Coming Home to Sing: Teresa Reynolds Brings Her Story and Music to Fort Ben

Teresa Reynolds didn't set out to be a singer. She set out to be an actor.

She grew up in Indianapolis, fell in love with performing in junior high, trained through a theatre intensive at Broad Ripple High School, and earned an acting degree from Ball State. 

Singing was always there. Inspired by her father’s love of music, she had been writing music with her brother, producer T.J. Reynolds, since they were kids. However, she compartmentalized that early love of music. Theatre was the career plan, and New York was the logical destination.

While living and acting in New York, she was contacted by a friend of a friend who was looking for a female rapper.

"I don't really consider myself a rapper," Teresa told the man who had called, David Ippolito. "I consider myself more of a singer." 

That was fine with him. Ippolito had spent two decades busking (performing in public spaces to earn money) in Central Park with a permit from the Parks Department, singing most Saturdays to crowds in the hundreds, sometimes over a thousand. He invited her to join him.

"That's where I really considered I was getting my chops," she said. 

As Ippolito told her and other performers who joined him on the hill, "It's just us, you know. If anybody told you that you don't sing very well, just sing louder."

She sang with him nearly every week for years. And somewhere in all that repetition, something shifted.

"In the beginning, there was a lot more of like … singing how I think the song should sound. This run would be cool right here, I'm going to get big here and small here,” she recalled thinking. “But that over-analysis just kind of faded away." 

What replaced it became the foundation of everything she does now: "I need to figure out what this song means to me, and I'm singing the story of the song. I'm not thinking about how I sound. We're having a moment together, about a love song, about something we've both lived. Music has the ability to transport you more than almost anything else … like music and smell. You hear a song and it takes you right back to your mom's kitchen."

That belief — that a song is a moment of connection before it's anything else — is the throughline of Teresa' career, from Central Park to Gloria Gaynor's stage to the band she leads today, Teresa Reynolds and the Slicktones.

From the hill to the world stage

The Gaynor gig came the same way the Ippolito one did. A friend of a friend, and an email from a manager describing what they needed. Teresa wrote back immediately: "I love disco,” although it wasn't yet back in fashion. 

Before that chance encounter, Teresa had been quietly wondering if her long-held dream of international travel — sparked by a single trip to Kenya at the age of 21 — simply wasn't in the cards for her. Then an email arrived, an audition followed, and she got the job.

Her first show was at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, alongside the Village People. From there: Argentina, and eventually stages around the world. There was one rehearsal with the musical director beforehand, and that was it. "It was like, okay girl, welcome to the big leagues. Pack your bag, come prepared."

After the first show, nerves got the better of her, until the musical director came back with a message from Gaynor herself: "You nailed it."

The takeaway wasn't just the memory. It was a standard. "It's important to me to always make sure that I'm being as professional as I can be, being as prepared as I can be,” Teresa says. “I wish I could just sit around and write music and play music all the time, but I also have to be a businesswoman."

Back in Indy

By 2018, after more than 14 years in New York, Teresa and her husband started watching Indianapolis from a distance. She was tracking the city's growing arts scene on social media, while he noticed that the restaurant industry  — his specialty — also was expanding. 

"We looked at each other and said, I think we can both do what we want in Indianapolis." She'd left after college assuming a career in the arts here wasn't realistic. Now it looked different.

Teresa already had two solo albums to her name, Aflame and State of Mind, made in New York with T.J. and producer Chad Moser. What she didn't have back home yet was a band.

She knew who she wanted, though — Poncho Hedrick and Mina Keohane, both musicians she'd met years earlier through her brother and had long admired. Hedrick gave her her first opportunity back in Indy, inviting her to sing with his band Blackberry Jam at the Jazz Kitchen. Through him she met drummer Matthew Dupree and guitarist Joshua Ginder.

The band came together almost by necessity. In 2021, coming out of the pandemic, Teresa landed a solo slot at Art and Soul — a stripped-down, filmed, socially-distanced version of the annual event that year. She had songs. She needed people to play them. She called Hedrick, Dupree, and Keohane. Then she booked her first headlining show at the Jazz Kitchen and realized: "Okay, well, I need a guitar." Ginder joined.

"That was it. I was like, you guys can't leave. I'm never letting you go," she recalled with a laugh. The name came later, while she was rocking her daughter to sleep in a quiet room. It just arrived. "From there it was off to the races."

Developing her own sound

Ask Teresa where the band's genre-blurring sound comes from and she points straight to her childhood living room. Her father's jazz records filled their home, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Eric Saunders, alongside music greats like Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and Sarah Vaughan. Meanwhile MTV and Indianapolis's now-defunct 96.3 were feeding her a steady diet of '90s R&B at what she calls its peak. "It has my heart,” she said. “It takes a lot sometimes not to just put on the old-school stuff."

T.J. grew up in the same house with a few different influences — more rock, different textures — so when brother and sister write together now, she says, "we're pulling together all the music that's touched us over our lifetimes."

Writing "Violet,” a signature single

Some songs get built. The single "Violet" just arrived.

Teresa was living in New York, out at a Knicks game with a friend, when her brother sent over a new track he'd produced. She got home near midnight, went straight to her home studio, and started laying down what she calls "caterwauling" — vocal runs, ad-libs, nothing with words yet. She looked at the clock. Late. She told herself she'd write just one verse before bed.

If my life were to end right now, could I feel good to take my bow …

"I was like, ‘What am I writing about?’ What's this about, my decomposition?" Then came the chorus: No, not without you. Something clicked, but she didn't yet know what. She kept going until five or six in the morning, finished the song, and sent it to her brother, who wrote back stunned that she'd been up all night.

It wasn't until she was partway through writing that she understood that she was writing to a child she didn't have yet. She wrote "Violet" in 2012. Her daughter, Violet, was born in 2019.

"I really feel like that song is about manifestation. I believe in manifestation. I think it's so powerful." It remains one of her favorite songs to perform. Every time, Teresa says, it still lands with the same weight it had the night she wrote it.

Making room for everyone

Teresa calls herself an organizer and activist, though she's quick to be honest about where that sits in her life right now. "I wish I was more on the front lines right now. It's hard … working and mothering." What she can offer, she says, is a mindset that focuses on connecting people, and believing there's enough room for everyone to succeed. "No one can compete with me, because I'm rooting for you too. There's so much space for everyone,” she says. “I'm following my path, and my path is different than anybody else's."

That belief has taken concrete form before. Several years ago, she won an Indy Arts Council public neighborhood grant and partnered with her friend and entrepreneur Amanda Belcher to put on Culture Fest — a free, day-long festival celebrating the Black community in Indianapolis, with bands, poets, jazz musicians, MCs, artists, and vendors. More than a dozen local artists got paid work out of it. "It was such a proud moment." She's candid, too, about the gap she sees locally. While organizations like the Indiana Arts Commission are dedicated to supporting artists,  "Indianapolis is unfortunately behind other major cities in their investment in the arts. We need to see our state and local government putting more

money behind it."

Coming home to Fort Ben

For Teresa, playing Arts for Lawrence's Fort Ben Cultural Campus isn't just another date on the calendar. It's a homecoming with people she admires. "There's so many great artists I love that come through Fort Ben. It's really a fun thing to be on a list among folks like Bashiri Asad, Stephanie Allen-Stevenson, and Blackberry Jam."

What she loves most is what a free show makes possible. "People can just pull up and have a good time. We can vibe together. It's Friday. We can celebrate that we're here, hear some good music, and have a communal time." 

She believes in what that kind of gathering can do, quietly, for people who need it. "You never know how much somebody might need just to sit down and listen to some music for free. It could change somebody's entire day, which could change somebody's trajectory. You never know the way that coming together can touch people."

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Teresa Reynolds and the Slicktones perform Friday, July 10 at 6:30 p.m. at Arts for Lawrence's Fort Ben Cultural Campus, 8950 Otis Ave. Alongside Teresa, the band features Mina Keohane on keys, Poncho Hedrick on bass, Matthew Dupree on drums, and Joshua Ginder on guitar. The concert is part of the Fridays at the Fort series, sponsored by Arts for Lawrence.