Guest post written by Motor City Love Song author Lisa Peers
Lisa Peers is the Lambda Literary Award-nominated author of Love at 350° and has a passion for smart, funny love stories with well-deserved happy endings. She has acted professionally in San Francisco, produced TV and radio programs in Detroit, and is currently a creative director for an international marketing agency. A Harvard graduate with an MFA in acting from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Lisa lives with her partner, Dani, in metro Detroit, not far from their three grown children, along with their beloved cats and way too much yarn.
AboutMotor City Love Song: No one knows why the queen of indie rock vanished from the Detroit scene twenty years ago. Now, her ex-girlfriend is determined to track her down—and what she uncovers will change everything. Released February 10th 2026.
When my family moved from San Francisco to metro Detroit twenty years ago, it was a hard adjustment for me. We were doing it for all the right reasons: being closer to my partner’s side of the family, better public schools, lower cost of living, having a front lawn instead of a sidewalk. But I’d never lived in Michigan before and had no friends or connections there. On top of this, I felt creatively rudderless. I’d been a professional musical theater actor in San Francisco, and that career wasn’t viable in my new neighborhood. I’d written fiction here and there but hadn’t produced much. I needed an outlet, maybe one that would give me and my two daughters something to do together. Then one fateful day, my older daughter came home from middle school and asked, “Mom, what do you know about indie rock?”
Let me say this again: My middle schooler wanted to talk to me, her mother, about a cool topic I actually knew a lot about … which maybe meant she thought I was cool.
Off to the Bloomfield Township Library we went, with me tossing dozens of CDs into our tote bags. We created iTunes playlists to play on our ever-present iPods. I shared Rolling Stone articles and anecdotes from the musician memoirs I was reading. And we started going to concerts together all over town—and when my younger daughter was old enough, she joined us. We quickly learned that pretty much every reputable indie band makes a point of coming through town. The more established ones fill up the Fox or the Fillmore. The up-and-comers play the Majestic, Magic Stick or St. Andrew’s, and a mix of pop newbies and punk stalwarts are always welcome at El Club.
Attending a concert became a family ritual the three of us performed every couple of months:
- Go south on Woodward Avenue toward downtown.
- Find cheap parking on a sketchy side street, paying a guy who may or may not be a parking employee.
- Wait in the long line outside (rain or shine, winter or summer) until the doors open.
- Push through the crowd to claim a few square feet in General Admission to stand near the stage.
- Cheer for the opening acts, even if they’re terrible.
- Go bananas as soon as the headliners take the stage and whoop and clap throughout their set.
- Try to catch the guitar picks and drum sticks the musicians toss into the audience after the encore.
- Scope out the merch table for limited edition CDs and graphic t-shirts.
- Hang around in hopes of getting an autograph or photo with the musicians before they leave town.
- Head home and relive the entire night while polishing off McDonald’s chocolate shakes.
- Brag to our friends the next day.
But not all bands had to tour to play the Motor City. The longer we lived here, the more we learned about Detroit’s own indie, punk and garage scene that began in the 1990s—not just the White Stripes but also so many other innovative, impressive bands that deserved to be just as well known. My partner’s cousin, who’d been a music booker during that era, turned us on to local icons like the Paybacks and Gore Gore Girls. We eventually got to see the Hentchmen, the Detroit Cobras, and the Dirtbombs perform live, leaving us awestruck: so much power and noise, and it seemed to only belong to us.
Detroit’s music brought my daughters and me even closer together, connecting us to the city’s creative core. It also inspired me to write my latest book, Motor City Love Song, a second-chance romance about how music underscores relationships of all sorts: lovers, ex-lovers, about-damn-time lovers, parental figures, and friends who become family.
In Motor City Love Song, Jace Randolph knows she’s nowhere near as cool as she was back in the late 1990s. That’s when she was managing Paloma Doralle, superstar of the Detroit indie rock music scene—and love of Jace’s life. That all came crashing down when Paloma disappeared from the public eye in 2001, crushing Jace’s heart and her career. In the more than twenty years since, Jace thought that part of her life was well behind her. But the Artemis Club, the trashy downtown venue where Paloma got her start, is in danger of closing post-pandemic, so Jace commits to producing a blowout benefit concert. And there’s one musician who’ll guarantee a sold-out show: Paloma, whose earlier hit has just gone viral. Jace has to locate Paloma and persuade her to return to the Detroit stage, no matter how much it hurts.
Motor City Love Song is my love letter to this incredible city and the power of its music to bring people together. I hope it’ll strike a chord with you.
