Editor's Note: This piece has been updated to reflect that Kin has performed at Froelich's Farm Fallfest, but not at Pumpkinfest and clarify the number of days the School of Rock tour lasted.
She is an up-and-comer of a rock ‘n’ roller — and Bucks County’s Eva Kin has the street cred to prove it.
Those streets are in Doylestown, where the 2023 Central Bucks East High School grad grew up and has been rocking out the past three years at the town’s School of Rock.
Sure, school’s out for summer — but not for ever, as Kin evidently learned the past couple of months. The singer, guitarist, keyboardist can key in on the Summer of ‘23 as a time when an eclectic education culled her talents as a class act for School of Rock amid some instinctive instrumental choices.
The triple threat, an intimidating talent, is a crowd of electric entertainment all by herself, who found the value of fine-tuned touring with others as she was named one of this year’s School of Rock AllStars.
Hey, Eva, you’re an AllStar now, go get your game on? She certainly was game to get it on, bonding with a band of musical brothers and sisters on tour throughout the East Coast in this elixir of an elite group of musicians.
“Do I feel like an AllStar? All over the place!” she laughs of touring her talent.
A little traveling music? Kin didn’t have 20/20 vision of what that would mean when she started at School of Rock in 2020.
“There was no indication,” she says, of the groove she would get into as an extracurricular activity.
There was a hint of her gifts when she was a talented tyke; that’s when Kin connected with classical music as a pianist.
“I’ve been classically trained since age 6,” she notes.
She might have had a classic case, not of stage fright, but of stage fatigue once the tour started in July.
“Going from city to city, It was stressful,” but she is ever so grateful for the experience. “But it was super cool to play all over the North Atlantic — New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York.”
When you’re in the top 1% of 62,000 SOR students nationwide it’s all stars and spangled special.
On being between rock and a fun place: “It was so cool to be touring and then performing at Puck,” the Doylestown music hall where she was once just a member of the audience watching other musical friends from high school perform.
She doesn’t take a back seat to anyone these days.
This is a young woman who didn’t suffer from high school daze. At CB East, she took direction from her heart and soul and helped form a funk band with other students.
She was in the loop there, but can’t be thrown for a loop on stage. On tour, she found out at the last minute she was going to do a number she hadn’t prepared. Kin, who has a preference for such American idols as her favorite — pop, R&B, rapper Jon Belion of “All Time Low” noteworthiness — didn’t have an idle moment prepping for being a proxy for … thrash metal?
She showed her own mettle as Matt Marek, music director of the North Atlantic Team, explained: “So when the song she had to learn last minute was ‘Holy Wars... The Punishment Due,’ by Megadeth, I thought that may push her out of her comfort zone. She told me she had little to no experience singing thrash metal, but you never would have guessed that based on her performance every night.”
Megadeath? No megadiff in her attention to detail. “The moment ‘Day Dreaming’ ended,” one of Kin’s evening musical entreaties to the force of Aretha Franklin, “she would pull out a pair of aviator sunglasses, and an entirely new persona would be on stage when she kicked off ‘Holy Wars’”
Holy sheet music turnaround. “It was an impressive display of her professionalism and confidence as a performer,” noted Marek.
Kin’s training at SOR includes her taking part in 11 Performance Season Shows and the school’s songwriting camp.
The perpetually in-motion performer has turned her membership in the School of Rock Doylestown House Band into a bevy of communal commitments, performing at the Doylestown Arts Fest, Froelich's Farm Fallfest and Baconfest.
Earning her bacon as a rocker? First things first — and that number one is getting a great education at the top-ranked Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she has packed her veteran-style accomplishments into a school bag for freshman year.
Despite a highway of hits and accomplishments behind her, Kin evinces a charming humility about the path she’s about to embark on. Tim and Irina’s titan of a teen daughter concedes, “I do tend to be pretty hard on myself.”
But with the considerable support she has received from family and friends, the young woman is kind and considerate, not playing favorites. Well, maybe a little. Her parents are AllStars themselves, she notes, while she admires Jon Bellion and his bellwether moves. Michael Gruver “had a great role in coaching me; what a great teacher,” she says of the Central Bucks East faculty standout; and Matthew Snyder of SOR “helped push me out of my comfort level.”
And she will never forget that other eclectic comfy campus she grew up on, which presented myriad opportunities for the artist she has become.
“Doylestown really has a wonderful music scene, one where I feel safe; being there is a great place to be.”
Maybe, with all the choices open before her — pop, production, jazz — Kin can take her experiences at Berklee and burnish them into the best job possible. Maybe, she says with an on-target tuneful chuckle and a rollicking riff of humor, “I’ll be a one-woman band.”
Michael Elkin is a playwright, theater critic and novelist who lives in Abington. He writes occasional columns about theater and the arts.
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