J.R.’s life as a touring bluesman came later than some. In his late 20’s, he was living in Brooklyn, bartending and teaching at a pre-school. He had a masters degree in printmaking, but the medium was quickly being usurped by digital alternatives. Still, he needed a creative outlet. 

A few years before, J.R.’s college roommate had introduced him to a song that made him fall in love with the blues. It was Blind Lemon Jefferson, a 1920’s singer and guitarist who is sometimes credited as the “Father of the Texas Blues.”

“I had never heard that raw, gritty passion in anything else,” he said. “It just kind of leveled me.”

From then on, J.R. spent his in-between time — in between work, school, relationships and everything else — playing the blues.

“There were a lot of DIY venues that popped up in loft spaces or garages. They were perfect for the type of music I was playing,” he explained. “All you needed was a condenser microphone, a picnic table and a cooler of PBR.”

Michal Menert has been thinking about fire.

The fires that have burned vast tracts of land near his childhood home in Colorado and not far from his former home in California. The fire that burned a warehouse full of his merch in Detroit last December. A fire that burned down the house in Fort Collins where he used to live with his bandmates in 2004. And all of the other metaphorical fires that have raged through his life over the years.

“Things burn down and then you watch the flowers grow back out of the cracks,” Menert reflected in an interview with BandWagon.

The theme has permeated the Pretty Lights cofounder’s music in recent months.

The Greeley Stampede’s new stage was built with Brad Paisley in mind.

The last time he played here, in 2007, Paisley had 10 semi-trailers full of equipment, said Justin Watada, executive director of the Stampede. Way back then, three “up and coming” acts performed with Paisley, including a young lady named Taylor Swift.

The brand new stage is bigger and much better, with all the fixins you’d expect from a show at Red Rocks, including a platform that will allow the artists to walk 50 feet out into the crowd. And Paisley is back as the Stampede’s biggest act in a lineup that includes Stone Temple Pilots, Jon Pardi, Cole Swindell and Jordan Davis.

Kodean IX doesn’t know where he would be without music, but he knows it wouldn’t be good.
He has been in and out of jail, and one of his cousins was in Greeley’s chapter of the infamous 18th Street gang. 

“He asked me why I was gang-banging,” Kodean recalled, “and I said, ‘Because I grew up here.’ – He told me to do something better. Break the legacy. And I did.”

Kodean and a grieving Keen OGT (who lost his sister to suicide) were rapping to help quell the pain they felt, and they began to call themselves OGT, or One Great Team.

Then the Moxi Theater gave OGT a chance, a big show, and Korean hasn’t forgotten it.

“I’d still be in a different life,” Kodean told BandWagon. “[The Moxi] gave me a chance to show what I could do.”

The Arcadian Wild really listen. You can see it in their patience with fans, their gentleness with each other, and most of all in the cohesive interplay of each melodic line in their music. Like mycelium spreading nutrients throughout a forest, each individual is inseparable from the whole.

The band began in an impromptu post-choir-class jam session in 2013. The lineup has shifted so often over the years that founding member Lincoln Mick refers to the band as a “revolving door,” but he remembers the band’s five-or-so departed members with much more sweetness than bitterness.

“To take a turn of phrase from Fred Rogers, so many people have ‘loved this band into being’ over the years,” he told BandWagon.

Jen Korte

Alysia Kraft can keenly use nature as a metaphor in her music. But in the case of “Little River,” a song with rich layers of meaning and potential interpretations, the inspiration was frighteningly literal.

“I almost drowned in the river by my parent’s ranch in the summer of 2020,” Kraft tells BandWagon. “It was a freak accident. The railing snapped on a bridge I was standing on and I was instantly tossed into a very high, very debris-choked river raging with freshly thawed spring snow.”

She lived to tell the tale. And in turn, make some of this year’s most resonant music.

A Wyoming native, Kraft’s is known in Colorado as one third of folk-rock favorites Whippoorwill and the voice of The Patti Fiasco. With therapeutic guidance, she came to an epiphany following the river trauma.

“From my own experiences, I’ve always wished more people from this country would listen to music that is not sung in English,” Jonny Jyemo tells BandWagon. “There is so much out there. Language should not be a barrier, but an invitation to connect.”

Jyemo is the founder of Jyemo Club, a Colorado band with members from 5 different countries. The band is based on a simple, inclusive idea: a concert where people from anywhere in the world would feel welcome. Where beats invite dancing and lyrics are felt beyond language. The Club has so many varying backgrounds that they can only be described as universal.