On September 13th, 2019, Taylor Stonack had no idea she was about to meet her future love AyJay Lasater, let alone at his own house. “When people ask us how we met, my favorite line is ‘Taylor walked up to my front door,’ and then there’s dramatic pause, and people are like, ‘what?’’ AyJay said, smiling. “Then I usually jump in,” Taylor said.
Back in 2019, Taylor had been regularly attending Sofars in Denver. At the time she was single, so she’d go to meet friends, or even just go solo. “It was kind of my single empowerment,” Taylor said. For her birthday weekend, her best friend came to town, and the night before, Taylor decided to take her to a Sofar. “I literally did walk up to AyJay’s front door– he was hosting the show.”
The spark was instant, but the Sofar was about to begin. Taylor headed into the house with her friend and took a seat in the middle of the room, while AyJay placed himself in the back. Between the first and second artist performances, AyJay went and found Crew Ops Manager Brandy Sachen and asked her about Taylor, who she knew through attending Sofars. Brandy encouraged AyJay to talk to her, but he was too nervous. Instead, he waited until the next break between artists, and casually walked by to try and lock eyes with Taylor. They did.
“From my perspective, I was just having fun, [and] had actually run into a couple of my friends, which is very telling about how cool these experiences are– you meet new friends, see old friends,” Taylor said. “I had said to my best friend, ‘he’s really cute.’”
Her friend encouraged her to go talk to him, but she was hesitant. “I was so anti-dating at that point,” Taylor said. “I’m almost nine years older than AyJay. I kind of had this perspective of, `I’m older, I love what I love, I don’t really want to date, it’ll happen when it happens.’” So instead, she went and casually asked Brandy about him. After some nudging, she finally struck up a conversation with AyJay and found out he was a regular Sofar host, and an aerospace engineer.
As the night wrapped up and Taylor was getting ready to leave, the two were still too shy to say much more, so Taylor’s best friend stepped in and invited AyJay to her birthday party the following night. “He showed up the next night by himself, and we’ve been dating ever since,” Taylor said. “For me it was really impactful that I met AyJay through a Sofar– and I’m probably going to cry– because I was really happy with my life, but I had kind of put out into the universe, ‘I want to meet someone who shares the same interests and experiences,’ so to meet through [a] platform we both love– he as a host, me as a guest– was really cool.”
The two have been going strong ever since, both together and independently– Taylor runs her own social media company, Sweet Potato Social, and AyJay runs his satellite imagery start-up, Albedo. And of course, they still attend Sofars, together.
Photo credit: Taylor and AyJay, photo by Nikki Rae
Taylor and AyJay, photo by Nikki Rae
