Welcome to the first of fourĀ live episodes of Only Vans from the MusicFest at Steamboat 2025. Two of my inspirations and great friends, Max & Heather Stalling, helped us kick things off. We get into many topics such as ex-husbands, cassette collections, mortal vs. immortal musicians, skinny dipping ā and they even perform a few live songs.
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Max and Heather Stalling are a staple of our music scene and these lovebirds are my favorite, you can tell. Heather is an accomplished singer-songwriter, incredible fiddle player, and I love that we had the opportunity for them to play three songs togetherĀ live at our very first hour-long Musicfest podcast taping up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in front of a live (and rather large) audience!
Max is a Texas A&M Aggie graduate, but we donāt hold that against him, because he has multiple amazing records out. Heatherās project, Blacktop Gypsy, is awesome and also available wherever you get your music. On this Only Vans episode, Heather makes me cry with a lovely impromptu monologue that I will cherish forever and, after joking that I never go to the late night jams in Steamboat at MusicFest, I did in fact attend an epic jam this year with Max, Heather, the Braun Brothers, and many more.
We joke about drinking a lot of wine and I outed Paul on a hangover after our hilarious āmarriageā story, sorry! I also talk about the Sequestered Songwriters, which is something that Courtney Patton and Jason Eady started over COVID and that really helped a lot of us get out to a really large audience. If you have not checked out the Sequestered Songwriters videos on Facebook, I think theyāre all still up there. A lot of people have told me [those videos] really got them through COVID and that was a way for us all to keep in touch with one another and learn some new tunes.
Thanks again to Dirt Trail Entertainment for sponsoring our MusicFest episodes. And thanks to our show sponsors, Hand Drawn Pressing & CH Lonestar Promo!
Photo Credit: Allison V Smith
Find our Only Vans episode archiveĀ here.
