In the beginning of 2025, Taylor Olin had decided she’d seen enough of Echo Park and decided to relocate to a cozy ranch up in Altadena. There, she’d begun to plant her roots in an artistic community, spending most of the last year and some change nestled in with her new flock of bohemian neighbors.
It would be the perfect sanctuary for the Something Specials frontwoman, that doubled as a creative space.
By the first week of January, she moved her belongings into a rented stationary camper situated on a ranch owner’s sprawling land, that they’d lived on for more than 25 years. In the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains, her L.A. chronicle would continue, as dreamed.
But within a week of settling down, she’d receive a knock on her door, step out of her home, and see flames burning a nearby hillside. When she saw the fire she knew to leave, packing as much as she could before making a run for it.
“Every successive update we would get from her was just unbelievably surreal,” said Josh Augustin, who plays drums and keys and does production for the band.
She didn’t know it yet, but all that was left of her camper was its frame; it’s burned, twisted metal was another casualty of the L.A. wildfires. For the next couple of weeks, she’d couch surf until ultimately sleeping in her van, waking up early to wait tables at an oyster bar on Sunset Boulevard.
“From there, I went back to Florida, and I put on a benefit show for some specific people in Altadena that I wanted to give some funds to,” Olin said.
She’d then relocate to Europe and start fresh with aid from a GoFundMe created by a friend. Roughly a year and a half later, she’s still there and has had time to reflect on the experience.
“As much as I was directly affected, I really have held the space in my heart for those who have been there for their entire lives,” she said.
“My commitment to the community had only been a year … whereas they had invested so much and lost so much.”
But something fascinating was happening behind the scenes, coinciding with the disaster that had sent Olin overseas and left her bandmates, Augustin and Nathan Slone — located in New York City — shocked.
One year earlier, the band had released “Love,” a pleasantly sweet, folky, country-adjacent tune that melts easily into eardrums. Though it hadn’t received much attention at the time, it began to gain some traction on social media right after Olin settled down in Europe, frequently appearing in short-form videos across Instagram.
“We had no idea where we were getting it from,” she said of the new listeners. “It was picked algorithmically and put at the top of recommended songs on stories and reels, and so we started seeing thousands of reels being used with its intro.”
They band unwittingly stumbled into virality.
“We would get maybe a few hundred listeners in a day across our entire discography,” Slone, guitarist and bassist, said. “It’s … come to life, die, come back to life, and died. Now our whole discography seems to be in a ‘high tide lifts all ships’ moment.”
At that time, “Love” was floating around 1 million listeners on Spotify. Today, it sits at nearly 20 million, with the band’s average monthly listeners at 1.2 million. Small highlights include being featured in a Reese Witherspoon carousel and Ashley Tisdale French gardening video on Instagram, the latter containing their other hit, “Aces.”
Now, the trio is gearing up to release its debut album, “Somewhere Up There,” on Friday. At just shy of an hour, the project is split almost evenly between new music and previously released tunes.
Impressively, the band has met in person only three times, one of which was when they first agreed to work together. Better yet, when Olin and Slone first met, it was shaking hands on stage at the Echoplex before the band’s first show.
They’re all skilled musicians, having done their due diligence in different music groups, but nothing has clicked like the parasocial success that is the Something Specials.
“We need each other all the way through — we each bring a different thing to the project,” Slone said.
“I’ll go and write the bass of the song, and a riff if there’s a riff. Josh helps with keyboards and drums. We refine it a little bit together. We send it to Taylor. Taylor records over it. We get it back. We might add a part or two. We mix it. All say yes. Send it for mastering and upload it.”
In a modern world, it’s not unusual to hear of music production being done in such a way, but it’s the group’s limited personal relationship that makes it shine.
The plan is to keep being nonchalant about the whole thing, and hopefully their fan base will continue to grow. On Oct. 28, they’ll play the Sultan Room in New York City, their third time together as a band.
“It’s bizarrely easy,” Slone adds.
“With very few exceptions, if things are flowing well, we can wrap something up in a week or two,” Augustin adds about the outfit’s remote recording process.
They’re still winging it at this point, unsigned and with no representation, but “winging it has served us well,” Olin said.
“We’ve been approached many times [by labels],” Slone continues. “But we do pretty darn well on our own, and record labels don’t really have much to offer us, frankly.”
Olin says that in a time where the use of artificial intelligence is so prevalent, and particularly in creative spaces, doing things “DIY” is the best approach. They’re starting with an initial run of around 500 vinyl records, with plans to release the album on CD and cassette later down the line.
“With this kind of band — with our sound, with our aesthetic— I think that as old-school as possible feels best,” she said.
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