Category: Interviews

Every musician has that one instrument they’ll never sell. For Les Jansson, it’s a well-worn 1964 Höfner Beatle Bass. Not because it’s worth a fortune. Not because it’s rare. Because it represents where everything began. Long before international tours, signature basses, NAMM appearances, Journey tributes, and sharing stages with some

Success in country music has a funny way of looking glamorous from a distance. Fans see sold-out shows, tour buses, backstage passes, and artists sharing the stage with country legends. What they don’t see are the lonely apartments. The long drives home. The family members living hundreds of miles away.

Spend enough time around the music industry, and you’ll eventually meet someone who insists they have all the answers. David Chatfield isn’t one of them. In fact, after more than four decades running record labels, developing artists, negotiating contracts, producing records, and watching the industry reinvent itself countless times, he’s

Ask someone to describe Tropidelic, and you’ll probably hear the usual buzzwords. Reggae rock. Hip-hop. Funk. Beach vibes. Good times. They’re all accurate… but they don’t tell you why people keep coming back. After sitting down with drummer Rex Larkman, it became clear that Tropidelic isn’t just another band blending

Some collaborations begin in a writing room. Others begin backstage after a show. Kate Stanton’s latest creative partnership started nearly 4,000 miles away. One songwriter in Ohio. One producer in Germany. No shared spoken language. No recording studio together. No late-night writing sessions over coffee. Just email. Google Translate. And

Fans see the lights. They hear the songs. They cheer when the artist walks on stage. What they rarely see are the hundreds of decisions, and dozens of people, that make those ninety minutes possible. Somewhere behind the curtain is someone making sure the buses arrived, the crew has hotel

Some guitar players spend their careers trying to be noticed. Paul Sidoti has spent his making sure the audience notices someone else. That may sound like an odd way to describe a musician who’s shared stages with Taylor Swift for nearly two decades, toured the world, played late-night television, worked

There’s an unwritten rule in live music: if your audience spends more time watching the show through their phone than actually reacting to it, you’ve probably lost them. The Dreamboats seem to have missed that memo. Or maybe they burned it. When I sat down with drummer Johnny G. Wiz,

The music business has a strange habit of making years of preparation look like a few minutes of opportunity. A three-minute audition. One song in a Nashville recording studio. A National Anthem before a packed football stadium. A festival slot somebody managed to squeeze you into after the lineup was

At 11 years old, Stephanie Rabus underwent open-heart surgery. Thirty-three years later, she found herself dealing with her heart again. And somewhere between those two moments, she built a life around singing. There are coincidences. Then there are circles so perfectly drawn that you have to wonder whether somebody knew