Cat Henry of Live Music Society champions small venues

LP: So I'm intrigued by what you do at Live Music Society for several reasons. As a lifelong music fan, it would be hard not to appreciate the work you do but also as someone who's been a live music professional in one way or another for, sadly, most of my adult life. 

Cat Henry: That makes two of us! 

LP: Yeah, we can talk about that, too. It's something that I appreciate as a professional, but I'm also super intrigued by it as just sort of an industry observer. And so I'm very excited to unpack some of this with you. I wonder if, as a service to me and our listeners, we could start broadly and if you could talk a little bit about the mission and motivation of the Live Music Society.

Cat Henry: Live Music Society is a nonprofit foundation, a philanthropic foundation. It was started by a group of music industry professionals. And artists who care about the smaller music spaces, the listening rooms across the United States, the places where artists get their start, hone their craft, and find their audiences where they learn whether they've got what it takes.

And there's a lot of economic and other pressures on these spaces that are essential to American culture. So, the foundation began as a way to recognize that place, protect them, and bring them together as a network to share best practices and learn from each other. And that's where we've begun and how we're growing.

LP: Am I correct in understanding that the idea and the founding predated COVID? This was not driven necessarily by COVID. 

Cat Henry: No, it wasn't driven by COVID. It was a seed of an idea in 2019. I think that the board applied for nonprofit status in January 2020. So, you know, it was just at the cusp of coming into being right before lockdown.

And, of course, that changed everything. It was born out of the founder Pete Muller's first touring experience. He's a finance professional in his career but also a singer-songwriter and toured with Stephen Kellogg in 2019. They toured almost 50 small venues, spoke to the venue owners, and learned about the struggles they face and the joy and pain of being a small venue owner.

He decided he could bring some people together to try and bring awareness to that and help in some way. So they were just getting started when COVID hit and, of course, immediately turned towards emergency funding with a goal to distribute 2 million in the first two years of operation, which we did.

And now we've just reached the 3 million mark with our fifth round of grants, which we can talk about. We now have two signature grant programs coming beyond emergency funding. Thankfully, we're beyond emergency funding and into the original idea for the foundation. 

LP: Yeah. Let me loop back to that in a moment.

There's one other question I wanted to ask you as a prelude to some of the deeper dive. There's a term you just used and that I see a lot in your literature: listening rooms. How would you define the difference between a venue and a listening room? Because it's very specific, the way the organization uses that term.

Cat Henry: There's a difference, and both are valuable. There's a difference between a small group of people in front of a solo guitarist hanging on every note, every sound, every lyric versus 200 people and a mosh pit wildly dancing to their favorite indie band and a cacophony and a different kind of social experience.

Both are valid. Both occur in our network of venues, and by small venues, we're referencing venues that are under 300 capacity but generally more than 50 — more than a cafe. And so it's two different types of experiences. Listening rooms are generally where people are sitting down; they're quiet spaces, and it doesn't matter the genre of music.

It could be a jazz club, Americana, folk. It's just a slightly different experience to a music club, a dance club where indie bands and rock bands play. That's really the only difference. 

LP: Talk to me about the grant programs. You mentioned that there are several now, and it's not solely about emergency funding. There are other areas — I know NIVA has the foundation, which is,

in many regards, a fund specifically for things like fires, earthquakes, and flooding. Unfortunately, things we're going to probably be encountering more and more of as a live music community. What's the niche you're filling or the needs you're addressing, and how do the different programs do that?

Cat Henry: We took a minute after the summer of 2022 to look at what we hoped was a post-COVID environment. Despite Omicron, despite the ongoing, very slow recovery that small venues are facing with no-shows, lower attendance, and last-minute ticket sales. We wanted to come out of this period as an organization with something more forward-thinking and optimistic, a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Our board discussed the way that we could best serve our community. In fact, we hosted a bunch of focus groups, did a survey, looked at our prior grantees after doing three rounds of emergency funding, and came up with the idea. We heard from our community that it was a struggle to re-engage with their audience, re-engaged with having people be aware that they're around, that they've reopened.

We were bringing people back into their space in a way that everybody felt safe. Understanding that there were lingering hesitations about being in crowds, which, in some ways, for various populations, is still an aspect of the sector. So, we decided to launch what is now going to be our annual signature program called Music in Action.

And it is a broad audience development, community engagement-focused grant. We didn't box it. We didn't put a bow around it. We asked venue owners and applicants to come to us with your creative ideas. We believe that you know what you need. To recover and look ahead to what long-term growth and health mean to you and your community, whether city or rural, we'll accept your creative ideas, and you can apply for up to 50,000.

And that was the program we ran in the spring of 2023, and we announced 17 grantees. From that program in the summertime, we had a chance to celebrate them at the NIVA conference. And from that group of applications, we decided to launch a second grant program called Toolbox, which is geared towards one-time, more practical purposes.

We asked: if you don't have a big creative audience development idea, come to us with what you do need, and we'll see what happens because this is a learning experience for us, too. And so there were a lot of applications that said, Oh, I don't want to do a music festival, or I don't want to do an open house, but I do need to build a bathroom because I built an outdoor stage during the pandemic.

There's no way for people to go to the toilet. So things like that. Very, not unglamorous, practical things became our new Toolbox grant. 

LP: So let me say it back to you just so that I fully understand. Toolbox is more about the one-time or out-of-the-ordinary or more operationally focused needs that an operator might have and where, if they had to go for traditional sources of funding, even if they existed, they'd be talking about having to go to a bank or get a loan or do things that really put their business operation even further behind the ball.

Whereas this is a way to get some unencumbered, one-off money that helps them either take their business to the next level or at least keep it going. Is that fair? 

Cat Henry: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, there are SBA loans, small business loans, and sources of funding. I hope some of our work educates the philanthropic sector that small venues need funding, even when they're not nonprofit organizations.

A venue owner was joking the other day that there are nonprofits, there are for-profits, and then there are for-profits that make no profit. And that encapsulates some of the small venue operational challenges: the margins are so slim that they don't have a spare dollar to do things they know will improve and enhance the experience for artists who are visiting and performing, for their staff, for anybody who walks into their space. So yes, the Toolbox grant, which we're now accepting applications for, is geared towards those kinds of one-time practical things. And I can give you a few examples of the things that we've already funded.

We have 13 Toolbox grantees currently and hope to have at least that many more by the time we get to the end of this year. 

LP: Incredible. Tell me a little about Toolbox or maybe both programs in terms of what happens after the check's written. What's your involvement? What's your compliance or monitoring or oversight or even just in so much as the world of philanthropy or business, in general, is about storytelling, what are you doing with the grantees to stay in their lives and to understand how the money's being spent and to turn that into the next round?

Cat Henry: Community is everything. The music community of which you and I are a huge part, the way that artists and audiences connect and feel like they belong — is now extended to the larger venue community through the work of organizations like NIVA. I think venue owners are much more collaborative than they were.

They used to see each other as real competitors. And so there's an opportunity here to build a network. I have made it my mission to reach out and say hello and connect and see the venue owners that we've given money to and to listen to them, not only in how they use the funds but also in what else is going on, what they're excited about, how it's been to reopen.

We've had so many stories about faltering opens and really exciting openings. So, it's about creating a network, and that will be our next phase, looking at a convening for that group. In some ways, it's kind of a support group. A lot of venue owners are former musicians and touring musicians. They are music lifers and music lovers, and it's good for them to be around people who understand what they're going through. And so that's one of the things that we want to develop. We tell the stories through our social media. We want to bring visibility and awareness to these venues, too. So, telling their stories and what they're doing with the money is a part of us highlighting their great work, both in their local community through local newspaper articles and nationally. So yeah, we stay in touch, and we learn about what they've done, and the Music in Action programs, the 17 programs, have only just started. The grant period is from August 1st to the end of June. And so there's a flow of different projects. I was just at DROM, the great global music venue in the Lower East Side of New York, last week for the very first project funded by our grant.

It's a collaboration that DROM has with a nonprofit called Moment, the Museum of Music and Entertainment, NYC, and presenting a series of Workshops and multimedia events and performances centered around New York City's music history. The first one was called Everybody, L E S, Lower East Side, and it involved an improvisation from the Groove Collective honoring musician Butch Morris, led by Peter Appelbaum.

But it also had this fascinating, 24-minute history of music on the Lower East Side in sound and vision from the days of vaudeville and up through Sonic Youth and punk and hip hop. It was fascinating. The 25-minute presentation went so quickly. And there were gasps from the audience and things you didn't even realize had happened in the East Village.

LP: I'd love to see that. 

Cat Henry: Yeah, I was thinking it should be on all arts. I wanted to make that connection. It's something that every New Yorker should see. The history of the Lower East Side and its music are fascinating. And so that was the first program that they presented. And then DRUM also has another partnership funded by the grant.

That is with Kids Rock for Kids. I don't know whether you've heard about that nonprofit. It's teenage rock musicians raising money to help their peers in underserved communities, and they needed rehearsal space. DROM is making rehearsal space and performance space available, funded by the grant, to continue its operations.

So, these stories bring visibility to the connection between the venues and their community. That they're not just commercial entities interested in selling booze and making money. That they really care about the musicians, and they care about the communities that they're embedded in, whether city or rural.

LP: It's interesting because as someone who, who's, who spends and has spent a lot of time with small and mid-sized venue operators. Their day-to-day realities present them with challenges more so than the typical business person in aligning their beliefs with the realities of the things they're up against.

You mentioned some, the need to sell alcohol, or in other contexts, the need to have service fees on tickets. There are things, or even the prices of certain things, that have to happen within the venue. There was a big controversy around venues and artists, around the percentage a venue keeps for merchandising sales.

And there's all these things that when you talk to a venue operator, you're exactly right, they're former musicians, they're lifelong music lovers. They're not predators by and large. This isn't where you'd go if you were seeking to make as much money as humanly possible exploiting artists, you know? Yet they're forced to make those sorts of compromised decisions. If they put themselves in the patron or the artist's perspective, they don't want to charge surcharges. They don't want to have 7 dollar beers. They don't want all these things, but. You have to pay rent in New York City. You have to have insurance — all these things that we don't always think about when we're the other stakeholders in the ecosystem. It's really where the business meets the reality of the marketplace in a very acute way.

You mentioned some of the challenges that are especially sharp for smaller venues and listening rooms coming out of COVID. You articulated ongoing problems with no-shows, a decline in ticket sales, or changing patterns.

This last-minute ticket buyer who, it's great that they ultimately walk through the door, but it's a different mindset for a venue operator. It's nice to know six weeks out. Who's going to be coming in six weeks later as opposed to all the walk-up traffic and the different challenges that presents for staffing and stocking booze or whatever it is?

We might be on another wave of cancellations that will hurt venues if this COVID increase happens into the fall. Those of us close to it have been talking about it now for over a year, but it's lost in the broader story about the return of live music. I don't think the general public understands that it's become a tale of haves and have-nots or it's been very bifurcated.

There's incredible success at the top end of the market, and still a lot of struggles in our sort of neighborhood and community-level venues. So, it clearly presents a big need and role for what you are up to, but how does the post-COVID world change how you think about mission? If the pandemic had never happened, would Live Music Society be the same?

Cat Henry: If the pandemic had never happened, the same economic pressures from inflation and the fear of recession might still occur. These are pressures that have happened in the past. The economic cycles are not guaranteed. There is uncertainty around business operations, and those, in some ways, are very different.

Coming out of COVID, the effect of inflation and escalating prices, especially things like insurance, which in some cases has risen by as much as 30%. And yeah, perhaps it's the climate crisis impact. A lot of it might be Astroworld, the fallout from Astroworld, and the insurer's limitations on what they will and won't cover.

But premiums have definitely been affected. Permits and licenses have been affected. The business pressures are there. And going back to the alcohol question, at this level, small venues rely very much on alcohol sales. And there are consumer patterns that are changing this, now documented that.

Gen Z, very positively, Gen Z has a much better relationship with alcohol than perhaps my Gen X generation had. And now venue owners are beginning to realize that kombucha and mocktails can be offered to patrons. So there's a shift. There's a general cultural shift as well. Not just around COVID-19, but what does it mean to run a small music venue in the 21st century with shifting consumer tastes in the digital world?

How do NFTs fit into this? How does, how do artist Patreons fit into this? There are many questions and ways that there can be opportunities for artists and venues to collaborate in new ways that I don't think have been explored yet that are quite exciting. So yeah, I think our mission would be the same: to recognize and protect, to empower small venues.

A trend that I've seen over the last year is in the funding field. When venues are looking at how to survive, how do I ensure that I can pay artists when I'm not sure if I'm going to have a full house or an empty room? Or how do I give an emerging artist a chance when they don't have an audience?

What does that look like? How do I make that happen? Because that's my role in the music industry. A seed assistant, as it were, they're looking at outside funding. And I think SVOG made people wake up to that. Oh, the federal government, people care that we don't go out; that we don't disappear. That is a very important economic engine.

From the stadium size, as you mentioned, the very highest to the lowest, because without the smaller venues, there is no feeder system and no beginning bands. Funding will become more of a part of that, and I've seen a trend towards venues questioning their business structure.

There are at least three or four venues that I know in the past year have transitioned to nonprofit. And that's not an easy undertaking because you must adopt a real mission and develop your education and community service programs. You have to build a board, and there are many tax and IRS implications.

It's not an easy fix, but in some ways, it is a better fit for venues so that they can have tax-deductible contributions and qualify for grants from private foundations, state funding, and municipal funding. That they would not otherwise qualify for because that seems to be a way that they can look at long-term health.

LP: It sounds a bit similar to some of the challenges and solutions that we see with local news and newspapers and a very similar set of conversations, quite honestly, a transition to nonprofit status, a search for patronage, or the safety net of a billionaire, to say it plainly, that's how a lot of local newspaper syndicates and what have you are thinking about it, while it's exciting to see that hustle and the fruits of it start to take place, it seems like, I don't know a way to say it without sounding cranky or negative about it, but It seems a shame that that's what it has to come to, that a person with the dream of operating a small local venue and being part of the local arts community or just being a music fan and being an idealist and wanting to throw a party five nights a week, that should be a valid pursuit and that someone could support themselves within their community.

And, of course, we could talk even more about the problems with local news and the repercussions of that. But it all seems like a reflection on what we've done over the last 20, 30, 40 years in terms of corporatization of entertainment and media. And it's very hard to escape that.

Do you note that and just set it aside and say, I deal with the reality as it is? Or do you contemplate that as an organization? How does how we got here fit into how you think about what you do? 

Cat Henry: That is a very important question. How people value music and art humanities in this country, and whether it's a corporate entertainment model versus a public good and a need and an elemental human need that should be supported. It begins at the very youngest, with access to music education and artistic, cultural opportunities for the very youngest people. The school systems removing most of their arts and music programming greatly impacted the devaluation of this experience.

Live music, collective gathering, celebratory gathering, It's an ancient feeling. Humans have been doing it since the beginning of humankind, yet it's not always valued as it should be. You're right; it should be possible for people to sustain this, but the models need to be revisited.

And part of that is having people realize that it's okay to spend money on music and that the artists should be compensated. That it shouldn't be free. There's been a movement since Napster, and with streaming, people assume they're paying the lowest price possible for cultural experiences or access to people's intellectual property and don't feel they should pay for it. And that's a re-educational opportunity that needs to happen. Streaming does not pay artists' salaries. They need to tour, and touring can be very hard on their mental health. It's a tough world out there for artists. So, there needs to be a reckoning of what it means to support an artistic community.

This has been a long-term conversation in America about how artists and musicians are supported. And the nonprofit world and finding your tribe, your local tribe, whether it's a subscriber model as the newspapers have done. If you believe in what we're doing, become a subscriber. The people who care want to put their money where their mouths are, whether or not they're actually in the room or doing it from afar. And so I think that is a viable alternative. Live Nation is reporting, or at least Ticketmaster is reporting, record revenue in the hundreds of millions. So there is pent-up demand for live music. So, in figuring out people are prepared to pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars, they've pushed ticket prices higher and higher for stadium and arena tours. Having some of that trickle down into the local environment and taking a chance on a new artist rather than somebody who's already a household name is something I hope will continue to happen. The teenagers locked down during the pandemic come to understand their musical tastes and what they're looking for from these live music experiences. 

LP: Something exciting and encouraging is that we see the evidence. I can't give it to empirically, but we all have anecdotes of looking around, whether it's ourselves and our wallets or witnessing campaigns where an artist chooses to interact directly with their fanbase. They cease to be intermediated by some of the corporate interests; fans will transact directly with the artist, and the fan will support them, whether it is a Patreon or paying to get something. 

I say it a lot to my friends and colleagues. I say it a lot here: We must remember that fan is short for fanatic. The fan wants more of the thing they love, and they don't always know what they will love tomorrow. They know what they love now and spend on it when given the opportunity, big or small, right? At a stadium or a local venue, they just need to understand what it is.

And it's very exciting to see that when an artist can step outside of that sort of corporate structure and appeal directly to fans, more often than not, the fans will meet them there. Whether it's the same scale and how that plays out, it's a different conversation where it's the next conversation, but there's potential livelihoods there, and that's very exciting.

And so having this network of small places becomes key to that because that is where the fan and the artist meet. We could do it against the glass and the screen, but ultimately, all roads lead to, "Let's go do it in person." 

Cat Henry: Yeah, absolutely. I love Patreon, and some artists have Substacks, and they're cultivating their writing and their marketing. There's so much pressure on an artist to be everything, to be a marketing genius and somebody who is engaging and charismatic and not just a songwriter. That's a tough space for musicians, but it's what's needed. And it is; I've seen more and more musicians starting out making a decent living through these platforms. When they don't have a record label, and they don't have support, they are doing it for themselves.

And I like the idea that there will be more partnerships such as that where the artist already has their fan base in a certain place and is cultivating it and can partner with the venue to say, okay, this is a special night for my Patreon community, or this is a special night, meet me here. And also being able just to get their first gig somewhere.

One of our grantees, the Rebel Lounge in Phoenix, Arizona, is using our grant money to give 80 artists their first headline show. They may not have a Patreon; they may not even have a band brand or anything. They're just getting them on the stage and seeing how they do. Just the access point as well.

How you begin is important, and those are the kinds of things that we want to fund. Venues can take a risk. They don't have to rely on advance sales or sellouts. They can continue to give that space to young musicians because you can't learn the craft on TikTok. You cannot learn to engage with people performing in front of real-life people.

It's a very tricky learning experience. It can go very badly wrong in some cases, but you learn. You learn where the rubber meets the road, how to engage with people, and how to get through a song without having to re-record 50 times. A real live experience. So I think artists listen to venues to listen to artists and hear where they are, what they need, and what they want.

I'm hoping that there's going to be some economic stability. We keep hearing about canceled tours because making ends meet is tough, not just for venues but for artists as well. Partly, that came out of the fact that everybody just started touring at the same time. In the second part of 2022, everybody was back on the road. You couldn't find a tour bus for miles. The availability of things like lighting gear combined with supply chain issues made things worse. And I hope that that will stabilize a little bit. But there needs to be multiple ways for artists to make a living so that they're not required to tour hundreds of nights in a row.

There needs to be a reckoning in the music industry as a whole to what it means to support art. What does it mean to make a living? And that's an age-old conversation that venues have a part in. There are ways that venues can help support artists by working with them to develop their careers, by making sure that they give them the right amount of marketing, and by supporting them, and those are the kinds of things we want to assist with.

LP: I want to come back to talk to you a little bit about the grant period that you're in now, but something you said stands out for me there, which is, I think NIVA did prove that certain parts of the music ecosystem, specifically the venues and promoters, could have a mindset shift and go from everybody's a potential competitor to, oh my goodness, we are all pieces of a community and pieces of an ecosystem.

That's really what's needed is for that mindset to go into all of the other stakeholders because in a world where once an artist has enough leverage, They're taking all of the ticket money. And when the record label or rights holder has all the leverage, they take all the terms. Like everybody's taking, it's not even more than their fair share. Everybody's taking as much as they can when they have the maximum leverage from everybody else.

It's very cynical, and ultimately, it plays off the idea that there's always another kid who wants to make it big. There's an endless supply on the creative side. I think you see that in the sports world at any given time. How many professional athletes are there in the major leagues combined? That's a bigger topic for another day, but to me, this zero-sum thinking is the root of many problems. 

Cat Henry: Yeah, the dog-eat-dog world. I think you're right. It is a cynical way of looking, and people assume that the music industry is like that.

But there are very bright sparks of hope. The fact that venue owners and artists came together to have their voices heard is the grounds for the Save Our Stages Act and that the federal government recognized and passed this legislation, which is unprecedented — 16 billion dollars.

But, in doing that, venues and the people in the day-to-day aspects of the music industry learned that they could have their voices heard, that there is. There's strength in numbers. 

And when I was at the NIVA conference this past July, just as many artists were talking about the places they love. These places had supported them in the very beginning, and there's this relationship with the venues that nurtured your career.

Everybody talks about Bruce Springsteen and the Stone Pony, but there are examples across the country: Nirvana and the Mason Jar, Katy Perry and Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles. There are places that really are musicians clubhouses that have supported artists, and artists don't forget that.

So it's not an us versus them. It's this: we're in this. There is a movement I've been appreciating called DETOUR, a new organization of venues out of Wichita, Milwaukee, and the Midwest. But it's growing in stature, a collective of venues engage in block booking. They're using their collective power to negotiate, being able to compete against Live Nation.

The indie venues can make decent offers and route artists on a tour through their network, but they are also looking at joining together to select a new artist, a young artist. Who they will help along, develop, and give their first tour to. This is a really optimistic and beautiful way of venues giving back to say, "We're not just going to engage our talent buyer to get the biggest price point that will sell out our venue. We're not just going to look at the booking agents and say, what you got? What's the next thing? But we're going to take an artist that we believe in. And we will help them get to the next stage of their career. And we're going to show them what it means to tour. And we're going to nurture them."

It's a new kind of way of operating. It's something that's not cynical in the least. 

LP: Yeah, that's incredible. Let me circle back now. Tell me about the grant period you're in now. Like, what's happening at the moment? 

Cat Henry: Our Toolbox applications are open. They will be open until October 10th at 1159 Pacific.

LP: Oh, Pacific. Okay, great. (laughter)

Cat Henry: Which is very specific because, we often get a lot of applications in the last 15 minutes of the application portal being open. So it's 11:59 Pacific time on October 10th. We are looking for venues that host. 50 shows a year, 50 headliners a year, that is our criteria, between 50 and 300 capacity for whom music is the brand identity.

They can be restaurants, they can be bars, but they have to have an identity as a music venue. Artists come first, music comes first, and they can bring us a one-time project. They will have six months to implement the funding, which we will announce in early January. And they can come to us with requests, things like innovative technology that might improve or modernize their operations.

They might be looking to hire a consultant, a grant writer, or someone who can look at their acoustics, or marketing and branding. These are the kinds of things, very practical things, even stretching to upgrading equipment. We're going to leave it quite broad. This is the first application-based round that we've had because our first Toolbox grantees were a subset of the more than a hundred applications we got last spring who came to us with these practical needs.

So now we're saying bring us your practical needs, and we're not sure what those will be. So if the venue is not sure, we encourage them to apply anyway, and they'll have to tell us a little bit about their philosophy and the kind of music they present, and you have to have been in business since before the pandemic in 2019. January 1st, 2020, is the cutoff.

That's the general criteria, the full criteria eligibility, and the application can be accessed through our website, livemusicsociety.org. We'll be selecting venues throughout the holiday period and announcing our set of venues early in January. And at that point, we will be announcing our second round of Music in Action grants, our larger 50, 000 grant round, which will launch again.

That will be every spring. That's going to be our annual. And then we're looking in 2024 at whether we can do one or even two Toolbox grant rounds per year. Those are the things we're looking ahead at. And building our network, looking at providing educational opportunities or opportunities to come together and discuss things and learn from each other, our big support group.

LP: If fans, other music industry stakeholders, people interested in the arts, if they want to participate and get involved. Is there a fundraising component to what you do, or are you board and founder supported? How can the broader community and ecosystem of people who care about these places participate?

Cat Henry: We do accept small donations through our website. We do have a commitment of funding currently from our board of directors, which I'm very grateful to, to have. But we do accept small donations, so you can do that, or you can support your local small music venue, either by visiting, buying a ticket, just explore and reconnect with the venues that are in your area.

And if there is a venue we don't know about, we always want to hear about it. One of the things that I plan to do over the next few months is to do a study on. What is the shield, how many venues are out there, and what does it look like currently in America post-COVID as we lost several?

And luckily, new ones are opening all the time. We haven't addressed that in our funding, but it's something that we want to look ahead at over the coming years is how we support the newest venue owners, the people who want to learn how to open and run a music venue or who are just starting and might need a little leg up. That is an area of opportunity as we look at our next three to five-year plan for sure. 

LP: There's so much you could do there, whether it's an incubator or cohorts. Because in any business, it's so isolating, and you're often reinventing the wheel for yourself when other people could help you save a few steps or at the very least, provide peer support.

Cat Henry: Yeah. And the word incubator is so key. That's part of what Detour is doing. And in fact, we have just announced. A partnership with an incubator in Austin, Texas, called the House of Songs, and we are connecting with them and collaborating with them. They bring songwriters from other parts of the world to collaborate with local songwriters.

They started in Austin, Texas. During the pandemic, they were forced to relocate to their headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. But we've just partnered with them to open a new space in East Austin. They're launching in October a whole new cohort of songwriters with collaborative opportunities throughout Austin, and this is a new direction for us in looking at incubating artists and where those two worlds meet: venue and the performers.

LP: Well, one of the grant recipients happens to be one of my favorite venues in America, the Royal Room here in Seattle. 

Cat Henry: Fantastic. Yes. Wayne. 

LP: Wayne. Incredible room. Incredible lineage. And for Wayne, incredible lineage stretching all the way back to New York and to the Lower East Side, as you articulated.

I lived in New York for the better part of 20 years. I appreciate that connection. I was thinking earlier when you were talking that it's a shame that the organization didn't exist when Tonic was around because that room probably could have benefited from the type of support you're offering.

Cat Henry: Tonic. What a great place. Legendary venue. Legendary venue. I have a funny story about Wayne Horvitz because when I joined Live Music Society in the summer of 2021, I was learning about our current grantees and Looking at the Royal Room and thinking, oh, that's a cool space. Oh, Wayne Horvitz. That can't be the same Wayne Horvitz, who used to perform with Marc Ribot and the dudes downtown.

So I got in touch with them and I was like, are you by any chance … ? And of course, yeah. So we started reminiscing about New York and the great, great music. And then he came to perform at this amazing place in Brooklyn called The Owl in a bill that included Bobby Previte — the great drummer and percussionist Bobby Previte.

And so we connected as music fans, heads in the Lower East Side, not just Live Music Society and venue owner. It was really nice. He's a great musician with an amazing philosophy. And yeah, the Royal Room is a fantastic place. Another venue that we support in Seattle is the Sunset Tavern. They are part of one of our current Music in Action grantees.

They are going to revive a ballad indie festival called Big Ass Boombox, build an outdoor stage and make it a free festival for up-and-coming bands in Seattle. I want to hear that you've been and that you're going to visit them when they launch that in the spring. 

LP: That's wonderful. One last quick anecdote that has sat with me over the last week or so because it's been such a joy to watch, which is I just recently dropped my oldest son off at college in San Francisco. And last weekend, John Zorn did a residency of shows in San Francisco for his 70th birthday. And I was telling my son I saw his 40th at the old knitting factory. I saw his 50th at Tonic. And I saw his 60th at NYU, and my 18 year old son went to his 70th at the Great American Music Hall and saw Electric Masada. It was a very proud moment as a dad.

Cat Henry: That is incredible! And you know, that's the lineage; that's what we all live for. My teenage daughter has very different musical tastes, but she surprises me. Her age group has access to so much music. And she puts playlists together, and I'm like, how do you know that song?

And I get the rolled eyes of like, well, of course I like Fleetwood Mac. She says, of course, I like those. I'm like, wow. Yeah. No, my access to music when I was her age was listening to John Peel on the radio in a tiny farming town in Southern England. It's interesting to see our children's musical tastes.

And Masada, one of the great, one of the great bands coming out of New York. Yeah. Happy birthday, John Zorn. 

LP: Yeah, exactly. That's right. And many more.