Want to live dangerously? Listen to Squirrel + the Girl, an all-parent cover band from our neighborhood

What do you get when you bring together five musically-inclined parents of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School students?

Answer: the East Dallas rock cover band Squirrel + the Girl, jokingly taglined as “the most dangerous mom/dad band from East Dallas.”

The group — singer Tina Kimbell, guitarist Marc Daigle, guitarist and singer Jeff Gruber, drummer Mike DeLisa and bassist Sean Gaffney (all members sing except for the drummer) — started out in 2019 as a volunteer effort to help St. Thomas Aquinas by playing at events so the school wouldn’t have to pay a band.

“The guys needed service hours,” Kimbell says, prompting a chorus of laughter from her bandmates. “The mom of the group already had plenty of service hours.”

Gruber and Gaffney met through their children and were able to bring the rest of the members on board over the course of a year.

“What I always tell people is that, on paper, that sounds like the recipe for a really either terrible or mediocre band,” Daigle says. “Like, ‘Hey, I know this guy who has kids at the school also who plays in a band.’ Sounds like I don’t want to be a part of that. But in actuality, everyone in the band has either played professionally or semi-professionally at some point. … It turned out to be a really cool thing.”

Bringing the five members together was like “lightning in the bottle,” Gruber says. They meshed musically, vocally and as friends.

“The great thing is it’s a group of folks I would have fun hanging out with anyway,” Gaffney says. “It just so happens that everybody can play music.”

They started under another name, which they didn’t reveal since it sounds like that of another band. That had to change once they graduated from playing school functions to East Dallas mainstays like The Goat and Barley House.

“Squirrel + the Girl came about because these guys have very, very short attention spans,” Kimbell says. “And for years, I have called them squirrels because we can’t get through a two-hour practice session without them veering off. I always tell the joke about, like, ‘Did y’all see the documentary on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?’ And I’m like, ‘Hang on guys, let’s pull it back together.’”

The band focuses on subgenres of rock music — classic, yacht, alternative and grunge, specifically. Songs are generally from the 20th century’s later decades, but they’ll sneak in a Taylor Swift or Miranda Lambert tune on occasion. The setlist ends up reflecting what certain East Dallas folks want to hear.

“When we play something like The Goat or even the Lakewood Country Club, we’re on home turf,” Gruber says. “The people that are there, they’re not only our friends, but they’re like peers, and they all have the same musical sort of history and taste that we do as well. And so our setlists have meandered all over through different genres and eras. … It just sort of sounds like what people in the neighborhood listen to.”

Kimbell recalls her bandmates pushing her out of her comfort zone to take on Robert Plant’s shout-like belting in the 1969 Led Zeppelin banger “Ramble On.”

“That was one song Sean was like, ‘You could totally do this,’ and vocally for me, I’m like, ‘No way,’ but it is one of the most fun songs we play,” she says, as Gruber adds, “And you kill it.”

She also says, “Gruber has become kind of the setlist master in the sense of where we play and what we play makes a difference. We can’t just play certain songs at The Goat. There has to be Goat songs.”

As adults and parents, they have to balance the responsibility of the band with family and work. Squirrel + the Girl is a fun hobby for them, a way to share their musical gifts with listening ears, something to look forward to and take seriously but not too seriously.

“You got to love a band to go and play at The Goat from 9:30 to 1:30 on a Friday night,” Kimbell says.

Squirrel + the Girl has its share of fans (especially at The Goat) who follow the band’s multiple performances throughout the year, particularly while school is in session since they take time off during the summer. Upcoming shows are posted on Facebook and Instagram.

Even the members’ teenagers enjoy the kind of music their parents play and sometimes make requests.

“My daughter is about to be 16,” Daigle says. “She’s like, ‘Oh, I really like this song on Stranger Things;’ and I didn’t watch it after the first season. And she’s like basically playing our playlist of songs that we play.”

But Squirrel + the Girl isn’t a tribute band.

What else can you expect from a band self-described as jumping around from song to song like squirrels?

“Our natural instinct was to be a little bit wider breadth,” Gruber says. “If you come and see us tonight, you’re not going to hear all ’90s, you’re not going to hear all country, you’re not going to hear all this. You’re going to hear something pretty distracted. But we hope you like it.”