Tag: Ellie Holcomb

Drew & Ellie Holcomb Take Us Through Their ‘Memory Bank’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Husband-and-wife indie-folk duo Drew & Ellie Holcomb have been making music together for 20 years. Ellie was a member of Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors when they first collaborated on a record in 2005 (now out of print). That was followed by 2007’s A Million Miles Away, which was then succeeded by something like their breakout, Passenger Seat, in 2008.

Over the years since, they’ve built up the Neighbors – and their cohort of friends, neighbors, fans, and listeners – into a more than tidy little paradise of a musical cul-de-sac, with more than a dozen releases (together and separately) and amassing more than a hundred million streams.

This year, the pair put out their first full-length duo album together, as equal fronting artists with the Neighbors behind them. Memory Bank, released on January 24, looks forward while looking back – a hallmark and through line of the duo, their group, and their creative output across their two-decade career. So many of the songs on Memory Bank seem to speak to the longevity they have – “Rain or Shine,” “Shut Up and Dance,” “Never Gonna Let You Go,” “Bones” – there’s a wisdom and perspective in this album that speaks to the distance they’ve traveled together. As well as denoting the upcoming miles they have yet to cover as partners, parents, and musical collaborators.

With the release of Memory Bank, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to stroll down memory lane with Drew & Ellie Holcomb, to contrast their latest project and the artists they have become now with their early projects and the artists they were then, in our most recent edition of First & Latest.

 I wonder, as you put together this Memory Bank, what memories from 2008 and that first album came up for you? How did that nearly 20-year history of making music filter into this project and its songs?

Drew Holcomb: Honestly, Passenger Seat was not even the first project. There was a record in 2005 called Washed in Blue that Ellie sang on that has been scrubbed from the internet. We put on an album called A Million Miles Away in 2007, which had a bunch of songs like “I Like to Be with Me When I’m With You” and “Hung the Moon” and others. I think the younger version of us was much less confident, in a way. We were flying blind. We hadn’t made a lot of records yet and you don’t know what you’re doing in the studio. We didn’t know what we were doing as songwriters. Ellie was just a member of the band at the time.

Ellie Holcomb: I was a neighbor with benefits. The starkest difference for me between Passenger Seat in 2008 and Memory Bank in 2025 is an open-handedness and a freedom that comes with the death of ego and also with a general posture of curiosity and gratitude.

You are both prolific creators – together and separately – how have you balanced your individual musical identities with your collective work over that time period? Do you find it to be an easy balance or a tricky one?

EH: One of my favorite things about us doing music both together and separately is that there’s a massive amount of respect for each other. The reason it took us 20 years to write and record an album together is because we’ve always honored that artistic and creative space with each other. We write really differently, we create really differently. I think that mutual respect and space that we’ve given each other made space for us to make what we we’ve released into the world now – and I love it.

DH: My only addition is a short answer: No, it’s not an easy balance. It’s very tricky, but it’s worth it.

I think our relationship definitely manifests itself through the music. I think on the one hand, there’s like the aspiration – love songs are often about the love that you hope that you have. So, when you’re young and you’re speaking about when you get older, you’re making a promise to yourself and to each other about the kind of love you hope for. There’s also a bit of the truths of your own personalities make it into songs.

There’s clearly a mission and a message in your music, and I think that’s part of your staying power as artists and part of why over so many releases in so many iterations – as a couple, with the Neighbors, as solo artists, as collaborators on outside projects – your songs continue to resonate with audiences in such an authentic and down to earth way. I wonder how much of that encouragement folks get from your music that you get, yourselves? I can see that being a big part of how you’ve gotten this far and are still moving forward.

EH: I’d say we talk to our kids a lot about what a stage is for and we always tell them that a stage is to bring joy. It’s a shared space where our stories mingle together. Music is a bridge builder. Our mission, if you will, with music is that it would help people connect to their own story and that it would help people connect to everybody else and feel a little less alone. There’s this beautiful quote that says we decorate space with art and we use music to decorate time. We feel so deeply grateful that people have used our songs to decorate like the time and the seasons of their lives, sorrow, joy, road trips, family gatherings, etc.

What will you take with you in your “memory bank” as you move forward, as you stare down the next 17 years of making music together? What do you see as your touchstones – or, alternatively, what do you hope you’ll look back and recall if we were to have this conversation again in 20 more years?

DH: Our memory bank as we move forward in the next 17 years of making music together, we are always trying to keep growing. I didn’t know how to sing harmony until this record. I learned how to sing harmony, not with the intention of making a record, but because I wanted to learn. Ellie’s learning piano with similar intentions. There are always new songs to find.

When you were making and releasing Passenger Seat, where did you see yourself now, all these years later? Was this always the goal? Did it seem like a pipe dream that you’d still be doing this together? Or was it inevitable?

DH: Music was definitely not inevitable. When I started making music, Ellie was a school teacher with no intention of being a professional musician. So we have just taken it a year at a time.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the artists.

LISTEN: Drew & Ellie Holcomb, “Bones”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Drew & Ellie Holcomb
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Bones”
Release Date: January 18, 2023
Label: Magnolia Records/Tone Tree Music

In Their Words: “We are not just the sum of our genes or the simple organization of atoms, we are the stories we have been told and keep telling, our love stories are songs and metaphors, ways of making sense of beating our isolation by cheating time and cheating death with the one we love. ‘Bones’ is a back-and-forth conversation between two lovers, sharing the way the stories they tell about each other are the ties that bind them together. This song is so many things to me. It’s love and play and truth and dare and gratitude that found a melody for the breath that’s in our lungs and for the life that we get to make together. Drew has been known to say that marriage is about beating death. I think he’s right. Love has a way of making meaning out of the time we have here, even in the midst of all the tragedies we experience. I hope this song reminds all who hear it that we really don’t have to do it alone.” — Drew & Ellie Holcomb

Photo Credit: Ashtin Paige

Finding Inspiration in Creation, Ellie Holcomb Moves Forward in Love

Posted on by Editor

As a consequence of growing up in the music industry and singing background vocals on albums since she was 8, Ellie Holcomb opted not to seek a future as a professional singer.

“I actually decided that I didn’t want to be a part of it at an early age, which is hilarious,” says Holcomb, who today has a thriving career as a Christian music singer and also records and performs with her husband, Drew Holcomb. It amounts to two separate careers, with her solo music tending towards inspirational anthems and the duo producing a more intimate Americana sound. Ellie’s powerful voice is equally adept at belting out a dramatic ballad or giving a more tender, reserved performance.

Ellie’s father is producer Brown Bannister, who produced albums by Amy Grant and many other Christian singers. He now runs the music school at Lipscomb University in Nashville.

“I was around a lot of people who did this for their work,” she says. “I’m so grateful because I saw from a really young age the power of music to encourage, to bring hope and to help people feel less alone. But I also saw the cost of doing music, like you have to leave. It’s often really hard on families.”

For our Artist of the Month interview, Ellie fielded questions from BGS as she and Drew drove to Chattanooga for a performance. (Read our Artist of the Month interview with Drew.)

BGS: You’ve got a powerful voice. When did you first realize that?

Oh, thank you. I guess from a pretty young age. I was singing in studios with my dad. When the budget ran out, I would come and be the background singer on whatever project he was working on.

What a great way to get experience.

I’ve kind of learned from the best in terms of how to become a singer. But I think even on this last record (Canyon, 2021), there were parts of my voice that I didn’t really know were there. As I’ve gotten older, there’s been this other realm that I’ve tapped into. It feels like painting with more colors. That’s been really fun, to realize I have this whole other set of tones and colors and textures that I didn’t realize in my voice.

Who are some of the artists you worked with as a child?

I sang on (Amy Grant’s) Home for Christmas as a little 8-year-old girl. It’s kind of hard to imagine artists in the Christian world that I haven’t sung with. I’ve done Sandi Patty back in the day, Steven Curtis Chapman, Matthew West, Charlie Peacock, Mercy Me, Bart Millard. It’s hilarious because there will be songs I’m hearing and I’m like, “Oh, it’s me. I forgot I sang on that.”

How do you and Drew differ in your music tastes?

It’s interesting. We have a lot of overlap in what we love. He grew up listening to Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. When I grew up, my dad was making records with Amy Grant. I love Sara Groves. Then we both love Carole King. He leans a little more into the rock land, and I lean more singer-songwriter.

You have young children (Emmylou, 9; Huck, 6; and Rivers, 3). Is touring difficult for you and Drew because of that?

I feel like we found a really beautiful way to kind of blend all that together. We bring the kids on the road a lot and we tour together and apart. So we kind of have a crazy schedule. But thankfully, Drew is a logistical ninja. He’s really good at keeping tabs on where everybody is and childcare. We’ve got a village of people that have come around us. We just keep getting family members and nannies (to help). It just feels like when they have to move on, we have another aunt in the arsenal. So we have been very blessed to have family and friends and incredible nannies come alongside of us as we do this crazy music life.

You quit your husband’s band (Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors) after seven years in 2012, and then pursued a solo career. What brought that about?

I’d actually quit Drew’s band to be a stay-at-home mom. Our daughter was in a car seat for over eight hours a day. By the time she was six months, she’d been to 32 states and Canada. And I’m like, “I don’t think I can keep her in a car seat for seven hours a day, poor thing.” So I quit to do the mom thing.

How did that morph into launching a solo career?

It was hilarious. I kept trying to write songs for his band. But often when I would sit down to write a song, I would say, “Drew, I’m so sorry, I accidentally wrote another song about God.” I didn’t mean to, but I’m just a spiritual person. I don’t fully understand everything, and I feel really comfortable in a lot of the mystery, but that is something that my heart has always been drawn to. And so I loved what Drew’s response was. He was like, “Hey, write what’s in you. Let those songs out.”

When he said that, it lit a fire within me. I don’t know that I needed permission from him, but all of a sudden I just felt this freedom to sing what was in my heart. That’s usually me saying, “I believe, but help my unbelief.” I’m usually wrestling my faith to the ground. I’m working my faith out through song. I guess the songs were helping me find some semblance of peace and comfort and solace. So I thought, “Man, maybe they’d help somebody else. That’d be cool.”

Does the divisiveness going on now in the U.S. tempt you to write political songs?

I don’t know that it does. I feel called to move forward in love, and I guess sometimes that will intersect, politically speaking, in terms of using your voice to speak up on behalf of those who maybe don’t have a voice. That can look political at times. But I think for me, I’m less motivated by politics and more motivated by love and peacemaking. But sometimes to make peace, you’ve got to tell the truth.

Many of your solo videos are filmed with spectacular nature backgrounds. Why do you return to that approach so often?

It’s very intentional because creation itself is one of the ways that I experience God most. I feel like the story of love beating death is written all over creation. When the (coronavirus) numbers were low, we did a trip where we went down into the Grand Canyon, rafted the Colorado River, spent the night on the riverbanks and then rafted out. While we were down there, a guide was telling us that in the Grand Canyon, the walls really tell a story. It’s actually a story of disaster upon disaster: landslide, mudslide, volcano, earthquake, flood, drought. Then there’s this great divide split wide open by a river, and I thought, this just looks like a picture of literally all of our hearts, especially after the last two years. There is a current of love that runs deeper than our deepest ache, pain or longing that will carry us back to a place where we can know that we’re beloved, no matter how broken we are. I’m like, “All right, let’s get in a place where I’m reminded of that. Maybe it’ll remind other people of that.”

You’ve spoken on stage about seeking help for depression and anxiety. Why did you decide to do that?

I want everybody to know how precious they are. I want to remember it myself and I want kids to know that. So it’s been a joy to speak openly about depression and anxiety and worry and fear and division and to say, these are all real things in a broken world. But we’re invited to be hope-people and bridge-building people and people who are about reconciliation and love. I really love getting to come stumbling and tripping and broken and full of doubt and fear sometimes into the presence of love. And I will happily hobble my way into that presence over and over again and invite others to come along with me.

Photo Credit: Ashtin Paige

Drew Holcomb, Bandleader and Bourbon Collector, Taps Into a New Golden Age

Posted on by Editor

Drew Holcomb writes and sings often about the comforts of home and family life, but don’t assume he’s setting his family and himself as role models.

The leader of roots-rockers Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, Drew (who is the BGS Artist of the Month for January along with wife Ellie Holcomb) is quick to point out that the couple is “not trying to portray any sort of ideal.”

“We just write about our life,” says the singer-songwriter, whose most recent projects are a tour and compilation album with Ellie. “That’s sort of the season that we’re in. It would be disingenuous for me to try to write anything different than what I see and experience, the lens that I have.” Drew says he does have some narrative songs in his catalogue that are less personal, “but it’s not tended to be where I’m drawn to as a songwriter.”

Of nine songs on the new collection Coming Home: A Collection of Songs, the couple harmonize twice about the comforts of home, four times about their love for each other, once about their love for their “wild man” 3-year-old son Rivers and once about the need to “Love Anyway.” The collection concludes with a cover of Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” which is appropriate given their You and Me Tour, which launches February 4 in Jacksonville, Florida.

BGS called the couple for companion interviews; enjoy Ellie’s Q&A here.

BGS: Your band, Ellie’s solo work, and the duo each have a separate, unique sound. Do you purposely work to give each a different style?

Drew Holcomb: Part of that’s personality. When I’m recording with the Neighbors, it’s always the same players, who I’ve been playing together with for years. And then Ellie has worked with different producers and different musicians than me, and she has her own stylistic creative impulses and decisions. So those two roles are clearly differentiated, and then we get together. We decided to let each song sort of dictate itself. There’s some good variety in there, but it lends itself toward more of a singer-songwriter vibe with a little more atmospheric, sonic landscape kind of creativity.

After Ellie left the band (Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors), she eventually started a successful career in Christian music. Where did the idea of also working as a duet come from?

She was in the band and took seven years off from that, and is still not in the band, but we do this (You and Me) tour together every year. We thought we should write some new music. We had not written together in almost a decade. We just put them up on Spotify and stuff like that, and they actually performed really well. The music sort of became its own sort of separate entity from my work with the Neighbors and her solo work.

Your take on Sting’s “Fields of Gold” pares back the production for a comparatively sparse interpretation. You and Ellie also do that on your Kitchen Covers series. Why that approach?

I primarily see myself as a songwriter, maybe secondarily as a singer. And thirdly, as a performer, entertainer. The genius of a song can get lost in some of the ornate production and people just think about it as a pop song, right? They don’t hear the great songwriting at the bare bones of it. I’m not a theatrical, big singer. So I kind of quiet things down, take the dynamic down on an “Islands In the Stream.” It’s just an interesting approach.

You’ve mentioned Van Morrison and Bob Seger as influences in the past. Who else are your musical heroes?

I love Tom Petty for a lot of reasons. I love how he played with the same guys for the majority of his career, working with different producers, made different styles of records but always with the same sort of North Star. Springsteen. There’s so many. Carole King, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson. There’s like 100 persons.

Americana is increasingly the category of singer-songwriters in popular music, where in the past comparable artists like Jim Croce and James Taylor had big hits on the mainstream pop charts. Is that frustrating for you?

Yes, certainly it is, to some degree. But if I was starting out in 1971, I don’t think I was good enough to have gotten a label deal, the only way to get records released in that era. The era I was born in gave me that long runway to hone my craft. Yes, there’s not as much opportunity commercially for what artists like myself do. But if it ever is frustrating, it’s something I move on from pretty quickly, just because you can’t change when you were born. I do think it’s actually a really wonderful time to put out music because there’s a lot of space for a lot of artists. While there may be less of us on a large commercially successful level, there’s probably more of us doing it in general, at the “pay your bills and keep moving forward” level. There’s so many good artists making great records that it’s a different type of a golden age.

Can you be immodest for a moment and tell me which of your songs might have staying power and be covered years from now?

I don’t know. I’ll let posterity decide if that happens. We get videos all the time where people are out and they’re hearing some person in a restaurant playing our songs. It’s really cool to see other artists and songwriters giving it a go. I definitely have been surprised by “What Would I Do Without You,” from the Good Light album. It seems to have that sort of staying power. I hear from people that their grandparents love the song, and then their kids love the song. If I could get kids who grew up on my music that came out before they were born and they still like it, that would be a good barometer of the staying power of the songs themselves. I’m starting to see that a little bit, and I hope that continues.

Are you still in the whiskey business?

I am. Just a very small partner on a thing called Sweetens Cove Tennessee Bourbon. It’s been a fun endeavor for sure. My manager and I both are collectors of bourbons and various whiskeys. When I was living in Scotland in college, I started drinking scotch. I was a history major, so I always fall in love with the backstory of whatever thing I’m consuming. Whiskey is great for that because every brand’s got a good mythology story, a good origin story or creation story. It’s a fun thing to be a part of.

You’ve done some scattered dates since the coronavirus hit, but the February–March You and Me tour with Ellie is your first full-fledged tour since then. How do you feel about it?

It’s great. You don’t realize how much you love something until it’s taken away from you. We’re definitely going to play some new songs on the tour. We’ve been writing. I like to test new stuff out, tease it out a little bit.

Did you write a lot of songs while you couldn’t do many shows?

Maybe 40 and growing. I’m not proud of all of them. Half of them are worth taking into the studio to see what happens.

So you’ll throw out 20 songs?

Usually, I cannibalize them. I take the stuff I like out of them and start something new.

Do you have any particular ambitions for your music going forward? Is there somewhere you want to go that’s different than what you’re doing now?

I’m writing more than I’ve written in a long time. COVID’s been good for my writing in the last eight months at least. I’d like to probably increase the pace at which I release music, but maybe decrease the pace at which I tour. I’d love to get to that point where instead of every tour having to be connected to a new record, you just tour on and off all the time and put out music whenever it’s ready.

You’ve done collaborations with The Lone Bellow, Lori McKenna and Natalie Hemby. Do you see more of this cross-pollination in the future?

I did this thing with Johnnyswim. We did a collaborative EP (Goodbye Road). I have aspirations of doing more and more of that with other artists. I’ve been doing lots of co-writing. The older I get, the more freedom I feel to collaborate and hold my own creative rudder less tightly and see what happens. I think there’s some of that on the horizon as well. That’s also what’s been fun about working with Ellie, to do things differently, try to stretch different muscles creatively and challenge yourself in different ways and share the spotlight. That’s been a big thing for me.

Photo Credit: Ashtin Paige

Artist of the Month: Drew & Ellie Holcomb

Posted on by Editor

Drew & Ellie Holcomb are about to hit the highways to promote Coming Home: A Collection of Songs, a new compilation album that represents their life together as a couple. Alongside a batch of familiar songs from their catalog that reflect their life as a couple, the Holcombs also put their own spin on Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” and even update one of their best-known works, “Hung the Moon.”

Upon releasing the new version of that crowd favorite, Ellie explained, “I wrote ‘Hung the Moon’ after a long season of listening to a lot of Lucinda Williams. It’s always been a song that’s felt like home to me. Drew was playing these chords around the kitchen one day, and I promptly stole them and wrote a love song about him. It’s been an honor to see ‘Hung the Moon’ be included in so many people’s weddings over the years and I LOVE this new take on an older song of ours. I hope y’all enjoy it as much as we enjoyed re-recording it!”

Drew and Ellie met as students at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and they married in 2006, a year after Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors began carving out a spot among the independent music landscape. Ellie ventured into solo territory in 2012, making significant inroads in Christian music. Meanwhile, Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors have forged on, with Drew tacking a couple of side projects like a vinyl subscription service, a top-draw music festival, and premium Tennessee whiskey. Next month, Drew & Ellie Holcomb will launch the You & Me Tour in Florida, with dates running coast to coast through March.

To celebrate our first Artist of the Month of 2022, look for individual exclusive interviews with Drew & Ellie Holcomb later this month, and enjoy a sampler of their career so far with our BGS Essentials Playlist.

Photo Credit: Ashtin Paige

BGS WRAPS: Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors, “Let It Snow”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors
Song: “Let It Snow”
Album: Let It Snow EP

In Their Words: “We are thrilled to release this new Christmas EP. It has our take on the classic ‘Let It Snow’ and two original songs — Ellie singing ‘Christmas Style’ and our first-ever Scrooge song, ‘It’s Christmas.’ ‘Let It Snow ‘ is one of my favorite Christmas songs to sing with the family around the holidays. Was a really fun one to record with Ellie.” — Drew Holcomb

Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors Gather Friends and Family, Too

Posted on by Editor

Drew Holcomb could lead quite a neighborhood association. Along with his band, The Neighbors, he collaborated with such all-star songwriters as Natalie Hemby, Sean McConnell, Lori McKenna, and The Lone Bellow’s Zach Wiliams for the band’s newest release, Dragons. Although it wrestles with some heavier themes — particularly dealing with grief and accepting that time moves faster as you get older — the record as a whole is an exhilarating listening experience that bridges the gap between the introspection of their prior albums and the dynamic of their live show.

As a friendly neighbor would do, Holcomb invited BGS for a cup of coffee near his home in East Nashville.

BGS: You did a lot of co-writing on this record and these songs have some real depth to them. Did you find yourself going into deep conversations as you were writing the songs?

DH: Yeah. Everybody I wrote with were friends. I still don’t love co-writing, but I like it with the right people. I already had a pretty clear vision of how I wanted to get intensely personal on this record. So when I wrote with Lori, for instance, we weren’t just writing songs for whoever, we were specifically writing for me and my record. She was able to draw things out of me while still letting me have the primary vision of what I wanted.

And yeah, there were a lot of great conversations. The song “Maybe” with Natalie was just… We were talking about how you have all these dreams you want to pursue, places you want to see, experiences you want to have — and as you get older, sometimes you think… you know, this is kind of exhausting. What I really want to do is, I just want to be with people I love, in the place that I love, and enjoy that.

That was pretty neat how you brought your granddad into the song “Dragons.” Did he really appear to you in a dream?

It’s sort of a mixture of dreams. I lost my brother when I was 17. I lost my grandfather when I was 23. Those were probably the two closest people to me. And I lost a friend to an overdose at 20. But everybody I’ve ever lost who was really close to me, I had very vivid dreams of them — and wake up super sad. They’re so real. You kind of relive the grief all over again, when you wake up.

But some of my dreams of my grandfather have been really sort of playful and fun. You know, because he lived a full life. There’s less sadness around that. I had those lines in the chorus of “Dragons” before we started the song, and was just looking for a way to deliver them, and that sort of attitude about life I got from my grandfather – to take chances, you only live once.

What’s that experience like when you write about your family — like your brother, your son, or your granddad — and then you play the song for your family?

Well, like “Dragons” — a lot of my siblings have their own experiences and their own histories with my granddad. So same question: “Is this a real dream?” And “Family” was one that everybody immediately fell in love with. I come from a huge family, I mean 14 to 28 grandkids on my mother’s side. It’s like beautiful chaos when we’re together. For the most part everybody gets along. There’s a lot of children, grandchildren, a lot of chaos. So that song, I think, really represents sort of my experience with family.

I love the line, “Going on vacation / On the credit card.” My dad loved to travel. And he would always say, “You’re never going to inherit any money, but I’ve made all my deposits in the memory bank.” Part of it was because of my brother in the wheelchair. Dad knew that maybe his time was shorter than the rest of us, so he wanted to take every opportunity. We had this big conversion van and every summer he’d take off two weeks and we would just go. I saw 44 states by the time I graduated high school.

Wow. And you were based in Chattanooga at the time?

Yeah. So we went off to California. Went to the Pacific Northwest. Went to Colorado and Texas, New Mexico, all the way up… We did a New England trip. We did all up in Canada. All of it driving.

Was there a music component to this, too?

Oh sure. Yeah, we’d listen to a lot of oldies radio. Back when tapes were still a thing, you could buy $5 tapes at the truck stop, and so he would let us all pick out a tape at the start of the trip. My favorite one I ever got was this Joe Cocker record. It had this Jimmy Webb song called “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress.” And we had our Walkmans too. We’d play our tape and then we’d kind of take off on our own thing. In some ways, those road trips are where I fell in love with music. Dad loved Dylan, so we listened to a lot of the sort of pop songwriter guys.

Were you playing guitar by this point too?

Started to. Got my first guitar when I was 12. Really started to learn how to play at 14. By high school, I was proficient enough to play through most of the songs I liked.

Did you just teach yourself?

I had a friend who was really one of those “play everything” guys — Jonathan. He played piano, guitar, drums. He lived down the street. He kind of taught me. I took lessons but the lessons never really caught, because it was more like theory and stuff. I was like, “No, I just want to play some Bob Seger.”

When did you get interested in vinyl records?

My wife’s wedding present to me was a record player. And then my first job was in music, as a sort of studio runner for a guy named Paul Ebersold, a producer. He and Ellie kind of conspired. She went and got me the record player. He went and bought me a bunch of classics — Born to Run, Blood on the Tracks, Van Morrison, all the stuff he knew I loved. Then on our honeymoon, we went out to San Francisco and went to Amoeba Records there in Haight-Ashbury. We spent like $500 on vinyl, shipped it all home, and that was sort of the start for us.

You launched the Magnolia Record Club now and you curate the Moon River Music Festival. That’s all interesting to me because it’s about music discovery. Why is that important to you, to help people discover music?

I think in some ways it’s like a pay-it-back, or paying forward. That’s how people found me, was by someone, some curator, taking a chance and putting me in front of listeners. I had never had a radio hit. Never really had a big national tour. Done some tours with friends, but I never had the machine, but I still made it because a lot of festival buyers and legacy acts and younger bands have shared their stages with me, and shared their audiences with me.

On the press side too — we’ve never blown up in the press, but we’ve had lots of people give us a lot of healthy attention. We played Bonnaroo in 2013 and I still have people all the time come up to me and say, “I first heard you at Bonnaroo.” That happens at all the different festivals we play. And so, I wanted to create that same sort of opportunity, but also I wanted to do it as a fan. I wanted to put these bills together.

We talked about this a little bit, about how you found your audience. But it seems to me that part of that is that you showed up for everything. You really took it seriously from the start. Where do you get that work ethic from?

I think part of it is that my dad always instilled this “work hard at all costs” in me. It was like, I’m going to get beat on talent — and that was definitely true when I was younger. I may get beat on opportunity, and with who you know. Nobody’s going to out-work me.

My first vehicle that I toured in was a 1998 Volvo station wagon. I bought it in 2003 with 64,000 miles on it. And in 2008, five years later, it died at 380,000 miles. I put 320,000 miles on it in five years, driving anywhere anybody would book me. I played 200 to 250 shows a year: coffee shops, living rooms, cover songs at bars, college campuses. Whether I was getting paid fifty bucks or a thousand bucks during that era, it was like, the only way to do this is to show up as often as possible.

Photo credit: Ashtin Paige