After graduating from Hillsdale in 2017, Lost Mary band members Luke Martin and David Johnson rejected the nine-to-five teaching jobs they were offered and began walking the tracks with packed bags, hoping to hop a train.
After walking for four days and seeing no trains, they discovered a crucial problem: Trains had not run on these tracks in Michigan since the 1950s.
They decided to switch to hitchhiking, getting picked up several times using a sign that read “rabies-free since July,” Martin said.
After making it to Cincinnati, the pair eventually returned to Hillsdale in fall of 2021 and started a painting company which they currently operate with a friend. In addition to painting, Johnson and Martin decided to put serious effort into revamping Lost Mary, the band they had started as students.
Lost Mary has been rising in the charts recently, now boasting more than 63,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, following the release of its Oct. 2024 extended play “Arcadia.”
As students, the two were in a band composed of members of Phi Mu Alpha, the men’s music fraternity now called Theta Epsilon. The band, called Deaf Davey and the Wine Boxes, was in part named after Johnson, who at that time was nearly deaf in both ears.
The two came up with the name Lost Mary in 2017 before recording their 2018 album of the same name.
“We wanted something more memorable in a way,” Martin said. “So we thought of the different connotations: there’s the Catholic idea with it, you know, Mother Mary, but then also there’s the other idea of Mary Jane, and there are others.”
Johnson interrupted: “We wanted a name that if someone heard it, they would be like, ‘What the hell does that mean?’”
On the path to their current and growing musical success, the two made many detours.
After their hitchhiking trek and before returning to Hillsdale, they decided to go to Mexico, but ran out of money in Colorado. For some time the two lived out of Johnson’s car in a parking lot up a mountain near Buffalo Bill’s grave in Golden, Colorado.
“My car was having issues,” Johnson said. “So some mornings, to get to work, we had to just turn the car off and coast all the way down the hill for like eight miles.”
Martin added, “there were some mornings we would wake up and the car was just covered in snow. And that’s when we realized, we can’t do this.”
Eventually they found themselves teaching at a classical school in Florida but there was a problem: Johnson’s hearing was operating at about 30% of its original capacity due to a rare disease called cholesteatoma. This medical issue drew them back to Michigan to see a specialist in Detroit — Johnson’s first visit to a doctor in six years.
In the spring of 2024, Johnson had surgery to repair his hearing almost entirely in one of his ears. During past recording sessions and music creation he would have to figure out different ways to hear the music he played.
“To play guitar,” Johnson said, “what I would do to make sure I was playing the right stuff was close my teeth, and then stick my chin on the guitar to feel the vibrations.”
Before the surgery, when they recorded “Arcadia” in spring of 2023 with a Montreal-based folk producer, Johnson’s hearing had declined to just 20% of its original capacity, he said.
“The producer, Tyler, had the volume cranked up to the highest setting on the headphones just so I could hear it,” Johnson said.
After recording “Arcadia,” Lost Mary recorded an album this summer with the same producer. Martin said the band plans to release a single from it before the year’s end.
One of the band’s more popular songs on Spotify is named “Donnybrook,” after an off-campus house they lived in which is now owned by the college.
The two members said Donnybrook formed them because the house had a history.
“There was a bunch of weird, almost demonic stuff going on in the house,” Johnson said. “It wasn’t that we were doing demonic things. It was just like that. And we heard from previous generations of the Donnybrook — the people who lived there before — that they had experienced pretty similar things.”
Martin said he remembered some of the weird goings on of Donnybrook.
“During the time we were there, there was demonic stuff for sure,” Martin said. “Seven out of the eight guys all had sleep paralysis. There was a poltergeist once. One evening, we smelled sulfur in the house, just this strong scent of sulfur, in the middle of winter.”
The song named after the house references some of these happenings, in part as an inside joke that former residents can understand, while also remaining cryptic enough for unknowing listeners to ponder.
“Some of the lyrics are even in reference to old Donnybrook stories we heard from people who lived there before us,” Martin said. “So in some way we’re trying to make light of it, but also its just an acknowledgment of like, ‘Oh, here’s some weird, crazy stuff that happened.’”
Lost Mary’s popularity comes from their recorded music, not live performances, but it wants to nail down its live sound soon, Martin said.
The band played at homecoming this year and a few other places around Hillsdale, but hopes to perform more once the next album comes out. They have a hard time adjusting to the live scene, Martin said.
“I think at the end of the day we strive to be religious people. We’re both Catholic, but it can be very tough because if you’re pursuing something like music you have to have an ego to move past the stage fright,” Martin said. “We aren’t those people, we don’t like to do that.”
Joel Calvert ’16 co-owns a studio called Hot Salad Records, where Lost Mary members do side work such as lessons in and where senior Greg Whalen recorded his EP “America Deployed.” Calvert called himself an “enabler” of the band, prompting the recording of their first album in 2017 with his equipment.
“We wound up living together in the summer after I graduated, and I said, ‘Let’s just record something and see how it goes.’ And we did.”
Calvert said he was impressed with their ability when he first heard them play.
“I think that Luke has a really good ear for things that are beautiful — they each bring a different strength to the band,” Calvert said. “DJ (Johnson) has an ear for the more percussive elements, and knows how to build on a song — how to fill it out and help it take shape with instrumentation. Lost Mary wouldn’t really work without both of them.”
Vincent Cañete owns a cleaning business in town and has known Martin and Johnson for 10 years, often helping them with performances.
“I think a lot of the time there’s a sort of wall when it comes to musicians — they’ll only go so far and then maybe drop,” he said. “Whereas they have consistently taken the next step into bettering their music. They’re willing to make investments in their own business or into their own band, and have actually seen growth in it. You can see those numbers on Spotify — you just have to look at their monthly listeners and the number of views to see that growth.”