Read Part 1 first. This is the back half of a two-part piece and it leans hard on the front half.
The short version if you're in a hurry: on a Friday in August, a duo out of Billings called Holland & Kohl drove down to open for Limberlost at The Living Room, the venue I run in Sheridan, Wyoming. We planned for a hundred people. Thirty came. I wrote about why that turned out to be the better night, about a sound guy who told me he couldn't turn her down, about an enormous dog named Duke, and about my belief that "making it" already happened to these two rather than idling up ahead waiting on them.
Then I sent them a list of questions. This is what came back.
Two months of Tuesdays
I sent the questions in August. I'm publishing the answers in October.
In between, the room did what the room does. A touring band came through and filled it. We handed a microphone to anyone who claimed to be funny and found out Sheridan has been sitting on more comedians than anybody had accounted for. Each of those nights had its own load-in, its own sound check, its own small catastrophe at 6:40 in the evening involving a cable nobody could find. A venue is a machine for manufacturing Tuesdays, and nobody warns you about that part.
So their answers sat in a folder, finished, waiting on me to stop moving long enough to read them the way they deserved. When I finally did, I had the specific and unwelcome experience of being out-written by my own interview subjects.
Here it is, barely touched.
The song has a name
In Part 1 I wrote around the title of the song she played for her father. I'd heard it once from the back of a loud room and didn't trust myself to put it in print. So I asked.
We've been calling it The Box Song. It stuck, I suppose that's what it is now and forever.
Then I asked about the box, expecting a sentence and maybe one usable detail. What arrived instead is the best thing anyone has ever sent me through a contact form.
The bag that is still tied shut
Her words, uncut:
"I left Indiana pretty abruptly after my dad passed away, consequently I left a lot of things behind. The only parts of my life that could fit into a Ford Escape were the only things coming with me, and I left a lot to be missed behind. My friend Brooke came over to check on me the day I was packing away, and she asked me why I wasn't bringing my guitar. I told her the guitar would not fit. She had none of this excuse, and made room where it didn't exist for my old guitar somewhere among the boxes stacked to the roof, trash bags of various items, and Maverick (my golden retriever, just a puppy at the time). Come to think of it, I think divine intervention placed Brooke with me that night — I wouldn't put it past me to have never picked up a guitar ever again, let alone start writing songs in Montana.
"Anyways, I drove home the following summer to visit my folks in Indiana. As I was gearing up to leave, my mother haphazardly tossed a trash bag into the back of the aforementioned Ford Escape. She told me it was full of my dad's stuff, clothes and other things she thought he'd want me to have. I fought that bag pretty hard, saying that I don't like things, I'm not a stuff person, I don't have space for that, etc. She also would hear none of these excuses, told me she loved me, and waved me back to Montana. That bag of things has since remained tied at the top, unopened, and untouched. It has also come with me through five different moving days — once it finds its way to a spot in a new house, it stays there until I move again.
"When I was studying for my last round of finals this past spring, I could not stop exchanging glances with this bag of unknown items, most touched or worn last by my own dad. I started wondering about its contents, what could possibly be in this bag that my mother insisted I keep and no one else. I still don't know. I don't know when I will know. I'm sure the day I do find out what's in there will be a very heavy day, but until then, I can absolutely tell you what is not in that bag. I cried through every line I wrote in that song, sobbed and gasped for air even, and it's with a heavy heart that I share those words on stage with people that may or may not be listening. I just like to talk about my dad, and I miss him dearly. I feel grateful for each and every person that approaches me with their own story of loss when I put my guitar away at the end of the night — connecting with others is the only way through this life we have all been gifted. At the end of the day, some things just won't let you leave them behind."
I can absolutely tell you what is not in that bag.
Read that line twice. She wrote a song about the contents of a container she has never opened, and the song is accurate, because what it's actually about is everything that couldn't fit in the Ford Escape.
She wrote it in April. It lives on the set list permanently and gets played conditionally.
"We do not play it every night. It's always on the set list, but if I don't feel like peeling back that many layers of myself to give away, then I say we skip it."
Which means if you've heard it, you were in a room on a night she decided the room could be trusted with it. I didn't know that while I was watching her play it. I know it now.
Samuel Kevin Dotson
I had his name as Kevin. That's half of it.
"His name was Samuel Kevin Dotson. His dad was Samuel, so everyone called him Kevin. I didn't even know that was his middle name until I started filling out my own paperwork in middle school. He was my best friend, my biggest cheerleader, and the only thing I've ever taken for granted. He had the most monstrous laugh (and the loudest sneeze, oh my lord..), made you feel like you were the most important person in the room, and never told a story the same way twice. I also get my southern twang from him, being from Southern Tennessee and all. My favorite memories with my dad include him holding onto the back of my shirt so a catfish on the other end of my fishing line wouldn't pull me in (at 7 years old, I had no business reeling in that fish), and passing a fifth of Jack Daniels back and forth at a fire that somehow always seemed to be burning."
Never told a story the same way twice. That's a whole man in six words, and it explains his daughter completely. She's standing on a stage in Wyoming telling a story about a bag, differently every time, and somewhere behind her there's a fire that somehow always seemed to be burning.
A stranger at Daisy Dukes
I had the shape of the band's origin right in Part 1 and none of the texture. Kohl supplied the texture.
"I saw Holland sitting on the side stage of Daisy Dukes nearly crying. I knew who she was from going to a show or two and thought she needed a band and that now was a fantastic time to ask. So I walked over to her and said You're Holland Dotson. I'm Kohl Johnathan. I play guitar, we should start a band. She was resistant at first saying she already had a guitar player but I was persistent. She then told me fine. I have a show on June 11th at Pine Creek Lodge. Come over on June 10th to practice and if it goes well, we can do this thing. So I went over and we practiced, played the show the next day, and we killed it. People loved us. We've been a band ever since."
Consider the nerve of that. He sees a woman he doesn't know, visibly upset, at a bar, and his read of the situation is she needs a band and now is a fantastic time to ask. That's either the worst social instinct in the state of Montana or the best one. The record will show it was the best one.
Her side:
"In that moment, I was like alright, here we go again. Another mediocre young musician that wants to start a band. I was happily surprised when I realized he wasn't just another guy trying to play guitar. Kohl is very serious about music, and that was the push I really needed to start taking myself seriously as an artist. I cried again after our first show together on the way home from Pine Creek Lodge — it felt like I had been reunited with a best friend I didn't know I was missing, I felt like I was on fire. In a good way."
One rehearsal. One show. They've been a band for a year and two months, which is less time than most people spend choosing a name.
Punchy country, settled
I called their sound punchy country. In Part 1 I admitted their name for it was better than mine and then announced I'd be using mine anyway. I felt good about that. I felt good about it for two months.
Punchy country is not cool. Sick country folk rock n roll is a more accurate description of what we do. Punchy country keeps the box we exist in a little small.
She's right, and she's right for the correct reason. Not that it sounds worse. That it fences them in. A two-word genre is a box, and this is a woman with strong opinions about boxes.
I thought I'd won that exchange. She was drafting.
The real name, for the record, was an accident of marketing. Kohl: "I was making a Facebook post promoting a smaller show of ours. When people asked what we sounded like, we both always said something like that. It's country, with a lotta rock n roll and a little bit of folk in it. But I needed to condense that for the post so I came up with sick country folk rock n roll. And it's catchy and rolls off the tongue and is fun so we've held on to it ever since."
A genre invented to fit a character limit. That's the most honest piece of music-industry history I've ever been handed.
The night, from the other side of the lights
I've spent a year apologizing to bands for our front door. It's in an alley. There's no sign. You walk past a sausage shop and a dumpster, and if nobody has told you where to go, you don't go. I've treated this as a liability.
Holland: "I felt like Bilbo Baggins going on an adventure to find this mysterious venue in the alley by the sausage shop. The instructions were so vague, and I LOVED that. When Kohl and Kori got out of the car and said, Okay! We're here! Now we just have to find it!, my initial thought was, no f-ing wayyyyy we have to FIND the VENUE we are PLAYING at? I began to hop skip and jump in excitement for this endeavor. I would akin it to Christmas."
Kohl: "When I pulled up to an alley with no signs, I was hella excited. In my past experiences, the secret or DIY or underground venues have always proved to be the best shows."
So the thing I've been apologizing for is the thing they liked most. I've written before about that door, defending it. Turns out it didn't need defending.
Then there's the attendance, which I spent roughly a third of Part 1 doing penance over.
Holland: "The room had such a vibe. Definitely in the top 5 coolest venues we've been lucky enough to get asked to play. Kori and I agree that we can't wait to come back. On stage, 30 people can look the same as 100. It really is impossible to see past the lights. We were just happy to be there and play our music."
Kohl, with more precision than I managed in two thousand words: "Too big of a venue for a duo and it can sometimes feel like it's completely empty even if there are 100 people. Too small and it feels like a basement show. Thirty is technically a small crowd but it didn't feel small. There were still people standing and hanging out in every section and room of the venue. Everywhere we looked while playing, there were people there. It didn't feel small to me at all, it felt kinda right."
It didn't feel small to me at all, it felt kinda right.
Thirty people, a full room by every measure that counts, and I was the only person in the building doing arithmetic.
And then there's the fog machine, which I handed to her mid-show with no instructions and no supervision.
"I am an all or nothing kind of person, I know this about myself. Dalton showed me the remote, handed me the remote, and wandered off. I think this was some sort of test. I just about suffocated the room on my first go of this fog machine remote, and all I wanted was more fog from this machine. I knew in that moment, I did not have the self control to handle this remote before people started dropping like flies. I did not pass this test."
She's describing about ninety seconds of elapsed time. It was not a test. I wanted a drink and she was standing there.
Finally, Kohl has filed a correction regarding Duke, the enormous dog who arrived unaccompanied, sat on his lap, and sang along to selected songs.
Duke is not a husky. No shot. That's 100% a Yellowstone wolf. No doubt in my mind.
I have no rebuttal. I described that animal as a husky in print, at length, with total confidence, having never once asked it for identification.
The seesaw
In Part 1 I wrote that she was headed to PA school while chasing music, and I drew a line from that to my own long-running intention to get EMT training I'll probably never use professionally. I undersold her. She isn't studying toward the medical thing. She's already doing it.
"I think of the two like a seesaw. It is really difficult to have the bandwidth to think about both. What usually ends up happening is I think about PA school/classes/EMT shifts for a few weeks, then I deep dive into music, booking shows, writing, and rehearsals. Kohl knows I am a nightmare to work with, but when the creativity is there, we both have to latch onto it and ride it out. Music is the dream, of course I love it. I am not an unrealistic person though, so I've kept up with school and work as an EMT to just be able to apply to school. I am currently waiting to hear back from PA schools to see if I earned a spot somewhere. We will see."
Look at the shape of that life. She works EMT shifts. She carries a song for her father on the set list and plays it on the nights she can. She drives to Wyoming on a Friday for thirty people and is back in Montana for a festival by one the next afternoon. And underneath all of it she's waiting on letters from schools that will decide which end of the seesaw comes down.
Not sequentially. Not someday. In alternating two-week blocks, right now, while the mail takes its time.
Ghosts in the digital age
The thing I flagged hardest in Part 1 is that you cannot stream this band. There's no catalog. Nothing to send a friend. I treated that as a problem she must be racing to solve.
"The EP is being heavily considered. I know I need something tangible out there, but man is it cool being sought after just to hear one of my songs again; the only way to hear it is to see it live. It's part of the allure, we are ghosts in the digital age. However, the process of recording is daunting. And, I severely dislike the sound of my voice on a playback. I still can't believe we've made it this far just by doing it live."
We are ghosts in the digital age.
I've spent years telling business owners to own their demand, publish everything, be findable. Here's an artist whose scarcity is doing work a catalog couldn't do, and she knows it, and she isn't in a hurry. When it exists she wants it streamed, and she wants vinyl if the money ever shows up.
Merch remains an open dispute: "Kohl and I have gotten in many fights about this. We had a design drawn up from a local Billings artist, Kohl liked it, I hated it. If either of us were doing music full time I think we would have something for everyone. It's harder than it looks!"
An artist was commissioned. One member loved it. The band remains, to this day, merchless. It's the most honest account of a creative partnership I've ever been handed.
The reason I wrote any of this was something she said in the green room after the set — a story about giving her name at will call for a sold-out show and being genuinely surprised to find it on the list. In Part 1 I argued that the window in which an artist is still surprised to be in the room eventually closes and doesn't reopen, and that I was lucky to be standing in it.
I asked her about that. She disagreed, politely, and then proved my point anyway.
"I think it is very generous of you to say that it won't be surprising for much longer. I still can't believe we got into that sold out show, being a couple of friendly local musicians definitely has its perks sometimes. It all still surprises me, and we are just the openers for the openers. We have found ourselves in some pretty cool rooms within the last year, and I can't help but think of all the gigs I've played at podunk bars with all the people that knew my name first. How lucky are we to even have a sliver of the pie. All I can say is thank you."
Then I asked what making it means to her, braced for a paragraph. She sent nine words.
You know exactly what it means. Go big or go home.
What I got wrong, and what she got right
Part 1 was my argument that making it already happened and the only thing left is to live inside it. I assembled that out of a fog machine, a dog of disputed species, a sound engineer, and thirty people.
She said it better without trying, and without agreeing with me. We are just the openers for the openers. How lucky are we to even have a sliver of the pie.
That isn't modesty. That's a person standing inside the thing, aware she's inside it, grateful in the present tense instead of filing the gratitude away for an arrival that was never going to feel like arriving. People who are waiting to feel like they made it don't talk that way. They talk about next year.
The bag is still tied shut in whatever house she's in now. The song is still on the set list. Some nights she plays it.
Where to find Holland & Kohl
They're a two-piece out of Billings, Montana — Holland Dotson on vocals and guitar, Kohl Johnathan on guitar, banjo and mandolin — playing what they call sick country folk rock n roll. There's still no album. Until there is, the only way to hear this band is to stand in a room while they play it, which is either an inconvenience or the entire point.
Holland plays Breedlove guitars as an endorsed artist
If you book rooms anywhere in Montana or Wyoming, book them. If you're within driving distance of Sheridan, come to the next show at The Living Room. The door is in the alley off Brundage, behind the sausage shop. There's no sign.
Apparently that's the best part.
Common questions
What is The Box Song about? Holland Dotson wrote The Box Song in April 2026 about a bag of her late father's belongings that her mother gave her. She has moved it five times and has never opened it. In her words: "I can absolutely tell you what is not in that bag."
Who was Holland Dotson's father? Samuel Kevin Dotson, known as Kevin because his own father was Samuel. He was from Southern Tennessee, and she credits him with her southern twang.
What genre is Holland & Kohl? Sick country folk rock n roll — a phrase Kohl Johnathan coined to fit a Facebook post. Country songwriting with rock dynamics and Appalachian folk roots.
How did Holland & Kohl form? Kohl Johnathan approached Holland Dotson at Daisy Dukes in Billings, Montana and told her "I play guitar, we should start a band." They rehearsed once and played Pine Creek Lodge the next day. They've been a band since.
Can you stream Holland & Kohl? Not yet. There is no released catalog as of October 2026. An EP is under consideration. The music is live-only.
Where is The Living Room? 151 W Brundage St, Sheridan, Wyoming. The entrance is in the alley off Brundage. There's no sign on the door.
Anything here about money or results describes my own companies. It isn't typical and isn't a promise of yours. See the earnings disclaimer.
DG
Dalton Goodyear
Operator, writer and speaker in Sheridan, Wyoming. Hosting short-term rentals since 2017. Licensed Wyoming real estate broker and founder of Wyo Stays.
