Four Best Friends Made an Album as Kids. 25 Years Later, It’s a Cult Classic

T
he year was 2000. Y2K came and went, and a group of four childhood best friends had something more important to worry about now: middle school. Would boys like them? Would they be popular? Would they stick together? 

That summer, they found a way to briefly escape the future. In a Santa Rosa, California, guest room turned studio, they imagined they were the Spice Girls and transformed into X-Cetra, a pop group they conceived. And with the help of one self-taught producer mom, they believed their pop dreams could become a reality.

Ayden Mayeri, Jessica Hall, and Janet Washburn were 11 going on 12 at the time. They had seen enough teen movies and had some anxiety about what to expect, but they had a few months before entering junior high. They ran around their safe, idyllic neighborhood, riding bikes and walking between their homes, which were all within the same couple of blocks. Rounding out their quartet was Washburn’s younger sister, Mary. She was two and a half years younger but a crucial part of her older friend group.

Janet and Mary’s mom, Robin O’Brien, and their stepdad, Don Campau, had always filled their home with music: a mix of Campau’s extensive collection of tapes and the popular grunge, alt, and indie rock of the time. O’Brien was a musician herself and part of the underground “home taping” scene since the Eighties. The scene was built around independent artists who self-recorded their own music on cassettes, mailing out their music to one another, and creating an extensive do-it-yourself network. 

That spring, her daughters and their friends had a surprising request: that O’Brien help turn the songs they had written into a proper album. O’Brien didn’t hesitate. She set them up in her home studio and guided them through a cappella vocal takes and melody construction, leaving the young girls’ lyrics unedited. 

But O’Brien needed music for the vocals, and her guitar skills didn’t feel like a fit. The girls wanted a pop album, reflective of the music they loved at the time. She turned to Campau, a community radio host and archivist she met through the home-taping scene. He had a new album of synth-y compositions by his friend Achim Treu, a successful German composer and experimental musician. The compositions were pulsing, dark, and a bit ominous. It was freakier and heavier than the Spice Girls, for sure, but O’Brien figured it could work.

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O’Brien worked for months, fitting the songs and melodies to Treu’s compositions. The girls had chosen their band name, X-Cetra, from a list in a long-lost journal. They finished their debut album, Stardust, by the end of 2000. O’Brien burned it to a CD and even made an insert with photocopied images from a shoot they had done in the yard. The girls were wearing butterfly clips in the photos. Campau printed the inserts on a special shimmery, purple, holographic paper with mini bios of each girl, complete with quotes and their star signs.

But by the time X-Cetra heard the album, the band had essentially “broken up.” The older girls were now in the throes of the middle school experience they feared, hanging out with Mary less as they navigated puberty. When they first listened to Stardust, that self-consciousness took hold. They sounded like kids, not professional pop stars. On top of that, the music didn’t sound like pop music at all to them. They decided to never talk about it again, letting it disappear.

Over the next 20 years, the girls grew up, moved out of Santa Rosa, and moved on with their lives. They dated boys, made new friends, and settled down into new cities, schools, and jobs. They hadn’t thought about X-Cetra or Stardust in years. But they would soon learn that an alternate universe existed where their pop star dreams had come true. Stardust lived on without them, online, in YouTube rips and forum discussions. The album they hid was not only out in the open but beloved. They had no idea how it happened. Soon, they would have no choice but to let X-Cetra live again.

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SANTA ROSA IN the Nineties was a picturesque, family-friendly American dream. Located in Sonoma County, it’s the largest city in California’s wine country. But it didn’t feel big at all, exuding a kind of small-town energy with its tight-knit community.

“It was a really great place to grow up,” Jessica Hall recalls. She was the first member of X-Cetra to live there, surrounded by immediate family; her aunt and grandmother lived on neighboring streets. “We used to play outside all the time,” she continues. “We were just either always on our bicycles or playing basketball or walking to the elementary school.”

Jessica met Ayden Mayeri first. When they were three, the Mayeri family had moved in next to Hall’s aunt. Hall used to peek over her aunt’s fence to get a glimpse of the mysterious new kid on the block until her aunt introduced them. They invited each other to their respective birthday parties. 

“All of a sudden, we were just like glue,” Jessica says. “She was an only child. I was the youngest of three. My sisters are significantly older than me at that age, so it felt like we became siblings.”

The pair were inseparable, walking back and forth from each other’s houses. Even though Ayden had made plenty of new friends at her Montessori school, she still preferred Jessica’s company. They were both extroverted and ambitious. They recruited other friends to their “dance company,” choreographing numbers in their living rooms. They also created “Genieland,” an imagined world where they were genies.

Jessica and Ayden were also avid pop-culture fiends. They were obsessed with the Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child as much as they were Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette. Jessica’s “really cool” teenage older sisters were into nu metal groups like Limp Bizkit and Korn as well as the dance music of the time, playing the younger girls songs by La Bouche, Ace of Base, and the Real McCoy.

“I feel like I was just taking in pop culture,” Ayden says. “I just loved everything happening on TRL or Pop-Up Video on VH1.”

In 1998, when Jessica and Ayden were around nine years old, a new family moved into the neighborhood. Janet and Mary Washburn were born in New Jersey and lived there until shortly after their parents divorced. Their mom, Robin O’Brien, married San Jose-based radio host Don Campau. The couple had been pen pals through the home-taping scene for seven years before beginning their “courtship,” as O’Brien says. Campau asked her to marry him before they even met. After they wed, they decided to relocate the family to San Jose before settling down in Santa Rosa.

“I really felt a sense of ownership over keeping [Mary] safe and protected from what was going on,” Janet says. “It was a lot of transition. It was a difficult time.”

The sisters were close enough in age and just young enough that there was a real friendship beneath the familial bond as well. They had their own imagined worlds too and played together often. So when they met Ayden and Jessica, who were the same year in school as Janet, Mary was immediately part of the crew.

“Across the street from our house, there was this basketball hoop that our neighbors had put on the side of their yard, and Ayden and Jessica were playing basketball out there,” Janet recalls. “I think we immediately went out and there was a little bit of an intro there. I can’t even remember how we ended up hanging out all the time. It just happened.”

Together, the four became inseparable. The Washburns soon entered the creative dreamworld their new friends were building in their yards and living rooms and playgrounds, like “Genieland.” In Jessica’s jacuzzi, they would sing in the round, taking turns belting out the chorus of Dido’s “Thank You,” as sampled on Eminem’s “Stan.” 

Outside of pop music, the girls had a deep love for all the teen movies the era had to offer. With a camcorder in hand and a limitless well of creative ideas at their fingertips, the four would write and film feature-length movies around their neighborhood. Ayden and Jessica had begun exploring filmmaking before the Washburns moved in; the sisters helped round out the cast and crew for these projects. 

“Jessica and Ayden had this really active imaginary world,” Janet explains. “Ayden’s a really strong driving force in the energy and fun, and Jessica’s so organized and loves to do all the editing and cutting. She brings it to fruition.”

Mary was just as extroverted as Ayden and Jessica, maybe even more confident than the older girls who were starting to become aware of what it means to fit in. Janet, however, was a shy perfectionist.  “It took a lot to get me out of that and actually participate in these things,” she admits. “But I really wanted to do something with my friends, so it was going to happen.”

It didn’t take long for the quartet’s creative pursuits to lead them to songwriting. Jessica remembers a yellow notebook where they would jot down ideas. They would sit on Ayden’s bed or the blue guest room, where O’Brien’s studio was located. Ideas and themes would surface and then lyrics would emerge, freely and without the fear of thinking anyone would hear these songs.

“There are some songs where a couple of us, or one of us maybe wrote the majority, but all of them have a little bit of all of us,” Mary says. “We would test things out, where someone would say something and we would kind of edit it. Get everything down, and then somebody might be like, ‘No, I don’t think that [works]. Let’s try this.’”

The lyrics were from an older perspective, a reflection of the world they anticipated being part of one day. The song “Conversation” was about domestic abuse, something none of the girls had experienced in their lives or their homes but had surely seen on TV or in movies. “We wanted a more adult, mature theme in the music,” Janet explains. “It’s almost a child’s interpretation of what an adult relationship could be like, which is a little odd.”

But their childhood realities and anxieties were hard to ignore. The songs became outlets for their real, lived experiences as well. Mary wrote “Another Girl” on her own, about getting rejected by a crush. Ayden and Jessica wrote “Wonderland” about Ayden’s fear of junior high.

“I was convinced I was going to get bullied for being Jewish,” Ayden explains, having seen one too many movies where kids were shoved into lockers for being or looking different. It would be her first time in public school, having only attended Montessori and Hebrew school before. That summer, her parents took Jessica on their family road trip through a national park. The two recall ignoring all the beautiful landscapes and wild buffalo out the window the entire time, hunkering down in their notebook to write the song. 

“I do think kids have really big, deep feelings from a very young age,” Ayden says. “I think people think that they don’t, which is strange. If everyone remembers being a kid, everything would just rock you the first time you felt something major. I just think we were having a lot of big feelings and experiences.” 

NO ONE REMEMBERS who exactly asked O’Brien to help. But once the songs were written, she felt like the next logical step. 

Stardust was the first time they let an adult touch anything they worked on. Ayden remembers refusing film-editing classes when her mom offered. They were very “anti-adult” when it came to their creative pursuits.

But O’Brien was different. Her daughters and their friends had a real reverence for her skills. The blue guest room was outfitted with the type of studio equipment they saw on MTV: microphones, mixers, speakers. They would wear the big headphones while recording vocal takes, and it made it all feel real. 

Until they asked her to help them record, O’Brien had no idea the girls had been writing songs. She related to that hunger. As a kid growing up in Chicago’s North Shore, she started writing songs when she was six years old. 

“My impulse when I wrote it down was to hide it,” she admits, sharing the same shyness as her eldest daughter. The impulse that moved her to write a song in the first place was intense, she describes, and visceral. It took a few years for her to try writing again. When she was 13, she started writing songs with another girl in her neighborhood, a near parallel to what her daughters would do decades later. 

Eventually, O’Brien learned how to record herself over two cassette players. She would sing into one, then play it back while harmonizing over it. She studied music at Berklee College, then moved to New York with her first husband. She wrote jingles for a while, sang in a band, and was even signed to Atlantic Records. The music she made and was interested in, however, was not pop-oriented. She liked progressive rock and chamber music. Her early songs were classically oriented, and she was already a skilled producer. But under her short-lived recording contract, she struggled with people who wanted to make the sound more digestible for a mass audience. 

“I didn’t like being in the limelight, but I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to give it a try and see what happens,’” she says. Eventually, she gave it up and moved to New Jersey. “I really just wanted a baby. I was really looking at my watch.”

O’Brien eventually found her way into the home-taping scene, an extensive, international network of underground, independent artists who would record music in their homes. In the mid-Eighties, the scene began to emerge as a community through magazines like Sound Choice, Option, and Factsheet Five. In those magazines were mailing addresses, encouraging the trading of cassettes and letters with fellow artists and fans. 

“This whole thing was not in any way associated with the music industry, although some of the people that were home-tapers in the early days wanted to be full-time musicians or wanted to make a career out of music,” explains Campau. It was this network that led him to O’Brien, who was one of thousands of home-tapers he began writing to and trading music with. In 1984, Campau launched a popular community radio show called No Pigeonholes, where he would play exclusively home-recorded music. 

“It was more about people than the music, actually,” he says. “I enjoyed all the different personalities that I ran into over the years. I got a wife out of the deal.”

O’Brien continued making tapes through her daughters’ childhood, even as the home-taping scene entered a transitional period in the Nineties as the magazines folded and the internet emerged. Their garage in Santa Rosa became exclusively a home for Campau’s tape collection, the cars banished to the driveway. They filled their home with music, playing the popular indie rock of the time for the young girls, encouraging their curiosity. Campau had done the same with his three older daughters, who had since moved out of the house. Funny enough, he had helped his daughter Nicole Campau record an album she had also written when she was 11.

It was O’Brien’s duty to help translate the girls’ wishes to tape. Each girl recalls how seriously she took them, speaking to them like they were peers and not just children. Twenty-five years later, her reverence for each of their capabilities is still apparent, rattling off their strengths at length. To her, Jessica had a “fantastic ear” and was always on point, pitch-wise. Mary also had a good ear but was so uncensored and willing that each take was done with maximum passion. Janet’s voice was the most beautiful, even though she didn’t want to be on the mic very much. Ayden’s enthusiasm and drive kept the project focused.

“I never for a minute didn’t take it absolutely seriously, because I take myself seriously,” O’Brien explains.

The vocals were fully recorded by the time O’Brien heard Achim Treu’s compositions. Both she and Campau were friends with Treu through their scene; Treu had even visited their home and met Janet and Mary. Jessica and Ayden even remember hearing some of his earlier work playing around their friends’ house. There was one CD in particular they would dance around to that reminded them of the B-52’s.

Artists like Treu would share compositions to other tapers for them to record their own vocals on or remix. Campau had just received a copy, debating if he would use it for his own project. She played the music for the girls during the summer, before trying to fit them with the vocals.

“We felt like it was weird and kind of cool, and it had enough going on in it that we could make it work,” Janet says. 

“In our heads we were envisioning bubblegum pop, which I’m so grateful that that’s not what we did,” Jessica explains. “I definitely have a much better appreciation for it as I’ve gotten older and have gotten more into music. But at the time I just thought, ‘These are really cool and different, and it’s awesome that he’s going to let us sing to these.’”

As middle school began for three-quarters of X-Cetra, O’Brien tinkered away at the mixes, trying not to mess too much with what the original intentions were. When she was done, she could already see the spark they once had dim with their growing self-consciousness. She cared more about them maintaining community in the face of those treacherous middle school waters than she did their feelings about X-Cetra. 

“When girls are 13, this is what happens: They rise up from the ground, and then they hover for like four years,” she says. “It’s a trauma response to culture or [something]. I don’t know what it is.”

O’Brien played the album for the girls and sent it to Treu as well. “He liked it. I hope he did,” she says. [Treu declined to be interviewed for this article.] “It was very generous of him to let us use these.”

Like the girls themselves, O’Brien believed it was a private project. But Campau is an archivist first and foremost. He attached his label name, Lonely Whistle Music, to the CD and, like any home-taper, mailed out some copies to his extended network. He estimates about 50 to 100 physical copies were shipped to his acquaintances. He even played it a few times on his radio show, too.

Eventually, Campau put the album online. Like everything he has made or attached his label name to, X-Cetra’s Stardust was uploaded to the Internet Archive. The upload didn’t make the girls overnight celebrities. But to a small, niche corner of the internet, it did make them stars.

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“I was expecting some cookie-cutter American Idol wannabes, but these girls aren’t that. There’s a bit of retro-Eighties/electro going on, plus the last song uses a sample loop from Martin Denny. I think they aimed for derivative (which the lyrics lean toward) but hit original, more or less.”

In 2003, WFMU’s blog ran a review of Stardust as part of their 365 Days Project, where more than 200 contributors highlighted “cool and strange and often obscure audio selections,” particularly from the subgenre. Most of the songs and albums highlighted fall under the umbrella of “outsider music,” a way of describing music made by people who have little or no traditional musical training or experience. 

Before X-Cetra, there were bands like Sixties outfit the Shaggs, a group of sisters whose music has been lauded as both the worst of all time and quite unintentionally brilliant. They found a revival in the Eighties after their only album Philosophy of the World was reissued and developed a cult following, with famous fans like Kurt Cobain, Frank Zappa, and Jonathan Richman.

Much like the Shaggs, X-Cetra’s only album was labeled as “bizarre” but “oddly endearing” in the WFMU blog. The write-up led to more fans of outsider music discovering them. “At first I figured it was some Planet Mu artist trying to sound retro or else some Spanish techno with cut-up english language lyrics stolen from paedophile (in the old sense) surveillance — then it sort of tries to be POP but misses the mark a little and turns into something altogether stranger,” wrote one Blogspot user three years later. A commenter calls the album “surprisingly groovesome.”

As the years wore on, the album racked up thousands of views on YouTube. There were comments on Discogs, forums, and Reddit threads. Some commenters recall hearing their songs on local radio stations, likely college and community radio or even Campau’s own show.

O’Brien, Campau, and the members of X-Cetra hadn’t thought about Stardust in years. One day, O’Brien received a call. A man on the phone asked if she was the same Robin O’Brien who produced X-Cetra’s Stardust. He revealed he wanted to clear up some internet theories about the album. 

“Apparently there were all these things people were saying, ‘Oh, these evil parents made their kids make this thing,’” she says. “It’s just weird stuff.”

While living in Wilmington, North Carolina, Mary had become friends with lots of people in bands, though she never attempted joining one again herself. She played one of the YouTube rips for a group of them. “There were four of them there, and three of them were just like, ‘Oh, cute. This is so funny.’ My friend Derek was like, ‘I genuinely think this is really cool.’ 

Janet ended up finding the reviews and discussions online. During Covid, the four girls created a group chat to talk about what they found, including rampant discussions on Rate Your Music. 

Ayden, an actress who had a recurring role on New Girl, similarly began sharing the music with her friends. She was filming a movie in Italy with director Jeff Baena (who died earlier this year). Baena became obsessed with the album, calling it “genius.” She went back to the chat to tell the girls how Baena wanted to direct a music video for them.

“The fact that anyone seriously thought it was cool, we couldn’t believe,” she admits.

In 2023, Numero Group A&R Douglas Mcgowan reached out after a colleague found X-Cetra on a playlist. They reminded him of the Shaggs and sister act Wendy and Bonnie. The archival label was interested in reissuing the album in time for its 25th anniversary. Titled Summer 2000 after one of the songs on the original, the vinyl release dropped in January. The “Crazy Fan Pack” includes a custom “Brain Freeze” nail polish and an X-Cetra slap bracelet, as well as three previously unreleased songs from their sessions with O’Brien.

Before the reissue came out, George Clanton and TV Girl sampled “Summer 2000” on their track “Summer 2000 Baby,” from the 2024 collaborative album Fauxllennium. Brad Petering of TV Girl has had a longstanding relationship with Numero, having cleared samples with them before. X-Cetra’s “mutated take on a teenybopper girl group” caught his attention right away. When he first played the song for Clanton, his collaborator wasn’t sure how they could make it work. 

“I was just dumbfounded at what he is showing me, thinking that this is going to be so difficult ,and it virtually sounds unpleasant,” Clanton admits. “A lot of it doesn’t lend itself to being sampled. It’s very muddy, and there’s this bizarre music going on the whole time. But [Brad] was listening, and the isolated vocals of the end of ‘Summer 2000’ where the girls do the chant [worked for us].” 

Their version became a hit with audiences during their live shows, and later Fcukers remixed the song for the deluxe edition of the album, released earlier this summer. Clanton and TV Girl would later produce Magdalena Bay’s cover of X-Cetra’s “Speechless,” reworking it for a new track called “Messy Hair.”

Electronic musician Pictureplane caught the release in a newsletter from indie-music specialist Boomkat and was instantly drawn to the “wild low-fi electronic pop music” the girls had made.

“It was really nostalgic for me,” he says. “I have a younger sister, and it just reminded me of being in junior high when her and her friends would record music at my house. I started making music when I was a teenager, and my sister and her friends would sometimes record themselves on my equipment in my room.”

There are more famous fans floating around: The 1975’s Matty Healy was photographed shopping at Amoeba Records in Hollywood, clutching a copy of the album. When I visited Ayden in Los Angeles in May, she showed a photo her nail technician friend took of XCX holding up her Spotify mid-manicure. She had been listening to Summer 2000. 

“I think before, it would’ve been hard for me to believe that this would resonate with people,” Mary says. “Who would want to listen to little girls singing? But I get it now. I think it’s opened a window into a community that I wasn’t aware of.”

THIS MAY, THE band got back together in Los Angeles. They hosted a slumber party-themed album release party, with guests like Patti Harrison and Alison Brie donning their best Y2K attire.

It’s been rare for the four women to see each other since they made the album. They’ve hung out more in the past two years than they had the previous decade. When they entered junior high, Janet, Ayden, and Jessica remained close. They spent less time with Mary, their age gap suddenly feeling large. 

Junior high became a less creative time for them. They stopped making movies, writing songs, and being genies. They were more interested in boys and fitting in. They went to parties and had their first kisses and met their first boyfriends. Janet started painting, and Ayden eventually found her way into the theater program. Jessica played sports. Mary, who had been a “compulsive journaler” since she was young, began writing poetry. 

In college, the older girls moved away. Janet went to school in Boston before eventually moving to Denver. She has since married and is raising three young boys. Jessica attended school in San Diego and moved around over the years, living in Spain during the pandemic when the X-Cetra group chat began. She’s settled down in San Francisco, working as a creative project manager. Mary has also found work in marketing in Boston.

Ayden studied political science at a community college in San Luis Obispo, still acting in community theater productions on the side. After her college boyfriend died, she realized that she needed to pursue something that left her fulfilled. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she’s found steady work as an actress.

When Mcgowan reached out, he encouraged the group to begin culling though their video archives. He knew they had a great story, and it would be a matter of time before someone would want to tell it. Ayden began producing a documentary, which has since been submitted to major festivals. During the process of reissuing the album, Ayden had the band reunite with O’Brien in the same home studio they made the album. The five of them began working on a new song.

This time around, X-Cetra are working with people outside the family. When I meet Ayden in Los Angeles a week after the party, she is in producer Owen Jackson’s home, joined by writer Alexandra Veltri. The other three members of the band chime in over Zoom, having returned to their corners of the country. The song I hear is loose, noisy, and fun. They’re still not professional pop stars, but this time around, they’re embracing the raw chaos they so easily captured as little girls.

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The experience for them, and me, is like being in a time capsule. They’re giggling and gossipping, excited to hear what they made as adults. It’s like a virtual slumber party, the type the four of them hadn’t done together in so long. In returning to X-Cetra they each refound the part of themselves they let get dampened by teenage insecurity and shame. Janet started painting again, and Mary has been writing poems. For the first time in years, they feel free. 

“I think you get to a place where you’re just like, ‘What was all that for?’ And I feel like that’s the point that I’ve been in my life the last few years,” Jessica says. “I’m realizing that I have let those things control me for a very long time, and there’s some untapped potential in me that I would like to explore. It’s like my little Jess voice is like, ‘Hey, remember me. Remember how much fun we used to have?’”