Category: Features

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Birth, Death and Time In The Sun: SUSTO’s Justin Osborne Finds new Dimesion

September 12, 2022

“There were ravines growing between me and people in my life,” Justin Osborne tells BandWagon. “And with COVID, everybody got pushed back together. Some of those changes had to be faced head on.”

Osborne is the commandant of North Carolina’s Susto and he’s just gone through some of the most intense years of his life.

“If humans are dimensional,” he says, “there’s a whole new dimension of myself that was awakened.”

Susto’s sound sits between Americana, psych-pop and the indie-rock church of rootsy folk. A mix of satire and earnestness adds a roughness; a raised eyebrow setting it apart from rural radio. Its dark, drug-influenced sentimentality and staunch idealism is, at its heart, just barefaced American songwriting.

“There were a lot of attempts at reconciliation – my own beliefs with how I was raised,” he says. “I’m trying not to disrespect,” he says, “but to participate in these big life events.”

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Permission to Shine: Shinyribs’ Kevin Russell Goes Big

August 24, 2022

Kevin Russell was nearing age 40, and given the upheavals in his career, should have been facing the clichéd mid-life crisis. Instead, he gave himself permission to be himself.

He left a band he’d played with for nearly 20 years, to focus on Shinyribs.

“The odds were against me for sure,” Russell said in a phone interview with BandWagon, “But I felt like I had to do it. It was a now-or-never kind of feeling. It was a gamble. But it was so great. We are now an instant party – wherever we go.” 

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Play it For Your Mates: Tones And I Rises Up Solo; Puts the “I” in Team-Macklemore

August 11, 2022

You’ve heard it.

It was written by a busker, in a closet, for a few friends at a youth hostel but somewhere on Planet Earth in the last three years, you’ve heard it.

The song is “Dance Monkey” and the number of times it has been streamed online is literally incalculable.

“I didn’t write that song to release at all,” Toni Watson aka Tones And I tells BandWagon. “I lived at a hostel. Like – I’d parked my van there, I used the showers. I played that song for a year on the street before I decided to release it.”

Now, for the first time, the one woman wonder is ready to collaborate – with her musical hero Macklemore, of course. “It’s just the most perfect track for both of us,” Watson says.

And she will finally release her first song ever about love. “I don’t mean to, but I’ve actually never written a love song,” Watson says. “I just don’t feel like I’d ever really known what it is.”

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The Bones of J.R. Jones: Desert Rhythms and Dancing Through the Blues

July 14, 2022

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.”

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Michal Menert: Things Burn Down

July 12, 2022

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.

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A Century of Country – Greeley Stampede’s New Stage Set for Brad Paisley and More

June 21, 2022

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.

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OGT: To Re-Write a Legacy

June 15, 2022

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.”

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How The Arcadian Wild was Loved Into Being

June 9, 2022

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.

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