The interview quotations in this article have been edited for clarity.
If you’ve worried recently about choosing a career path that will lock you into a lifetime of misery with no reprieve, look no further than inspirational Carnegie Mellon alumni to remind you that you can always chase your dreams no matter where you are in life.
Anne DiGiovanni graduated from Dietrich College in 2006. She was involved with the The Tartan while she was here and this is not her first time being interviewed for an article. She studied English and History. Like many of us, DiGiovanni was involved in clubs, had boyfriends, and wanted to “go to grad school and … make money, have security, be financially stable.” For her, that meant graduating and moving to New York to earn her law degree at NYU.
However, after working in law for 15 years, DiGiovanni decided to make a big change — she wanted to be a professional musician. In 2018, while still working as a lawyer, DiGiovanni began an indie-pop group with her husband Joseph Lewczak (who is the love of her life, she said) called Only Bricks. Over the course of the pandemic, the pair became more serious about their side gig. Now, Only Bricks is consistently releasing music, and DiGiovanni has started a new solo project under the name deegie. Self-titled “punk pop princess,” deegie makes music that speaks to adulthood, love, now, and her experiences at Carnegie Mellon.
Her new EP, “EXES,” coming out over the course of the next few months, will cover her experiences with ex-boyfriends, including a few she had at Carnegie Mellon. One single, “Never Look Back (PJ)” is about someone she met while living in Donner! The music video, shot around Pittsburgh as an ode to the backdrop of their relationship, was made in part by Arrim Jung, a sophomore majoring in film in Dietrich College, who deegie said she had a wonderful experience working with.
When I spoke with deegie, she told me a bit about PJ and the inspiration for “Never Look Back (PJ)”: “This is really a true story about my college boyfriend. My first boyfriend in college, who was PJ, he was a math major, and we met freshman year in Donner, where he lived on the second floor, and I lived on the first floor. I think we met on Clipper ship during orientation, actually. But we became friends because we were in Donner, and started dating. And it went well; for a while we had a really nice, sweet relationship, but ultimately, you know, it’s college… you don’t necessarily end up with your college sweetheart. He grew up in Pittsburgh… he kind of was the key person who was showing me around town and introducing me to all these experiences that made me fall in love with Pittsburgh.”
She explained that PJ invited her to go to his grandmother’s house outside of Pittsburgh for a barbecue, and she was unable to go. She said, “He was really upset about that fact. I was like: Alright, I’m gonna have to break up with him. He was just really devastated, and that’s really hard to do to someone, you know, to break their heart to let them down to kind of like put them in this depressive place. Things got kind of messy and ugly.”
The song is an ode to the memories deegie made with PJ in Pittsburgh as well as the way she felt about the way things ended. She said, “You know, it’s easier to just move forward and never look back. But we end up thinking about that person in the process of trying to put them out of our mind. And, you know, do we feel bad? Do we feel hope that they just have moved on in their life?”
deegie will explore these themes and more in “EXES,” but for now, you can find “Never Look Back (PJ)” on her Spotify. This song, and her others, have a heavy 2000s punk sound that’s refreshing to hear from a newer artist. Her style calls back to the era that she was at Carnegie Mellon in some of the same ways that her lyrics do.
Curious about how things have changed, I asked her about what Carnegie Mellon was like during her time. She responded that wifi “was starting to happen as I was a freshman. Having a laptop, emailing in assignments — that was all sort of just bubbling up and was new. [Facebook] happened my sophomore year. … We were one of the pilot program campuses that had Facebook before it was available to the mass public. So you know, the ability to like, stalk people and see their photos, see their goings on, see their daily musings, their relationship status … that was all just brand new.” She told me that there was a heavy focus on technology on campus, and that her school (then the HSS College of Humanities and Social Sciences), was known as H and less stressful compared to technical colleges.
deegie said the things she did at Carnegie Mellon served her well in her career both in and out of law. Even though she’s using new and more creative skills in her music career, she says, “I think all of the skills and the experiences that you’ve had will serve you in different ways, because I have that legal background and some of the harder professional writing skills from CMU. Now I know how to look at a contract for my music stuff. I know how to write a press release and approach people to get the word out about my music. So like, all those things that I spent my time doing for 15-20 years before this point, are serving me now in my business.”
deegie’s career switch helped her find passion in her everyday work, making her a great example of what’s possible after graduation. “Something that I’ve learned in the last year or so [is that] there are so many people out there that, when you hear about their life story, like they are not just one thing,” she told The Tartan. “They don’t just decide, ‘I’ll be an engineer and that’s it for my life.’ They really can jump around and just start over. You’re never too old. It’s never too late.”
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