When Vie Boheme was first dabbling with going to open mics with her singing and poetry while living in Pittsburgh early in her career, she found herself going down a rabbit hole learning about vocalists like Nina Simone, someone she had never encountered during her years at college.

“I was really pissed off,” she recalled. “How does she not come up?” In those early performances, Boheme would often cover Simone’s works. Later on, she’d get turned on to Billie Holiday, but it didn’t happen right away. “I didn’t get why she sounded so sad,” Boheme told me. When Boheme learned more about Holiday’s life, the sadness began to make more sense, and she found herself drawn to the intensity and weight of emotion in her singing.

I met Boheme in downtown Minneapolis as she was rehearsing for her upc

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