“Not everybody wants to be in front,” said singer Janey Winterbauer. “Back of stage is really what's holding everything together, and I think that's the most important place.”

Until a few days ago Winterbauer, whose voice you’ve heard on The Current many times even if you’ve never heard her name, planned to spend her New Year’s Eve onstage at the Palace Theatre as part of the headlining act, the Suburbs. Due to a Covid-19 surge the show’s now been postponed to Feb. 12, but in the sweep of the Suburbs’ history, six weeks are hardly a blink of an eye.

“They formed that band the year I was born,” Winterbauer observed in a Zoom call from her Minneapolis home earlier this month. “I grew up with a 45 of ‘Music for Boys’ in my house, that my dad bought. And now I get to be in the band.”

“I’m a sucker for pros,” said the Suburbs’ Chan Poling. “You can throw pretty much anything at her and it always comes up pristine and and well-thought-out.”

“She shows up,” said Aby Wolf, who’s performed with Winterbauer in a range of different projects over the past decade. “She studies. She does the work. She preps. Then when the time comes to do the show, it’s just easy going. And she doesn’t take things too seriously!”

“It's so cool to just to feel like you can kind of weave your way into those spaces and leave a mark and have an impact,” said Winterbauer, who’s been a go-to collaborator since she emerged on the Minnesota music scene as a teenager in the ‘90s.

In addition to singing with the Suburbs for the past several years, Winterbauer was a longtime participant in the New Standards Holiday Show as well as a core member of the Wits house band. She’s performed with the supergroup Golden Smog, she made a record with Marc Perlman of the Jayhawks, and she’s a staple of benefits and tribute shows. Her unfazed mien comes from long experience and well-earned confidence.

“Everyone's terrified and quaking on the inside,” Winterbauer said about getting up onstage. “Some people are better at hiding it than others. I just stopped being afraid of getting up there and screwing up. I realized that people wanted me there, and there must be a good reason for that.”

Winterbauer’s stage experience started early. Born in 1976, “I grew up on the West Side of St. Paul, right across the High Bridge,” she explained. “My father was very, very into music. He had a huge record collection; he played all of his records for me all the time. He comes from a family of musicians. I always had a little bit of need to be up there making something…but then when I was about nine, I got the theater bug.”

She was soon landing roles on local stages including the Guthrie Theater, the History Theatre, and the Children’s Theatre - where in 1990, she was cast as Wendy in a production of Peter Pan.

“Everybody auditioned for that part,” she remembered. “And they all said, ‘You're not going to get it.’ And I did. Partly because I had an audiobook of Peter Pan that I'd had since I was a kid, and it was narrated by this very British woman. So I knew how to say every single line already, and I had it memorized. So I just nailed all the auditions.”

Shortly after that triumph, Winterbauer was ready to make the jump from drama to music. “I left the theater when I was about 15,” she said. “I left for boys and for drugs and to have fun, and I needed structure in my life.” Using an insiders’ term for supportive art-scene peer groups, she continued, “it was really important to have a circus family. The fact that this music stuff was starting to work out really did make me feel like I belonged to a community, and that's all I've ever really wanted.”

Winterbauer attended St. Paul Open School, now called Open World Learning. “It was the hippie school right down the street from Central,” she said. “It was like a huge family, and the theater department was really great. I used to spend a lot of time not going to class and sitting in the hallway playing guitar.”

She continued, “I went to Open School for for most of my my school career, and then I promptly did not go to college. I tried to go to college for about five minutes, and it wasn't for me.”

After Winterbauer’s high school band Seducing Daisies failed to take off (“we played a graduation party and then no one ever asked us to play again”), she was hired to replace the lead singer in an established group called Nectar. “That's kind of how I started meeting everybody,” she said, “because we played the Entry all the time.”

She remembers the mid-1990s as a point of transition in the Minneapolis music scene. “All of the big acts around town were off on their tours. You know, Semisonic wasn't around. Anyone who was a working musician was touring. And so there was a lot more room for young new bands.”

One of the fans who came to see Nectar at the Entry was a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist named Christian Erickson. “He was probably sitting in the back by the sound booth chain-smoking,” said Winterbauer. “I don't think he was looking at me looking at me, but he liked my voice. So in 1998, he asked me to sing on one of his musical projects, which is called Astronaut Wife.”

Originally conceived as a home recording project, Astronaut Wife would become, according to Winterbauer, the first act ever to submit an MP3 to Radio K. With The Current’s launch still several years in the future, Mark Wheat was then at the University of Minnesota student station. He started spinning Astronaut Wife, Winterbauer remembered, “and then we started getting more shows, and then we started playing in the [First Avenue] Mainroom.

“Once you start doing stuff like that,” she said, “you just find your community within the walls of those clubs, and then people start asking you to sing on their stuff and sit in with them for a couple of songs. And that's just really kind of how I started doing tribute shows and voiceover work and stuff like that. It was a waterfall of opportunity for a while.”

Winterbauer and Erickson married in 2001. “And then five months later,” she said, “we had our first child. I was 24. That kind of put a damper on stuff for a while: the band couldn't really play, because we couldn't afford babysitters to go to rehearsals.” She turned to voiceover work, working with a company run by Steve Kramer of the Wallets.

“I was recording Barbie commercials,” Winterbauer remembered, “and I had my two-year-old kid in the sound booth with me sitting on the floor, quiet as a mouse. And those actually ran, so I made some money during that time. I had never had any kind of residuals before. Once you get, like, a Barbie commercial and it airs 50 times a day, all of a sudden you start just getting checks and checks and checks.”

Erickson and Winterbauer now have two children, ages 20 and 15. Raised with their parents’ love of music (“the kids just became obsessed with Kraftwerk”), they’ve inherited their parents’ independent streak. “We signed up Dom for band camp once and he hated it,” Winterbauer said. “So he went and formed his own band, which is great.”

Even after years of playing a wide range of local stages with all manner of collaborators, joining the band at Wits - a live radio show built on “comedy, conversation, songs, and surprises” - brought a new level of adventure. Produced by American Public Media, The Current’s parent company, Wits ran from 2010 to 2015.

“It was amazing,” said Winterbauer. “I can't believe that we all survived it because there was a point where we did 12 shows in a row, 12 Fridays in a row…it was a really interesting way to have a relationship with music, to spend all week learning somebody’s songs and learning all these sketches and learning all these other musical elements, performing the show, and then have to forget about that and start learning new stuff the very next Monday.”

Hosted by John Moe, Wits featured a wide range of stellar celebrity musical guests including Brandi Carlile, Neko Case, Father John Misty, Valerie June, and Jason Isbell. “Our job was to kind of prove to them that we knew our s—t and we could make them sound really good,” explained Winterbauer.

John Munson and Steve Roehm of the New Standards were also in the Wits band, “the Witnesses.” Winterbauer’s experience leading the vocalist section for the New Standards Holiday Show, she said, “led up to me being able to do Wits and just walk out on the stage - you know, stand next to Robyn Hitchcock - and just be like, I'm cool. Okay, handle it. They're just people.”

Looking back on her three-decade career in Minnesota music, Winterbauer has fond memories of the scene she first encountered, but she said it’s definitely changed for the better.

“It’s a more inclusive scene now,” she said. “More young kids are getting out there and doing things…and no one's retiring. It's kind of awesome. The original punk rockers are still going.”

What’s more, Winterbauer believes, compared to the ‘90s today’s scene is “just generally more accepting of people moving here from out of town that want to start music careers.” Noting that “people like like Haley and jeremy messersmith and Chastity Brown are all transplants to Minnesota,” she said that in the past, “that was never okay. You had to pay your dues, or just shut up and wait.”

While breaking into a music scene is never easy, Winterbauer favorably compared the networking possibilities today to the “old boys’ network” that used to dominate.

“I used to go to all these punk shows in basements and stuff when I was a teenager,” Winterbauer remembered. “There weren't a lot of women down there, and there was a reason for that.” At the time, she said, she was drawn to that feeling of danger. Why? “Because young people are stupid.”

The Me Too movement has had a positive impact, she continued. “Back then,” she said, “you wouldn't even bother to tell somebody that somebody had assaulted you backstage, because nothing was going to happen anyway. Now…it's harder to get away with that kind of monstrosity, and that makes me proud of the guys in our scene, because they're calling that s—t out.”

Aby Wolf remembers the first time she saw Winterbauer sing, at Adam Levy’s Southern Songbook series in the early 2010s. “I thought her performance was so captivating and strong and interesting and sort of strange,” Wolf said. “I was like, ‘What? Who is this person?’ I was really captivated.”

“She's a lovable person,” said Poling. “Super smart and she’s got a good vibe.” Over the past several years he’s come to rely on her as one of the Suburbs’ key voices. “Now I think, gosh, if I want to sing falsetto, I just do it in unison with Janey and she’ll keep me on track.”

“I like the idea of being a cog, an integrator,” said Winterbauer, “because it also doesn't come with the responsibility of having to be on completely on. You don't have to worry about tripping and falling when you're wandering around the stage - which I have done before, and I never want to do again.”

“From the first few times that we worked together,” Wolf said about Winterbauer, “she had a very warm, welcoming way of bringing me into the fold: letting me know the dynamics of the band.” Wolf added that she appreciates how Winterbauer leaves room for the group to grow together. “When she shows up, she's ready. But also, she leaves a lot of space for ideas to be decided on in the moment. She finds a really good balance.”

“I loved that movie,” Winterbauer said about the documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, which spotlights underappreciated backup singers, “but it kind of bummed me out. Not everybody wants to be the person that is, like, solely responsible for the front of the stage. I'd rather try to back that person up as much as possible so they can move around and make mistakes and still sound good.”

“Why are vocalists expected to be the face?” asked Wolf in agreement. “I don’t know that the horn section feels like they’re inferior to the lead singer.” Wolf, who like Winterbauer has both been a lead vocalist and a backup singer, said that having backup vocalists is akin to having a horn section or a string section. “Each person is assigned to their own role.”

“I just want to be a part of making cool s—t,” said Winterbauer. “That's all I've ever wanted to do.” Looking to the future, “I want to see what kind of adventures I can have, what kind of friends I can make, and what kind of projects I can put together. You know, someday I'm actually going to write a damn song.”