the record store in town.

“I would not say it’s a very great album or anything. I think it’s just great that we, in our 14- to 16-year-old brains, were so hell-bent on putting out an album and making music,” Dane said. “And we did it.”

Shortly after, they played their first Chicago show, a milestone for the suburban group. Following the performance, the band spoke with The Daily Herald. Dane told the paper he harbored a dream that The Reverends “will go big and then tour around.”

Reinspired

But the band dissipated on its own. Bandmates went off to college, and next thing they knew, it’d been years since they got together to play. By the time Dane headed to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he kept music around him but opted to study political science. Post-graduation, he eyed law school — after a gap year.

The time allowed him to waver, though. Toward the end of college, he’d realized how much he missed performing. During his senior year, he reconnected with friends he grew up with, and they started to play together again. Among those musicians was Rafael Soto-Marquez.

Though fellow Elgin native Soto-Marquez wasn’t a founding member of The Reverends, he and Dane shared interests as teenagers, meeting formally through a local charity. Soto-Marquez got into music in high school, first playing bass guitar in his school’s jazz band, then through other bands of his own. He would sometimes play with The Reverends if a member couldn’t make a gig.

Soto-Marquez was a few years into Chicago’s music scene when he and Dane reconnected. After high school, he’d gone to study physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Before he even left for school, Soto-Marquez looked to see if any future classmates were musicians. Through college, he tried his hand at a few open mics and played around the South Side, at IIT and parties.

After graduating, he went into computer science. The first paycheck went toward a drum set. When he and Dane reunited, Soto-Marquez was living in Logan Square in a spot big enough to host, say, a band practice.

Between the two of them, they formed a mishmash of former Elgin bandmates who were still local.

“It was a bit of the familiar cast,” Soto-Marquez said.

As Dane wrapped up his senior year, he was spending most weekends traveling to Chicago from Champaign to play.

Reinspired, Dane in the interlude after college found himself wanting to give singing a serious try. He decided his early 20s were for taking chances. So he opted to forgo law school and landed a corporate job that afforded him the opportunity to really pursue music.

The mishmash of musicians eventually became Hollyy. For six years now, the retro rock, soul band has been “at it,” Dane said, writing and gigging and promoting. Along the way, he began to write on his own. The lyrics, initially, were for himself, something therapeutic as he managed a stretch of time when he was “just not in the best place,” he recalled. But one song turned into two, into three, into 12.

Dane signed a solo record deal in late 2024 and in the following months, released two EPs. Meanwhile, Hollyy put out its first full album.

The momentum was already picking up. Then came the lake shows.

The busking bug

They’d been wanting to busk.

Soto-Marquez busked in college and as a self-described “tech nerd,” he’d long been interested in finding a way to perform without needing the setup of a traditional sound system. A couple of years ago, he bought solar-powered battery gear that gave Hollyy enough portable power to play anywhere. After one test run of the technology, the band “caught the busking bug.”

The idea came to a head last summer, by happenstance really. Dane had been set to go on a summerlong solo tour, but plans fell through. Absent the tour, he didn’t know what to do — until one of his managers told him to just get out and play. Dane, alongside a few members of Hollyy, took to the lakefront.

It downpoured before that first lake show, and Dane’s microphone didn’t end up working. About 100 people showed up.

“It could have been better,” Dane said. “But I do think the idea was there.”

The next show, a few hundred turned out. And the next, a few more.

“Every time,” Dane said, “it would grow.”

This year’s slate of lake shows debuted in late May. So many people crowded the performance that the Chicago Park District pushed back and called the police, according to Dane. The Park District did not return requests for comment.

Authorities gave Dane two tickets, he said. Afterward, an organization that provides free legal representation for artists in Illinois reached out and offered its services.

“They’ll be representing me at my court date that I was issued for this,” Dane said, “which is, like, so silly.”

Subsequent performances have gone on without further run-ins.

For Liz Gazal, the most recent pop-up made for the perfect night. The 44-year-old creative director headed for AIDS Garden after work in the city. She posted up for the performance in a patch of grass with a blanket and a container of watermelon. It was her second time at a lake show, her first this summer.

Gazal started turning out to see the musicians busk after Dane opened for a different show she saw last year. She loved his voice and wanted to hear more.

While Gazal came to catch the set, young parents Kara and Sean Campbell came to cut a rug. The latest show fell on their daughter Rosie’s first birthday, and what better way to celebrate.

“She likes to dance,” Kara said, “that’s for sure.”

“Dance parties,” Sean amended.

Around the family, people shared takeout dinners, swung on hammocks and chattered. One group sat huddled together making beaded dreamcatchers. Down at the lake, boats just off the shore slowed to listen while swimmers took in the music from floaties. Near the water’s edge, Bednar sat tucked away in the crowd. Dane’s dad and aunt came to watch, too. Bednar wore an old white Hollyy shirt.

Dane says the past couple of years have been a blur but that the reception — especially from home — has been invigorating.

“We just have this community that’s ready to support us,” he said.

Look no farther than the lake.

Earlier this month, as dusk draped over the water, fans clapped the musicians through their last song of the night. One spectator kept time with a tambourine. The band responded in kind.

“It’s the last one, Chicago!” Dane shouted. “I need ya!”

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