On a recent summer night at Moon Base One in Salem, the crowd pressed close to the stage as Vee VanRemoortel’s band, Middles, launched into “Tiny Skies.”
Guitar in hand, VanRemoortel stepped into the spotlight.
She ripped through a solo, her bandmates cheering her on, while the audience — a mix of queer fans, allies, and first-time concertgoers — erupted into applause.
For VanRemoortel, 26, moments like this once felt impossible.
“If you told me five years ago when I was alone, crying, and feeling like I’d never breathe easily again, that I’d be on stage like this — I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said. “Now it’s my everyday.”
VanRemoortel’s story begins in Marblehead, where she grew up surrounded by music. Her mother was a preschool music teacher, her grandfather a jazz educator and arts administrator. Instruments filled the family home, and by age 7, she had her first guitar.
“Music was never work,” she said. “It always represented joy. It was just part of life.”
She joined choirs, tinkered on the piano, and picked up saxophone. Encouraged but never pressured by her family, she followed her passion all the way to Drexel University in Philadelphia, where she studied music industry and production.
The program didn’t require a focus on one instrument, and for VanRemoortel, that freedom was perfect. “I could develop my musicianship on my own terms,” she said. “I wasn’t boxed into recitals or juries. Instead, I was in a city full of musicians. It was: do your schoolwork, then go make music with your friends.”
Like many 2020 graduates, VanRemoortel’s senior year ended abruptly when the pandemic shut down campuses. She returned to Massachusetts, moving first to Boston, then to Beverly.
She taught music at Marblehead High School, her alma mater, filling in for a departing band director. “Who gets to go back and teach at their high school so soon after graduating?” she said, smiling. “It was surreal.”
But teaching was only part of her story. After briefly working at a music software company, she was laid off, an early lesson in the instability of corporate life. She even pursued aviation, earning her pilot’s license and working in private aviation customer service.
Still, the pull of music was too strong to ignore.
By 2024, she had stepped away from flying to devote herself fully to performing and teaching. “I realized I knew what I was supposed to be doing,” she said.
In August 2022, VanRemoortel came out publicly as a transgender woman, a revelation she described as both terrifying and liberating after “20 years in the closet.”
At the time, she was performing with wedding bands — traditionally conservative spaces, with rigid gender roles and expectations. To protect herself, she presented as male at gigs.
“I didn’t know if I’d be accepted as my true self,” she said. “Weddings are so heteronormative, so gendered. It felt safer to keep pretending.”
That changed one night during a performance when she confided her struggle to fellow musician Ellie Brigida. The very next day, Brigida texted her: Do you want to join The Femmes?
The band was just starting — an all-women and nonbinary project designed to create inclusive spaces for music and celebration.
“I was being seen by a member of the music community in the way I wanted to be seen,” VanRemoortel said. “Ellie saw me for who I am. The Femmes see me for who I am. And I cannot tell you what an incredible feeling it was to know there is music after coming out.”
Today, VanRemoortel’s calendar is packed. She teaches at The Real School of Music in Andover, continuing a three-generation family tradition of music education. During the week, she meets with guitar, saxophone, and trumpet students. On weekends, she’s often on stage.
She plays in multiple groups:
• Red Line, a wedding and events band
• Scenes, a Billy Joel tribute group where she channels the saxophone legends of Joel’s recordings
• The Femmes, who have played everywhere from Boston clubs to Toronto festivals, with more tours planned
• Middles, her original music project, which released its debut EP in July 2025
Each project has a different role in her life. Wedding gigs, she said, pay the bills. Tribute bands let her honor the music she grew up on. Middles, meanwhile, is pure creative expression.
“It’s the most fulfilling thing I do, even though I haven’t made a dime from it,” she said about Middles. “But that’s the balance of being a working musician. Some gigs are for income. Some are for the soul.”
For VanRemoortel, music isn’t just a career. It’s also where she feels most at home in her body.
“There is rarely something I feel more comfortable doing than playing music,” she said. “That was true before I transitioned, and it’s still true now. Music has always been healing.”
That healing has extended to her audience. Fans tell her they’ve never felt safer or more empowered at a concert than at a Femmes show. Even her father, she said, recognizes the joy of those spaces.
“It’s not just for queer people,” she said. “It’s for anyone who wants to feel joy and inclusivity. And when my dad comes to a Femmes concert, he says, ‘That was just a better concert experience overall.’”
As she looks ahead, VanRemoortel is focused on building Middles while continuing to perform and teach. The Femmes will travel to Toronto in the fall and Nashville next year.
She knows the life of a working musician is unpredictable — a patchwork of teaching, late nights, rehearsals, and travel. But for her, it’s exactly right.
“When I have a night off, I’m still playing music around a campfire with friends,” she said. “That’s how I know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
For VanRemoortel, the journey to this point has been winding: from Marblehead to Philadelphia, from teaching to aviation, from hiding her identity to celebrating it on stage. Through it all, one constant has remained.
“Music saved me,” she said. “And it keeps saving me.”
