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Sarah Bonde took a deep breath and gazed into the sellout crowd at Manhattan’s famed Mercury Lounge.

It was hard to see faces through the glare of stage lights illuminating her band, but many of the faces she already knew: her father, brother and sister, family friends from Massachusetts, University of Virginia alumni, and scores of acquaintances she quickly collected after moving to New York.

“As some of you know,” she began, her voice cracking, “we lost my mom in May.”

When her side gig of a pop-rock band needed a 10th tune to round out its first album, Bonde, a 2019 graduate of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, penned her parents’ UVA love story, and how the University became a thread through their lives and hers.

“Southern Sky” takes listeners on a journey from nervous first glances at a UVA party to a courtship, a wedding, three children and the anguish of a slow-motion death to cancer. While Bonde penned it as a tribute to her parents, it’s also an ode – a pop anthem, really – to the enduring gravity of relationships built on Grounds.

“If you go to UVA or you live in Charlottesville, whether you are on the Lawn or on Skyline Drive, and you’re watching a sunset with the people you love, it’s such a unique feeling,” she said. “It’s addictive. It’s a feeling of hope.”

So, standing on a stage where Radiohead, Lady Gaga and The Strokes once played, Bonde introduced the set’s fifth song. It would be her first time performing “Southern Sky” in public.

“This one’s for you, Mom,” she began.

Family stories of UVA

Bonde grew up in a musical family. One of her grandfathers was an international pianist. An aunt was a professional opera singer. Her father “has always played in bands on the side,” she said. “It was always so much fun for us as kids to see him play at the barbecues and in local clubs. I grew up around it.”

She also grew up hearing Allen and Colleen Bonde’s stories of meeting at a UVA graduate-student happy hour, going on dates in Charlottesville and falling in love. By the time Sarah’s college applications were due, the self-described “sulky teenager” wanted to forge her own path. UVA wasn’t on her list, but to keep the peace, she agreed to visit.

“I remember watching all the students walking to class, and everyone was wearing something UVA-themed,” she said. “I had never seen that before at a school. People just seemed to love it that much.”

The school spirit, plus the beauty of Grounds, hooked her. “It was really perfect.”

At UVA, Bonde joined the a cappella group the AcHOOstics and, like her father, pursued an engineering degree. Everything was falling into place until her third year, when she learned her mother had brain cancer.

‘We’re a band now’

Bonde graduated in 2019 and moved first to Washington for a job with Capital One, then to New York. Two of her Wahoo friends – Anne Windsor, from a cappella, and Katie Gallivan, from the Engineering School – were also in the city. Both sang and played instruments. Bonde started jamming with them in the fall of 2022 for fun. As she remembers it, she invited her fellow Wahoos to a “Friendsgiving” celebration where all three clicked musically.

“The next morning, we woke up to a group text that said, ‘We’re a band now,’” Bonde recalled. “So that was that.”

The trio soon added Casey Cates, a singer and guitar player. Bonde saw the phrase “Bimbo Summit” on a social media post and immediately thought, “That’s an excellent name for a girl band.”

It’s a reference to a November 2006 paparazzi photograph of mid-2000s celebrities Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton piled into the front seat of a car, post-party. The New York Post dubbed the gathering “Bimbo Summit.”

For a band founded by three UVA grads, the name raised eyebrows.

“That was exactly my parents’ first concern with it,” Bonde said. “I remember my mom saying, ‘People are going to think you’re calling yourself a bimbo.’ I was like, ‘It’s ironic, Mom.’”

Like most bands, there were personnel changes. The girl band added a guy, 2019 UVA graduate Peter Cybriskwy, dubbing the drummer a “himbo.” The band, as a five-piece, gigged throughout New York all of 2025, but in December, Gallivan moved to California.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Colleen Bonde’s health was failing.

‘That song’s very special’

Colleen Bonde, a pediatric speech therapist for more than 30 years, was exceedingly kind to others without ever expecting anything in return, Sarah remembered. Husband Allen Bonde said Colleen “was tough, wickedly funny and didn’t let her illness slow her down.” The couple even visited London in 2025, one of Colleen’s favorite places.

But by the time Sarah finished “Southern Sky” in April, Colleen was in hospice care. Sarah sat next to her, opened her phone, and played the finished track. She doesn’t know how much her mother understood, “but she heard it, and that’s good.”

The album release party scheduled for May 29 turned out instead to be Colleen’s funeral. Sarah delivered the eulogy.

What makes “Southern Sky” so special to Sarah – apart from the inspiration – is that the band poured their own hearts into it, she said. They knew what it meant to her.

“It is truly one of the prettiest songs we’ve put out because of the rest of the band and their talents,” Sarah said. “That song is very special.”

The new debut was set for July 24, and Sarah wanted it to be a family affair, a celebration. She invited her dad’s band to open, and fans from Massachusetts poured into New York for the occasion.

Cates invited her parents’ band to play as well.

Near the end of the night, “Southern Sky” went off without a hitch, until the last line. It’s what her father frequently told Sarah’s mother: “You’re always by my side.”

Sarah was in tears, but the crowd whooped and hollered, and her bandmates stepped in to comfort her.

“It’s not a sad thing, it’s a happy thing,” she told UVA Today after. “I totally believe it’s true. She’s always there, by our side.

“I was hoping for this to be a celebration,” Sarah continued. “And it was.”