I asked her if they'd open the night. She wrote back three words.
That band fucks.
That's a yes. That's an enthusiastic yes, from a woman who had reached out weeks earlier saying she'd played the Ice Haus and wanted to come jam at The Living Room sometime. I'd said yes to the jam, but I wanted more than a jam for her. Then the schedule shuffled the way schedules do, Limberlost landed on the same Friday, and suddenly the question wasn't do you want to come play but do you want to open for a rock band that's opened for Yngwie Malmsteen and Bush.
Three words. Sent in about four seconds.
~Thirty
We planned for a hundred people. ~Thirty came.
I'm not going to dress that up. A hundred is what the night deserved and ~thirty is what it got, and there is a specific flavor of quiet that settles over a room when you can see the space where the other seventy would have been standing. Anyone who runs a venue knows it. You do the math on the door while the band is still loading in.
Here's the part I didn't expect. The thirty who came got a better night than a hundred would have gotten. Not in the consoling-yourself way. In the literal way. Thirty people in a two-thousand-square-foot room, all of them close enough to see a guitarist's hands, none of them talking through the songs because there was nowhere to hide if you did. Everyone in that room felt it, from everyone. That's a real thing that happened and it's not the thing that happens at a sold-out show.
Both of those are true at once. People missed out, and the people who didn't miss out got something a crowd would have diluted.
Punchy country
Their own name for what they do is sick country folk rock n roll. I called it punchy country.
She did not love that. She laughed, and then she corrected me, and her version is better than mine, and I'm still using mine. Punchy country is what I mean when I say the songs make me want to dance and they also make me want to party, which are two different impulses that most country music picks between. Holland's writing comes out of Appalachia by way of Tennessee and Indiana and lands somewhere near Tyler Childers, and then Kohl puts a rock band's sense of dynamics underneath it, and the result hits harder than the genre label prepares you for.
She's an official Breedlove artist. She has no album out. Those two facts sitting next to each other tell you most of what you need to know about where she is right now.
What Bob said
Bob runs sound for us. Somewhere mid-set he asked me how it sounded from the floor.
I told him they were loud. Then I told him they were good.
He said, I know. I can't pull her down. She whales like Dolly Parton.
That is a sound guy's compliment, and if you've spent time around sound guys you know it's the highest one available. He wasn't complaining about the level. He was telling me the instrument was bigger than the room and there was nothing he could do about it from behind a board. Some voices you mix. Some voices you get out of the way of.
That was the second. Not "they're good." Bob, hands on a fader, telling me the fader wasn't going to help.
If you want to know the exact moment I thought Nashville, five years, maybe less — that was it. Not a song. A man who has heard ten thousand singers through a monitor telling me this one wouldn't come down.
The song for Kevin
Her dad's name was Kevin.
She played a song for him. She said the title and she talked about it a little first, and the part I retained was something about a box of his things that her mom had given her. I'm not going to reconstruct what I don't remember precisely, because that song deserves better than my paraphrase, and because I'm going to ask her and let her tell it in her own words in the second half of this.
What I can tell you is what it did to me, which is the only part I actually own.
I got married recently. My mom danced with me at the wedding. Anyone who has read anything else here knows what that took. So I was already carrying that around the room that night. And then a woman I'd known only through a DM for six weeks stood up in front of thirty people in an alley venue in northern Wyoming and sang about a box of her father's things.
I'm not going to tell you what the room did. I was in it, not watching it.
Duke
A giant husky showed up.
Big enough to have a SSN, 401k and some stories to tell as far as I could establish. He simply arrived, the way large dogs sometimes do, and made himself part of the evening. Before the set he was sitting on Kohl's lap — all of him, which is a considerable amount of him. During the set he sang. Woos, specifically, and only during certain songs, which means he had preferences.
Good dog. Correct taste.
I'm including this because if I only wrote down the song about her father, I'd be lying about what the night was. It was both. It's always both. The heavy thing and the enormous dog are in the same room, forty minutes apart, and pretending otherwise is how people end up writing about music like it's a funeral.
A lot of responsibility
Kohl worked the fog machine with a foot pedal during their own set. Sensible. Restrained.
When Limberlost went on, I handed Holland the remote.
She blasted that thing. Absolutely emptied it into a full rock band. Somewhere in the back half of the set she handed it back to me and said it was a lot of responsibility, which is the funniest and most accurate description of a fog machine remote I have ever heard, and which also tells you something about her that four paragraphs of praise wouldn't.
The green room
After the show she was telling stories, and one of them was about getting into a party. Someone she'd met somewhere had invited them out. She gave her name at will call. Her name was on the list.
She told this like it was a surprise.
That's the whole thing. That's the entire reason I'm writing this. She told a story about her own name being on a list as though the correct response to that was astonishment, and she's right that it's astonishing, and she's wrong that it'll keep being rare. There's a window in an artist's life where they are still surprised to be in the room. The window closes. It does not reopen.
I was in the room while it was still open. I don't take that lightly.
Humility isn't something she's performing. It's just that nobody's told her yet.
Kohl
He'd be easy to write as the quiet one. He isn't.
The band exists because Kohl walked up to Holland and asked her to start one. That's the origin story. Someone had to be the person who crossed a room and said the thing out loud, and it was him, and if he hadn't there'd be no duo to write about.
He got down. Ripped it up on guitar all night, and closed out with a run at Free Bird that had no business being that good in a room that size. He plays banjo. He plays mandolin. He's got style and he's got vibes, which are two separate assets, and he carries both without appearing to think about either.
He's also dating their manager, Kori, which means the entire operation is three people who actually like each other. Don't underestimate what that's worth. I've watched more bands come apart over logistics and resentment than over talent.
She saves lives during the day
She's going to PA school.
Sit with that for a second. The woman Bob couldn't pull down, the one writing songs about her father's belongings, is also studying to be a physician assistant. She wants the music to be the full-time thing. She's building the medical career anyway.
I have my own version of this. I want to get EMT training. Not for a job — I run my companies and I can't commit to reliable shifts, and I know that about myself. I want it because being ignorant in a moment when it matters is an unacceptable thing to choose. It's principle. It's the whole principle.
What I recognized in her that night wasn't ambition. Ambition is common and cheap. It was the refusal to pick — the insistence on being competent in the thing that saves people and excellent in the thing that moves people, at the same time, while driving to Sheridan on a Friday to play for thirty. oh yeah, then scooting back to Montana to jam a festival by 1:00 the next day... they're living it and they don't even know it.
Making it already happened
Here's what I actually believe, and it's the reason this post exists instead of staying a nice memory.
We hold our dreams out at arm's length on purpose. We call it reaching for the stars and then we build our lives around the reaching, because the reaching is safe and arriving is terrifying. As long as you're reaching, you can't fail. You're in progress. You're pre-something.
But look at what a dream actually consists of when it shows up.
It's late-night laughs with strangers. It's a fog machine you've handed to someone who's taking the job extremely seriously. It's a giant husky named Duke on a guitarist's lap. It's a sound guy telling you he can't turn her down. It's thirty people, not a hundred, and the thirty being the right thirty. It's a woman singing about her father's box of things in an alley venue in a town this size, or bad ex's some foul spearmint Zyns or and Amen for not being barefoot and pregnant... and a man in the back thinking about his own mother on a dance floor a week earlier.
That's it. That's the thing. Nobody's coming to tell you it started.
Holland and Kohl are not waiting to make it. They made it. They made it the night Kohl crossed a room and asked, and every night since has been the living-out of it, and the Nashville version — which I'd bet real money is coming inside five years — will not be more made it than a Friday in Sheridan for thirty people who were paying attention. It'll be louder. It'll pay better. It will not be more real.
The making-it is in the process. The arriving already happened. What's left is to live in it, which is harder than reaching and considerably better.
Cheers to those unable to attend
There were seventy empty spots in that room, and there are other absences that don't have anything to do with ticket sales.
Her dad. My dad. Friends who didn't make it, in both senses of that phrase. People in seasons of life that don't allow for a Friday night out, those barstool blue dots popping up we should ignore, but can't help ourselves — the new parents, the people sitting in hospitals, the ones who are working, the ones who would have loved it and could not come.
So: cheers to those unable to attend. Raised honestly, without turning it into a moment.
And to whoever broke her heart badly enough that these songs exist — you don't get credit for this. You get nothing. But good on Kohl for helping her dry those tears with a guitar, because that's what actually happened, and the songs are better than you were.
The band fucks.
Part 2 is coming
I'm sending Holland a set of questions — about Kevin's song, about the box, about what Kohl said when he crossed that room, about what she thinks she's building. Her answers will make up the second half of this, in her words rather than mine.
Until then: she has no album out yet. No streaming catalog. The only way to hear this band right now is to stand in a room while they play, which is either an inconvenience or the entire point depending on how you look at it. Their dates are here. Follow her here, because the EP is coming and that's where it'll land first.
And if you're within driving distance of Sheridan, come to the next one. The door is in the alley off Brundage. There's no sign. That's on purpose.
Update, October 2026: Holland answered the questions. Part 2 is the rest of the story — what she hasn't opened, why the song for her father only comes out some nights, and what Kohl was actually doing back there with the banjo. Read Part 2: The Box Song →
