Published: March 12, 2008 04:59 pm            

Local girl rocks out

KJ Testin of Zionsville lives a double life. By day, she’s a former sorority girl who sells medical devices and played on the tennis team at Zionsville Community High School. By night, she’s a hard-rock lead singer who’s been turned into a cartoon character on a video game along with the rest of her band Xero Sum.

The rocker inside her emerged from her boy-band listening days four years ago after her father died of cancer at the end of her freshmen year at Indiana University.

“That is a time when people go digging and finding things they didn’t know they had,” KJ’s mother Mary Testin said. “I think she was searching and that is what she found. Thank goodness she had a voice to go with it.”

After her father’s death, KJ took a semester off. A month before she planned to return to school, she responded to a post on an Internet message board looking for a singer in a rock band. She really didn’t listen to rock music at the time. Instead she liked Janet Jackson and the myriad of boy bands popular then.

“I am an impulsive person... I get into trouble sometimes from that, but then again a lot of good things have happened from it,” she said.

This was one of those good things. She met the drummer from the group that would eventually become Xero Sum. He gave her some songs without vocals. She took them home and wrote lyrics to them. One would become Wasted Away, which has been playing on X103, an Indianapolis rock radio station, for the past year.

The drummer, Gabe Senour, was surprised by the song KJ came back with because when he handed her the blank track, he didn’t think she had a chance.

“When I walked in where she was working I laid eyes on her and thought that is never going to work,” he said. “She looked like a pop singer. She didn’t look like she could front a rock group.”

He said theirs is a stereotypical rock look, and she was the opposite of that.

But listening to the song changed his mind. A few hours after listening to the song, Senour walked into the guitar player’s room and told him he had been singing the song for three hours. The guitarist said he had as well.

“If we were doing it, we knew other people would do it,” he said.

After she was given the job, KJ tried to return to IU, but felt she didn’t fit in with her sorority sisters anymore. On campus, she also was haunted by the memory of her father, remembering all the places she’d been when she received phone calls from her mom, asking her to come home because her father wasn’t doing well.

She knew it would disappoint her mom and would have disappointed her father, but she decided to return home to concentrate on making her band a success, she said. She felt she would be wasting her parents’ money while not getting good grades.

Mary Testin, a teacher at ZCHS, said she was disappointed when her daughter came home, but she knows one day she will go back for her degree.

KJ is the type of person who sets her mind to something and then does it, her mom said. Now she’s concentrating on becoming a rock star, and she will succeed at that as well.

But whether “this rock star thing” lasts another year or a decade, one day KJ will want a job that requires a degree and then she will go back to school to get it, Mary Testin said.

In the past, KJ has gone to great lengths to get what she wanted, Mary said. KJ’s only vocal training was one year of choir her freshmen year at ZCHS, but the only reason she joined choir was because she needed to be in the school musical. She had heard it would be “West Side Story,” and KJ loved that play, Mary said. However, when she learned the high school wouldn’t produce “West Side Story” for a few years, she quit choir.

“She has a fierce determination, but not in a negative way,” Mary said.

KJ said she expects music will always be part of her life.

“I will always be doing something on the side. If I don’t’ get to do this (for a living), I will be satisfied knowing that a lot of my goals have already been met,” she said.

One of the those goals was to have a song on the radio.

“That was a dream come true. I heard my song on the radio for the first time, and I was bawling,” she said.

Another milestone was when the band was turned into characters on the video game Rock Tour Tycoon, where the player is the manager of a band trying to make it in the music business.

Out of nowhere, Testin received an e-mail from the creator of the game saying he had seen the band play in Indiana and wondered whether they would be interested in being part of the game. She responded thinking nothing would ever come of it, but six months later the band’s manager received a contract for them to be part of it.

“I am a cartoon character, which is every kid’s dream,” she said.

But she still has one final milestone to reach.

“Our ultimate goal is do this for a living, whether we become millionaires or are touring and living out of a van. I don’t care,” she said.

        

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