Kolton Moore & the Clever Few - First Show Ever in NYC - Mercury Lounge - October 22, 2025

Photos by Brian Andrews (Lone Pine Media)

Before tour, you make lots of plans for what you’ll do: How many places you’ll visit, how many people you’ll talk to, how many social media posts you’ll make, how many videos you’ll make.

Then you get on tour, and reality sets in. Putting on shows is hard work, so it’s tough to get as much sleep as you need. You take care of the basics (showering, eating, laundry, setting up for shows, playing shows, tearing down and loading out after shows), and realize you don’t have as much time or energy as you thought you would. So you take care of some essentials (sending emails about the upcoming shows, thanking people on socials for coming, moving photos and videos to the external hard drive, etc), and all of a sudden the day is over and you accomplished maybe 50% of your to-do list.

That’s just like life, I think. I’ve always been a little envious of people who seem to be ok with just sitting and relaxing. That was never my way, though. I get bored after too long. I’ve always dreamed of exploring, building things, seeing the world, experiencing as much as I can in the time I have between birth and death. I’m trying to get better about living in the moment and not thinking too long about all the things I want to do.

NYC Walkabout October 23, 2025

We got to play our first ever show in NYC last week at Mercury Lounge! It was an amazing show and I’ve got some pictures from our photographer Brian to share of that, but first, here’s some that I took the following day when we had a day off to spend walking around the city.

We caught a fun street show in Times Square, got a pretty good slice of pizza, walked around Central Park for a bit, saw the new Louis Vuitton building, and then I broke from the group to go on a side quest to get spicy dan dan noodles at Very Fresh Noodles, bought a super cool blue velvet overshirt at Marine Layer, got a coffee at Do Not Feed Alligators, rode the subway down to the Financial District and then rode a bike up along the water to Chinatown to meet up with the boys for dinner at Uncle Lou’s. Then we all caught a bus back to where our tour bus was parked in Secaucus NJ.

Overall, just a super fun day in the city.

You Should Feed the Bots

A week ago, I set up an infinite nonsense crawler trap – now it makes up 99% of my server’s traffic. What surprised me is that feeding scrapers garbage is the cheapest and easiest thing I could do.

Really excited to be back on the road! I meant to post about this sooner, but I’ve been working my ass off for the past couple of months getting everything ready for this tour and our album release. But now we’re on the road!

As I’m writing this, it’s 9:05 PM and I’m sitting in the green room at Richmond Music Hall in Richmond, VA. It’s our first time ever playing in Richmond! So far the tour has been really fun, we’ve played shows in Birmingham, Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Charlotte. Tonight is Richmond, tomorrow night is Washington DC, and then we’re on to Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Michigan next week.

I’m also trying something new this tour: Being almost completely sober. Besides a couple small beers during a late morning walk at Anakeesta in Gatlinburg on a day off, and a couple small glasses of wine, I haven’t been drinking since the start of September. And I have to say, it’s made a world of difference for my mood and my energy. I’ve felt for awhile that I needed to stop drinking, so I’m glad I finally cut alcohol out almost completely. I wake up feeling rested every day, the work feels easier, and just feel way better overall. I haven’t weighed myself recently, but I think I’m dropping a few pounds too. In short, it feels amazing!

I still feel incredibly grateful to be able to have the opportunity to tour and play shows, and I’m hoping to write up an article with some helpful advice and things I’ve learned about it soon.

But that’s all for now!

Visit www.koltonmoore.com to see upcoming shows!

Hey y’all! My band is back with a new full length album. Recorded earlier this year in Memphis Tennessee with Grammy-winning producer Matt Ross-Spang, A Place That I Call Home is our 6th full length album, and our best work yet.

Check it out if you’re a fan of Americana, Rock & Roll, & Texas Country: It’s a blend of our favorite music with our own unique flavors added. I’d recommend it for fellow fans of: Wilco, Dawes, Whiskey Myers, Turnpike Troubadours, Brent Cobb, Bright Eyes, Band of Horses, Modest Mouse, Manchester Orchestra, Big Thief, Pinegrove, etc.

Link: The Case Against Social Media is Stronger Than You Think

A long read, but important for understanding the depth of the negative consequences of the proliferation of social media use in recent years.

That negative content spreads especially far online makes sense given some well-established properties of human psychology. Humans exhibit a broad-based psychological negativity bias as well a range of more specific attentional biases toward negative stimuli. This is because, like other organisms, we have evolved to be uniquely attuned to signals suggestive of danger. As a result, when given the opportunity to cycle through a variegated soup of thousands of digital signals daily, we tend to fixate on and amplify the most distressing ones.

This dynamic creates very strong incentives to prey on our negative emotions. Successful ‘attentional entrepreneurs’ online not only enjoy attention’s more immediate benefits like status or influence, but are often paid by platforms in proportion to the ad revenue they generate. In that case, if certain kinds of content reliably accrue the most attention, there are very strong incentives online to produce that content en masse.

That is exactly what has happened in recent years with sensationalized and excessively negative political content. The last decade and a half has seen the rise of a new class of political influencers who, empowered by social media’s unique incentive environment, have come to exert near-symphonic control over the fear, anger, and tribalism of large sectors of the American public. The phrase “political influencer” calls to mind names like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, but I mean it to refer to any content creator, pundit, journalist, or even politician with an active online presence oriented around the production of political content—so perhaps hundreds of thousands of users with followings of varying sizes. Critically, this group is not a random selection from social media’s overall user base, but skews wealthier and more educated, meaning its greater online influence is likely matched by greater offline influence as well.

Despite accounting for only a small slice of the online population, this new influencer class is coming to dominate the market for political communication. In the process, it is transforming America’s perception of itself, which, since America is a social entity constituted in part by its self-perceptions, just amounts to saying it is transforming America.

KM&TCF Played Camino Real 2025 with Jason Boland and Kelsey Waldon at Gruene Hall. Got the audio and the video for our set too

Lnk: Vintage Macintosh Programming Book Library

Nick R. was generous enough to send me his entire vintage Mac programming library to be destructively scanned and shared with the community. We’ve added a few of our own for a pretty huge collection (over 150) of vintage Mac programming related books. Enjoy! Thanks Nick!

This is super cool. I really should carve out some time in my schedule to work through these books.

I was born in 1985 and the Macintosh was the first computer I ever used, so that era of computing has a special place in my heart. While I switched to using Windows PCs in the 90’s and 2000’s, I switched back to the Mac to learn web and graphic design and audio production in 2008 and I’ve been a Mac nerd ever since.

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of visiting Oregon. Good people, great food, beautiful landscapes, home of many of my favorite bands. And I finally got to drive along the Oregon Trail, from Pendleton to The Dalles (in the dark so I couldn’t see much except the lights and their reflections on the Columbia river and the ghostly outlines of the bluffs in the faint moonlight, but it was still a cool moment to a kid who always wondered what it’d be like to follow that path). Thanks to everyone who made this weekend possible!

Photos taken this weekend were on the disposable film camera lens and 85mm 1.8 on the Sony A7C, and then a few on my iPhone 16 Pro.

#wheatstock #wheatstock2025 #helixoregon #tourlife #travelphotos #koltonmooreandthecleverfew #kmtcf

Good morning friends, it’s Wednesday, August 13, 2025. The weather is 82 degrees outside and cloudy, and I am relaxing at home in Fort Worth, Texas.

#behindthescenes

We are warmed up and ready for the show this weekend. Our bass player Matt is traveling this week so we had to rehearse without him, and man we missed that low end.

I’m pleased to share that the 6.5x14 Pearl Free-Floating Brass snare drum I bought from Chicago Music Store in downtown Tuscon AZ during our recent July tour sounds incredible, just as I hoped it would.

I’m looking forward to the weekend trip up to Oregon this weekend. Any chance to get away from the Texas heat is always welcome.

Thanks for reading,

Aaron

Stay in touch:

• Send me a message
• Follow me on Instagram
• Follow my band
• Catch an upcoming show

Good morning friends, it’s Tuesday, August 12, 2025. The weather is: 78 degrees outside and sunny, and I am relaxing at home in Fort Worth, Texas.

Today I’ve got band practice for our show in Oregon this weekend, (Wheatstock Fest).

We’ll be flying out to Portland Friday evening, driving to Helix, then waking up early for a 9:30am soundcheck. Should be fun!

That’s all for today,

Aaron

Stay in touch:

• Send me a message
• Follow my band
• Catch an upcoming show

Still arguably the best drummer in the world. I love Jorge’s enthusiasm in this video, it expresses my internal dialogue when watching Danny play drums.

The first and only time I got to see Danny Carey play drums live was in Fort Worth in 2002 when Tool was touring for Lateralus, and it was the most mind blowing thing I’d ever seen (it’s still top 5). I was 16 at the time.

I just found the full show on Youtube:

Good morning friends, it’s Monday, August 11, 2025. The weather is: 85 degrees outside and sunny, and I am relaxing at my favorite coffee shop near my house in Fort Worth, Texas.

A year ago today, I was visiting my Aunt and Uncle in Hudson Wisconsin with my mom. I didn’t know it when we planned the trip, but my Uncle owns a Indian Scout motorcycle, and was happy to let me ride it. That turned an already fun week into an epic fun week.

On top of that, Wisconsin was having a cold spell, so the temperatures were averaging around 70 degrees, which is waayyyy cooler than then 105 degrees we have in North Texas during August.

The only downside was that Chartable (where I was working as an account manager at the time) had an epic fail after an update was pushed by the engineering team, and our customer’s dashboards and data were unavailable for pretty much the entire week. This is a worst case scenario for a software-as-a-service company, and our customers were understandably pissed off. Unfortunately there was nothing I could do about it but keep an eye on our internal Slack channels and wait for updates from the engineers.

So while I was having the time of my life riding a motorcycle around Wisconsin, our engineers at the company were having one of their worst weeks ever. A strange coincidence, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

Turns out my Uncle Scott and I wear almost exactly the same clothing sizes, so I borrowed his jacket and chaps for the ride from Hudson to Prairie Du Chien and back.

Here’s the journal entry from the end of the week:

So great to see Scott and Cheri, Mark and Tami, and a bunch of my Mom’s family in Prairie du Chien. Visited the dike and downtown in Hudson. Getting ice cream and pizza. Riding Scott’s motorcycle around Hudson and down the Mississippi River. Stopped in Red Wing MN to buy new Red Wing Chelsea boots. Stopped in Winona to get lunch with Brett Terpstra. Stayed at Mark and Tammy’s house. Getting dinner / breakfast at huckleberry’s. Watching the Brewers win while drinking Spotted Cow at the Sawmill Saloon. Walking home along Michigan street. Getting coffee and working at Simply coffee shop. Erik put on a great show at the concert in the park and then again after at the Tavern. Getting burgers and a T-shirt from Pete’s. Fish and chips at Blackhawk. Driving the motorcycle back to Hudson along Wisconsin’s west coast Mississippi River road. Shooting clay pigeons with Scott. Took mom for a motorcycle ride to give it a good clean and polish at the car wash. Playing pickleball and table tennis with Scott and Cheri.

Good memories. I’m hoping I’ll have time to go back soon. Trading the summer heat in Texas for the cool weather up north is definitely one of my all time favorite life hacks.

Thanks for reading,

Aaron

Stay in touch:

• Send me a message
• Follow my band
• Catch an upcoming show

Good morning friends, it’s Saturday, August 9, 2025. The weather is: 90 degrees outside and sunny, and I am relaxing at home (for the moment) in Fort Worth, Texas.

It’s my 40th birthday! A pretty significant milestone in anyone’s life. I’m feeling thankful that I’m still in good health, I have a life I enjoy that allows me equal parts being comfortable at home and traveling the world, and that I haven’t made any major mistakes so far. I have a lot of friends and family who care about me, and I have a good number of projects to keep me busy and learning.Overall, I think things are going well. I know that can all change at any time, so I try not to ever take a good life for granted.

For the next decade of my life, I want to focus on getting better at self-improvement. I’d like to eat healthier, lift weights more, lose that extra 15 pounds, read more, write more, be a better friend, and become a better musician and story teller. I’d like to spend less time worrying about the state of the world and more time doing things I find fulfilling and rewarding (especially if they involve friends or my local community).

Before I go, let’s look at a list of 10 highlights from my 30’s (2015-2025):

1. Playing a show at Red Rocks (2024)
2. Buying my first house in Fort Worth (2021, Got lucky and got a crazy low interest rate)
3. Countless tours and shows with bands (too many good memories and crazy stories to count)
4. Learning how to lift weights and getting back in shape by doing almost 3 years of Crossfit classes (2021-2025, My official take onCrossfit: It’s a great workout if you don’t push past your abilities and hurt yourself)
5. Moving to Los Angeles, even if it was only for a few months (I accepted a new job in Beverley Hills at the beginning of 2020, and March 2020 was the worst possible time to move to LA. Still, I get to laugh about it now.)
6. Being debt free, and even having some money in savings (money was a concern through most of my 20’s and early 30’s, but I made some smart financial decisions between 2019-2024 that paid off)
7. Playing Phoebe Bridgers songs with the Chartable team in a jam room at the top of the World Trade Center 4 building (2022, Spotify offices)
8. Spending a week in Stockholm, Sweden for Spotify’s Intro Days (2022, their meetup for new employees)
9. Spending a week in Portugal (2023, explored Lisbon, rented a motorcycle and rode up the coast to Ericeira and back through the countryside)
10. Buying the motorcycle I’ve wanted since I was 15 (a Honda Shadow, I got the 2016 Honda Shadow Phantom in late 2020 after moving back to Texas from LA)

Can’t really complain about anything. I’ve been a lucky dude so far.

Thanks for reading,

Aaron

Stay in touch:

• Send me a message
• Follow my band
• Catch an upcoming show

Good morning friends, it’s Friday, August 8, 2025. It’s currently 96 degrees outside and sunny, and I am relaxing at home in Fort Worth, Texas.

I’m gonna keep this one pretty short today, as tomorrow is my 40th birthday and I have a lot I need to do to prepare for the pool & pizza party.

Last night I went and saw the new movie from producer & director Zach Cregger—Weapons.

TL;DR: If you like scary movies with a bit of humor to take the edge off, you have to go see this.

If you enjoy Stephen King as an author, you have to go see this. My first thought as I left the theater was “That’s the closest I’ve ever seen a movie come to capturing the vibe of a good Stephen King novel”.

Round of applause for Zach Cregger, this will be remember as one of the top-tier horror movies of 2025.

In other news, this is the 3rd day where I have successfully finished two new daily habits: A 20 minute run in my neighborhood, and writing and publishing a short blog post. Both of these habits are trivial when done once, but will add up to something significant if I do them every day.

For you open source nerds out there, here’s a new podcast episode from the Changelog that I shot and edited (with an extra camera angle provided by Mr. Gerhard Lazu):

Launching Pipely LIVE on stage in Denver | Kaizen 20 with Gerhard Lazu

That’s all from me for now. Thanks for reading!

Aaron

Stay in touch:

• Send me a message
• Follow my band
• Catch an upcoming show

Good morning friends, it’s Thursday, August 7, 2025. It’s currently 87 degrees outside and sunny, and I am still at home in Fort Worth, Texas.

I had the good fortune of joining the Changelog podcast in Denver Colorado a couple weeks ago to film their first ever live podcast event at the Oriental Theater. I had a great time, and learned a few things along the way, so I thought I’d use my writing time this morning to share a few lessons.

1. Success is a result of repeated small efforts that compound over time

Overall, I’m happy with how the video I captured and edited turned out. I’m always looking for things to improve (and my list is long), but considering the limitations and the budget, I think I did a decent job of capturing the event and creating some good video for the Changelog audience and community to enjoy. All the skills I needed and knowledge to make specific decisions to get the end result were acquired over time, thanks in part to a lot of other people sharing their knowledge over the years.

For example, to capture the audio for the live show, I brought my Macbook, a USB-C adapter, and a USB-A to USB-B cable to plug into the venue’s soundboard and capture audio channels out into Logic Pro. I knew how to do this because it’s the same gear and process I use to record my band’s live shows. I knew how to mix, edit, and master the audio tracks because of the time I spent as a podcast editor, as well as the time I’ve spent mixing our live shows.

I also brought a formatted USB stick that was supposed to record the stereo track out of the soundboard, but something went wrong in that process and nothing was recorded to the stick. I still got all the audio tracks recorded to Logic Pro, which was what I preferred anyways, but the lesson there is to always have a backup recording going if you can, because you never know when one of your recording methods might fail.

2. Have a Plan A, and a Plan B (and be ready for whatever happens)

One of the more stressful parts of the whole experience was knowing that I was responsible for capturing good audio, video, and photos from the event. It’s not an impossible task, but it did weigh on me because I wanted to do a good job. There’s a lot of things that could go wrong when recording a live event, but I stayed focused on doing the best I knew how with the resources I had.

Another example of rolling with the punches / dealing with unforeseen circumstances: I shipped two tripods and a DJI RSC 2 gimbal to the hotel, and when I got the package unpacked at the venue the morning of the show (we got to the venue an hour before doors opened, which meant I had to move quickly to get everything setup), one of the heads of the tripods wouldn’t lock in place (rendering it unusable). Two of the tripod legs on the gimbal were also broken, meaning I could hold the gimbal but couldn’t set it on a flat surface to use it as a tripod. I didn’t anticipate any issues with the tripods, and there wasn’t enough time to locate a replacement.

Luckily one of the tripods still worked, so I set that up by the soundboard to use as my primary camera angle, and decided I would handhold the gimbal and record a secondary angle.

Thankfully I didn’t have any issues with my main cameras (two Sony A7C cameras that always work flawlessly), but my plan B for video was a GoPro that I mounted up in the balcony of the Oriental Theater. I didn’t end up liking the footage I got from the GoPro so I didn’t use it, and next time I know what I should do differently with a GoPro to get good footage (get it really close to the subjects).

For audio, my Plan A was to record audio tracks straight from the venue’s soundboard into Logic Pro on my Macbook, and that plan worked. Plan B was to record a stereo track from the soundboard into a USB stick, and that plan failed.

There’s so much more I could share about the experience and what I learned, but my 20 minute timer just went off, so I’ll save it for another day (maybe tomorrow). In the meantime, check out the video for yourself:

Changelog: LIVE from Denver with Nora Jones! | Nora’s journey from Jeli.io to PagerDuty

Thanks for reading,

Aaron

Stay in touch:

• Follow me on Instagram
• Find me on LinkedIn
• Follow my band
• Catch an upcoming show

Original photos taken by Brian Andrews / Lone Pine Media

Good morning friends, it’s Wednesday, August 6, 2025. It’s currently 90 degrees outside and sunny, and I am at home in Fort Worth, Texas.

It hit me yesterday that this is the last week of my 30’s (I’ll be turning 40 Saturday). It feels a little surreal, seems the decade went by faster than the previous ones. I feel grateful to be here and in relatively good health.

I know I’ll have to have a few less drinks and sweets in the coming years, but that’s ok. I’ve had enough good times to last the rest of my lifetime and I’m excited to continue my journey into better health and fitness.

Reflecting on the past ten years… 2015 was a really hard year. I was barely paying bills, struggling to develop my career, and my dad passed away right before Thanksgiving. I had reasons for optimism, but the next few years were a struggle. Things started looking up by the end of 2019, but then 2020 and Covid-19 happened, and the world changed again. My fortunes really changed for the better when I joined Chartable in October 2020, and then started playing with my band again in 2021.

2021-2025 passed in a blur of remote work, concerts, tours, and making music. I bought a house in Fort Worth, TX from my older sister and started fixing it up. My band recorded 2 new full length albums and some singles, and went on multiple cross-country tours, and played dozens of shows regionally, and festivals too.

Chartable got bought by Spotify in 2022, then shut down in late 2024. I lost my account manager job there at the end of February 2025, but I was ready for it, and took the opportunity to rest for a bit and catch up on chores and projects I’d been putting off for years.

Now, I’ve got more time to work on projects that matter to me, and I’m loving it. Setting up systems for my band, helping with the launch of our new album and preparing for our upcoming 5 week tour in October, it’s all very exciting. I have to be a little more careful with money than I used to be, but I don’t mind. I’m happy to spend a little less if it means having more time to work on things that are important to me.

Ok that’s all the time I have for today. Back tomorrow for another update!

Thanks for reading,

Aaron

Stay in touch:

• Follow me on Instagram
• Find me on LinkedIn
• Follow my band
• Catch an upcoming show

That’s wild. Never expected this level of success, but always dreamed about it.

linktr.ee/kmtcf

This October, my band is embarking on the longest tour we’ve ever attempted (23 live shows in 5 weeks).

While I’m not sure we’ll survive it, it’s definitely going to be a fun adventure and I’d love to see you at one of these shows!

Ticket presales start Monday August 4th (code is STRAWBERRY)

General ticket on-sale starts Wednesday August 6

🎟️ Get tickets here: www.bandsintown.com/a/4653673…

• Oct 9 – Birmingham, AL – Saturn
• Oct 10 – Atlanta, GA – Vinyl at Center Stage
• Oct 11 – Chattanooga, TN – Songbirds
• Oct 12 – Nashville, TN – Cannery Hall - The Mil
• Oct 14 – Knoxville, TN – Barley’s Tap Room
• Oct 16 – Anderson, SC – Wendell’s Dippin Branch
• Oct 17 – Charlotte, NC – Visulite Theatre
• Oct 18 – Richmond, VA – Richmond Music Hall
• Oct 19 – Washington, DC – Union Stage
• Oct 21 – Ardmore, PA – Ardmore Music Hall
• Oct 22 – New York, NY – Mercury Lounge
• Oct 24 – Pittsburgh, PA – Thunderbird Café and Music Hall
• Oct 25 – Detroit, MI – El Club
• Oct 26 – Columbus, OH – A&R Music Bar
• Oct 29 – Lexington, KY – The Burl
• Oct 31 – Indianapolis, IN – Turntable
• Nov 1 – Kansas City, MO – Announcing Soon
• Nov 2 – St. Louis, MO – Blueberry Hill Duck Room
• Nov 4 – Bloomington, IL – The Castle Theatre
• Nov 6 – Chicago, IL – Carol’s Pub
• Nov 7 – Milwaukee, WI – Vivarium
• Nov 8 – St. Paul, MN – Turf Club
• Nov 9 – Omaha, NE – Barnato

Exciting stuff! Let me know if you want to nerd out about any of the tour prep or behind the scenes work we do to pull something like this off.

Love y’all 👋 💙

Aaron

What’s up friends!

I can’t believe this year is almost halfway done. I’ve been telling myself (almost every day) that I’m going to sit down and write a blog post, but the weeks keep passing and I keep finding other things to do. But I’ve learned that if an idea keeps coming back no matter how much you procrastinate, it’s an idea worth pursuing. So here I am, sitting at my favorite coffee shop in Fort Worth (Avoca), with a 45 minute timer set to keep me focused on finishing an blog post update for you. So thanks for being here and reading this.

Where to start?

The Job Situation: A Major Change

If you’ve been following along for a few years, you know that I’ve been working two career paths since around 2010: Music and Podcasting.

On the music side, that meant playing drums with bands, but also learning how to do marketing, website & graphic design, audio recording & post-production, photography, video production, and a lot more. If it has anything to do with building a sustainable career as a musician / band, I’ve probably either done it, or studied it, or it’s on my list of things to learn.

On the podcast side, I realized pretty early on that all the skills I was learning for the music career path were useful to podcasters. I’ve always thought there were a ton of similarities between starting a band and starting a podcast, and doing either one professionally (building an audience and earning money).

Once I figured out that the internet made it possible to work with people anywhere in the world, I started offering my skills to podcasters and earned money to support myself and my career in music.

I could write endlessly about that period of time in my life (2012 through 2018), but to make a long story shorter, after working with podcasters for about 5 years, I realized that I wanted to transition to working with tech startups that were building software for podcasters instead.

In 2020, I joined a startup called Chartable that was acquired by Spotify in 2022. As a musician, this was a cool development, and the pay and benefits were nice, but eventually Spotify started rolling Chartable’s features into their software, original employees started leaving or joining different teams in the company, and I saw the writing on the wall: Chartable would not be around much longer.

This was fine with me, as I was still playing drums and working on Kolton Moore & the Clever Few, and I was feeling more and more that I wanted to spend more time working on my music career. So I started saving as much as I could, while continuing to invest in audio and video gear that I knew would come in handy once I transitioned from a comfortable tech job to working full time on the band.

Leaving Spotify

The email I’d been anticipating finally came in late January 2025: Spotify was eliminating my job and setting me free. Thankfully they provided me with a generous severance package which meant that I was in even less danger of being broke, something I’ll always be grateful for.

I’ve experienced a roller coaster of emotions since then.

Initially, it was excitement. Finally! Free to work on band stuff! Enough time to work on my own projects and do all the things I’d been putting off!

Then as the initially shock wore off, stress and anxiety set in. How was I going to replace the income I was making at Spotify? Can I even start a new full time job if I know I need to take weeks off to record an album or go on tours?

There were several weeks in the spring where I had trouble sleeping. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, thinking about the money I wasn’t making, and stressing about the future.

Eventually, the stress faded significantly as I reduced my expenses, made a budget, and figured out how much money I needed to earn every month to break even, and how long I could pay bills with my current savings.

Feels So Good, Feeling Good Again

About a month ago, I started feeling good/optimistic again. Now, I’ve always been an optimistic person, but sometimes it’s hard to feel that way when life is beating you down with multiple challenging situations, or when you have far too many goals/projects/responsibilities and not enough time to rest & reflect.

What really made the difference between feeling stressed and feeling blessed was rest, autonomy, and clarity. I mean good old fashioned “getting 8 hours of good sleep every night”, but also “I’m finally caught up with the majority of important life projects”.

Without a full time 9-5 Monday through Friday job, I had enough time and energy to catch up on all the projects I’d been putting off. Instead of feeling buried by things to do, I was able to reflect on what I wanted to do next, and I got clarity on what was important and significant to me.

I have so much to be grateful for. The band, the upcoming shows, the financial support that Spotify provided and the savings to be able to take time off to rest & recharge, the freedom & time to work on all the projects I’d had on the back-burner for so long, and the opportunity to take on new responsibilities and projects.

Working hard, and working smart. And sometimes, even resting. Feels good.

Now that I’ve got all that written down and out of the way, let’s talk about what I’ve been up to this year, and what’s coming up next.

Life Lately, and What’s Next

Highlights of this year so far include:

Recording a new album with producer Matt Ross-Spang at Southern Grooves in Memphis, Tennessee

I published a post about this previously which you can see/read here. We recorded a new full-length album in late February that will be out this summer (singles coming soon). Lots of behind-the-scenes work here, and I’m looking forward to getting it out to all the fans.

March Tour with Kolton Moore & the Clever Few

In late March, we headed up west through the mountains to play shows in Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Portland, Spokane, Seattle, and Jackson Hole. I need to write in more detail about it, but here’s some cool pictures from our photographer Brian Andrews:

Up Next

I’ve been spending a good chunk of my time getting my house ready for a new roommate to move in at the end of the month, but once July hits, it’s gonna be shows and video production until mid November! Looking forward to sharing more updates with y’all.

Thanks again for reading, will check back soon.

Aaron Dowd

Fort Worth, Texas

June 14, 2025

It’s been more than 5 years since I played a show with my Yamaha Maple Absolute Custom drums, but I think it’s time to get them back on stages.

Recording a new album at Southern Grooves Studio in Memphis with Kolton Moore & the Clever Few and Matt Ross-Spang.

All photos by Lone Pine Media except for the last one of my new van tattoo.

First of all, a deep gratitude that I got to be a part of this band and the five days we spent in Southern Grooves with Matt. Time moves slow in the moment while you’re working on the songs but then all of a sudden most of the work was done and we were packing up to head home to Texas.

You never know exactly how things are going to unfold when you go somewhere new to work on an album, but I knew we all wanted to make a record of songs we love and are proud of, and I think we’ve done just that.

Some of my favorite memories for this album will always be:

1. The first-listens where Kolton would grab his acoustic guitar and play a song for everyone and we’d all listen and feel the song and then talk about our ideas for it together. This happened a few times at the house we rented for the week, and also in the studio, and each time was significant and meaningful for the evolution of the songs.
2. The moments in the studio where we’d collectively get a great take of a song, or when someone individually would get a great take adding a new layer to a song, and we’d all look at each other with huge shit-eating grins and whoop and holler, knowing that we’d made and captured something magical for the song. That collective celebration and the high fives that we’d share reminded us that we are all trying to make the best music we can, for ourselves and for everyone who loves listening to us play our music.
3. The first time we heard the rough mixes of the songs after a few focused days in the studio and just how good they already sounded. To know all the time and effort and care that we put into the songs had all been worth it was like seeing a beautiful sunrise after a long cold night struggling to climb a steep mountain. Relief, joy, wonder, the pride of knowing we worked and made something special together.
4. Sam and I getting Van tattoos at Bluff City Tattoos after we finished all our work for the album. Van life forever!

We were fortunate enough to find a new member of the band just in time to make this record: Matt Gumley. A bright spirit with a lifetime of experience with performing and acting, Matt has brought some much-welcomed fresh energy to the band, contributing not just bass parts and vocal harmonies, but also a raw creative spirit that elevated everyone.

Matt Ross-Spang has also been a dream to work with. He has a focused but laid-back style that meshes well with how our band works, and has a fine-tuned sense of when to provide feedback and guidance, and when to let the band members work through a part or bring their own sound to the song. I’d love to work with Matt again in the future.

A huge thank you from the bottom of my heart to Matt and all the guys in the band and everyone who listens and supports us. I hope you all know how much I appreciate you and how excited I am for what comes next.

Finally got around to uploading my favorite photos from my trip to Portugal in October 2023. I took most of these with my Sony A7C and a Sony Sonnar 2.8 35mm lens.

Looking for a photographer in DFW? Get in touch.

I made a new short teaser video for our upcoming acoustic album, Bare-Bones:

Kolton wanted a old-school video look for videos for this project, so I added the VHS effect in post using the Rarevision app.

I shot most of the recording session with multiple cameras, the angle in this video was from a disposable 35mm lens on a Sony A7C.

The disposable lens does provide a cool “film camera” look that I find appealing, but it has several limitations, mainly it’s terrible in low light settings and also looks “low-resolution” straight out of the camera.

It’s easy to fake that grainy film look for footage and photos from a good lens, but it doesn’t work the other way (you can’t make footage from a Dispo lens look “good”).

I’m fond of the look of the disposable lens, although after reviewing the footage, I plan to stick to using my good 35mm lenses (Sony 1.4 GM and Sony Sonnar 2.8) moving forward.