“WHEN I WAS YOUNGER I wanted to be famous,” says Mo Troper. “When I was a kid that’s what I wanted to do: I wanted to be in a famous band.”
Perhaps it’s no wonder—growing up, Troper was surrounded by images of the world’s most famous band.
“My birth father collected Beatles memorabilia,” Troper says. There were bobble-heads, foreign seven-inches, VHS bootlegs, blowup doll caricatures of the Fab Four’s cartoon likenesses, and so on. “I feel like if I was an adult I probably would’ve thought [he] was an insane person,” Troper says. “But when you’re a five-year-old that’s really cool.”
Troper formed Your Rival in high school. A bombastic, nakedly emotional, wailing power-pop band more teenaged Weezer than Beatles, they wrote “fun songs about horrible things.” Though they found an audience in the all-ages house-show circuit, played Treefort, and signed with local label Party Damage, Troper struggled continually against expectations, process, and plain bum luck.
“It just never really worked,” he says. “It seemed like for every minor accomplishment there were multiple setbacks. I never had my excitement about the project matched, and that was really hard.”
Even in the moments when it came together, Troper was left largely unfulfilled. “I got a taste of what it was like to be in a band that some people cared about, and I don’t think that did anything for me,” he says. In a performance billed as their last, two members didn’t bother showing up.