GREEN BAY, Wis. — The young girl who didn’t want to go to college was sitting in her room talking to her mom about going to college.
“OK, I’ll go to UW-Green Bay and get a degree in counseling, or whatever,’’ Mandi Sagal told her mother, Sue.
“Whatever,’’ code for $@#%&*!
The conversation was playing out like a poor girl's version of Titanic, where Rose runs to the front of the ship and contemplates jumping because she has no desire to continue with the life that had been planned and prepared for her.
Mandi did not want to go to college, even though she dutifully went through all the steps and had been accepted at UWGB. But this was not the life she wanted. It was not the life she envisioned.
But then Jack -- excuse me --then, Sue appeared.
“I said, ‘Well, what do you think about just bypassing college and going to Nashville?” said Sue, which was tantamount to telling your child they can bypass the broccoli and go straight for the brownie.
“Her eyes just lit up,’’ said Sue.
Mandi’s dream was to become a singer. She was known around Green Bay for her musical chops and singing the National Anthem at UW-Green Bay sporting events, Lambeau Field, and Miller Park, and also performing at summer festivals and local charity events.
“Well, that’s what you always wanted to do and it doesn’t make sense to me -- if your heart is not in to going to college -- and you know what you want to do,’’ Sue continued. “You’re young, maybe we need to think outside the box and maybe you want to try and pursue your dream, and you can always go to college later.
“Now, I don’t know if that was the greatest advice,’’ Sue said. “It’s been a really hard road.’’
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The journey began in January of 2013 when Mandi was 18 and fresh from graduating from Bay Port High School.
Mandi didn’t have a job lined up when she left for Nashville. She decided she would take all of her savings from working as a youth and would stretch it as far as possible. What was possible was two months.
“The only job I could get was cleaning tanning beds,’’ she said. “Yeah, not fun.”
There were multiple trips back home for Mandi, multiple trips for Sue and her husband, Bill, to Nashville. In between, there were phone calls, lots of phone calls.
“It was absolutely awful as parents,’’ said Sue. “It was exciting, but she’s 18, 19. She’s just a baby. And, she’s in a city that we don’t know anybody and it was terrible for us. And all we could do is talk to her on the phone, take her calls, hear her frustration, and just keep encouraging her to keep fighting through. ‘You can do this.’ But it was very hard.”
As time moved on, Mandi eventually found other jobs, gaining valuable experience as an office manager and running a surgery center, but in a somewhat cruel twist, the one thing that prevented her from securing better, higher-paying jobs was her lack of a college degree.
“There have been so many nights where I’ve just been like, ‘Ahh, what am I doing?’’’ said Mandi.
Second-guessing became second nature. College, and a career in interior design, all of a sudden seemed like it might make more sense.
“If you want to be a nurse or a doctor, you got to school for X amount of years and then you have a degree and then you start residency. There’s like a plan, at least some sort of plan to what you want to do,’’ Mandi said. “The music industry, there is no plan. You’re in a city where everybody, every artist thinks they’re that one in a million.
“But when I think about going to pursue interior design, it doesn’t fill me up nearly not even a fraction of what music does for me. So, to pack it up it’s like, ‘Well, what else are you going to do?’ This is what I believe I was put on this Earth to do.”
Mandi was that girl you’d see singing in her car on the way to work in the morning, the one that put in the extra hours at work to get the job done, the one who would be writing songs on weeknights and weekends and performing in the honky-tonks at night.
Yes, it was exhausting.
“It’s definitely very difficult,’’ she said of performing when physically and mentally spent. “I had to pull from something within me when I felt like I had nothing most times. Every time, I found it. And there are some nights when you’re writing music, songwriting, after a whole day of crunching numbers doing financial analysis; your brain is just tired.
“Then to go try and write and express feelings and put it into words that are cleverly put, it was just; it’s exhausting. And I feel like my baseline, I’ve pretty much been exhausted since I’ve lived here.’’
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On a journey like this, the key is meeting the right people. But as Mandi learned, that’s an education in itself.
“This town is literally whiskey shots and handshakes, that’s what you do,’’ said Mandi. “But then try to, when you’re naïve I guess you don’t really have a; I didn’t have a great meter of judging certain people’s character, like you have to kind of look at everything, like, why are people helping you? Clearly, they see something in you. So it’s just what they see is the thing. You meet a lot of wrong people along the way. You get burned a lot.
“So I try to draw myself with people that think similar to I do. That they’re doing music because they love to create music.”
Still, when you’ve done the work, put in the time, and then stand helplessly by as you watch others achieve the dream you’re still reaching for it can be a bitter pill to swallow -- emphasis on bitter.
“You’re pushing a boulder up a mountain,’’ said Mandi. “And it is an incredible effort and there’s a lot of hard work and some luck involved in that, but a lot of hard work. So if you don’t absolutely love it to your core, yeah, it would make you pretty bitter. I love it to my core and it still makes me bitter.
“You see everybody around you doing so well and you’re just like, ‘Why? Why isn’t this working for me?’ It does, it makes you bitter. It makes it hard to be happy for the people that are constantly around you. It’s a tough city to be in. When you’re signing to people that are living out your dream and what you want, it can make you bitter. It certainly does to me.”
Those feelings can transform into a kind of mental gymnastics that tests your entire belief system.
“I believe in myself. I believe in this material,’’ said Mandi. “There is a form of rejection, if you don’t get that deal, then you’re like, ‘They didn’t see it. They didn’t believe in it.’ Or, ‘What I put out there wasn’t good enough.’ And there’s always that. That can make you bitter, can make you insecure even. But when I get into that headspace I generally try to tell myself, ‘This is your story. You’re putting out music that you really like to listen to. It’s true as an artist.’ It’s just hard.’’
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The saying goes Nashville is a 10-year-town. Mandi Sagal, in year eight, released her first single on Jan. 28 of this year, “Smoke Your Weed,” a personal narrative of a relationship gone wrong.
“I was single at the time and kind of entertaining this guy who would text and blow up all of my socials, like all of my posts, be the first to view my Instagram story, Snapchat me and then he texted me and said, ‘Hey, come over. We’re having a few people over,’’’ Mandi said.
“And I went over, and he didn’t talk to me or pay attention to me the entire night. So I kind of wrote the song. It’s definitely a true story, the whole smoke your weed thing. My thought process was, ‘If you’re not going to pay attention to me, I’ll just smoke your weed. You’re going to pay for this somehow by not hanging out with me.’
“You kind of bare your soul on the songs that you write, and by putting that out into the world, you allow for that to be judged.’’
Authenticity, Mandi decided long ago, would be her calling card.
“It can be scary, too,’’ she said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, man. I hope people can relate to this and don’t think I’m crazy.’ You kind of just have to put your head down and write things that are honest to you.”
The song is starting to gain traction. It can be found on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, YouTube and iHeartRadio.
It also was given high marks in a review by American Songwriter Magazine.
“Any musician can attest it takes nothing but time to break through the static and be heard. If you’re a woman, it could take even longer -- if at all. Nearing that threshold, velvet-voiced singer-songwriter Mandi Sagal demonstrates with her debut single, “Smoke Your Weed,” that she not only possesses the voice and songwriting chops to make it, but she’s more than ready for the spotlight.”
Radio play, a deal with a record label; Mandi hopes they all are part of her future; a future that looks more promising than ever before. She is engaged to be married to her producer, her parents and grandmother moved to Nashville in 2017 and she is building an insurance business with her brother, Tyler.
But the release of her first single, and accompanying video, is the reason you’ll see her singing in her car today.
“All of that is incredible,’’ said Mandi. “To come from having nothing released as a solo artist before this and to come from a black hole to existence and have it perceived so well is really amazing.
“If somebody had told me this is how it was going to be, how much I’ve had to struggle just to make end’s meet and just so exhausting, that’s part of me that’s, like, I don’t know if my 18-year-old self would have believed it. But living through it now, I’ve certainly come a very, very long way and there is just no right way or a certain path that you have to take. Everybody has a different journey.’’
Story idea? You can reach Mike Woods at 920-246-6321 or at: michael.t.woods1@charter.com