Petra’s Story from A to B

Once upon a time, I got this crazy idea that I could make my own music in my spare time. So what if I was thirty with zero experience? I knew how to DIY things. In the same way someone learns to bake zucchini muffins without a recipe, I started a band.

I didn’t care if we sounded terrible at our first downtown gigs in New York. I had a blast screaming Sixties covers in Japanese, wearing dresses made from pink bubble wrap. Somehow, that led to a record deal with Sony—and full-throttle popstardom in Japan.

I wasn’t trying to be famous. Call it what it was: a fucking fluke. But when Sony is backing you, anything can happen—and everything did. My face on a billboard the size of a bullet train. Fans screaming outside TV studios in Tokyo. We felt like The Beatles.

When Charlie Drayton—yes, that Charlie Drayton—showed up to record with us, even I had to wonder if we’d earned it. And being actually big in Japan? It makes you question why the industry treats it like a punchline. Because trust me—being big in Japan is wildly underrated.

The non-stop party lasted a decade. Then, like a firework fizzling on descent, everything stopped.

The recession hit. The band fell apart. My identity went with it. And the five-year fiancé left the year I turned forty—only to marry someone ten years younger. Not exactly the ending I’d imagined for my glam fairytale. I thought I’d be closing deals, having it all, coasting as a grown-ass former rock star.

Instead, I had…nothing.
Except a front-row seat to my own flameout.

Starting over in midlife is when it really hit. I didn’t have a problem with my age—but apparently everyone else did. Algorithms, like my ex, had decided I’d expired. Jobs disappeared. Dating in my own generation? Good luck. And every year I wasn’t a mother seemed to count against me.

It started to feel like a scam—that a woman’s worth comes with an expiration date, measured in dog years.

None of this sat right.

We’re still shoving single women over forty into the same tired boxes: cat lady, cougar, spinster.

So I took the whole narrative off the shelf—and put it on the turntable.

Because coming of age in midlife shouldn’t sound like a sad, scratchy record for those of us who didn’t follow the script.

Cue The B/Side.

Not a pity party. Not a rebrand.

A reclamation.

For the women who didn’t disappear.
For the lost and found stories that didn’t get the main track.
For anyone who’s ever had to start over—and make it sound better the second time.

Let’s turn it up!

Yours Fiercely,

Petra