While its neighboring county-seat sibling often gets the lion’s share of the glory, there’s lots to love about the Longmont music scene. From blues-tinged funk to rugged Americana and tender folk ballads, you’ll find a song for every season in this East County hub. Wherever your taste falls, here are just a few of the standout artists making this up-and-coming cultural community worth a second look.
The Blue Shoes
Outgrowing the kids’ table
From backyard barbecues to international showcases, it’s been a long strange trip for the teenage musicians of The Blue Shoes since their debut at Greeley Blues Jam in the summer of 2021. But if you ask the young blues-rock quartet what it’s like to shoot for the stars onstage during your high-school years, you’ll get a mixed response.
“It’s almost a blessing and a curse,” says 17-year-old frontman Brody Mundt, who sings and plays guitar alongside bandmates Ben Egan on bass and saxophone, Dylan Luther on drums and Simon Von Hatten on keys. “On one hand, people will be like, ‘Oh, they’re so good for their age!’ But then on the other hand, they still think of us as kids, and they don’t really take us seriously.”
But after the band’s strong showing at last year’s International Blues Challenge in Memphis, it’s hard to dismiss The Blue Shoes as your average high school garage band. For evidence, just listen to the tracks recorded by the group at the city’s fabled Sun Studios, offering a mix of high-energy originals and elevated covers that boast a musical maturity beyond their years. “I definitely had the spirits of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Howlin’ Wolf running through me,” Mundt says with a laugh.
As far as what’s next for these young Longmonsters, the band is currently working on their debut full-length LP, expected to drop by the end of the year. Things are less clear after that, with the quartet on the brink of dispersal after high school. But Mundt isn’t worried about what that might mean for the future of the band.
“We shouldn’t have to think of college as the apocalypse. Countless musicians still record remotely with their bandmates — it doesn’t necessarily matter if we’re all in the same area,” he says. “I’d still love for there to be a creative identity associated with our band, even if everything’s different. I don’t just want to have one release and say, ‘That’s what I did back then.’ I want to keep it going in whatever way it can.”
Angel Corsi
‘Not your mama’s folk music’
The sounds of Philly soul and Sam Cooke rang through the childhood home of Angel Corsi. But when the Longmont singer-songwriter is asked about the biggest influence on his music today, marked by a penchant for storytelling and tender folk sensibility, he points to what might seem an unlikely combination.
“I say it’s like Springsteen on Broadway if he grew up with Ice Cube and KRS-One,” Corsi says. “I use hip-hop elements in my music, so there are lots of textures that are new palettes for many people in the folk scene … I like to tell people it’s not your mama’s folk music.”
Corsi moved to Longmont last summer from the U.S.-Mexico border town of Harlingen, Texas, where he says a heady mix of reactionary politics and rich Latino culture helped develop an appreciation for nuance and complexity in his songwriting. You’ll hear as much in the textured stories and characters populating his six-track EP, Fabula, and its upcoming companion Wild Blood due later this year.
“I’m writing about people who are living inside the gray area, where they’re not always good and they’re not always bad. It’s a complex thing. We need to stop thinking about people in black and white terms,” Corsi says. “My job is to activate your empathy.”
Mojomama
Scene queen
When it comes to local music in Longmont, few acts are as time-tested as Mojomama. For more than two decades, these homegrown funk purveyors have been a fixture on city stages — from packed festivals to intimate listening rooms and points in between. And to hear vocalist Jessica Rogalski tell it, the band’s mainstay status has offered a front row seat to the many changes the community has seen since her band’s first show in the early 2000s.
“The music scene has developed a real vibe of its own, because I think we’ve had an influx of artistic and musician types in the Longmont community — because, of course, affording the actual town of Boulder is out of reach for most musicians,” Rogalski says. “We’re all still working at the same pay rate we’ve been paid for 20 years, so we all have to find ways to make a living and have a consistent footprint musically.”
A big part of maintaining that footprint comes from the band’s high-energy live show, which earned a semi-finalist slot at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis two years in a row. It also comes from Rogalski’s day job with husband and bandmate Paul as proprietors of Mojo’s Music Academy in Longmont. But she says it would all be for nothing without the fans who have helped make their “funked-up blues” project a true local institution.
“As musicians on stage, you want to have that exchange of energy. Without the listener, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do,” Rogalski says. “So it’s really meaningful when you look out there and people are singing your songs. It’s just the best feeling ever.”
Antonio Lopez
A band apart
Like most musicians, singer-songwriter Antonio Lopez says the last few years have had their fair share of setbacks. But with the “post”-pandemic world returning to something that looks a little more like normal, the Longmont staple sees plenty worth celebrating.
“The camaraderie and kinship between [my band] has really strengthened,” the artist said in his first interview with Boulder Weekly since the height of the pandemic in 2020. “We’ve got an in-house team that we feel really strong about.”
And that’s no small detail for the artist whose Boulder County roots run deep. While Lopez’s guiding creative vision is the force behind the songs, he says the real magic happens in the interplay between drummer Christopher Scott Wright, bassist Chad E. Mathis and percussionist Jonathan Sadler.
“While I am a singer-songwriter, my band is very much a band. We have that ethos. It’s not really like a frontman with a backing band. We’re a unit together, and what each of us brings to the table is unique,” he says. “We get along really well, and we put the music above everything else. I’m just really proud, especially as we’re moving into this next chapter.”
That chapter began earlier this spring, when Lopez and his bandmates launched their “doubles” series of singles, harkening back to the days of A and B sides on 45 RPM vinyl releases. The project continues with another pair of songs this month, culminating with an album release in November. Until then, the artist says he’s finding plenty of inspiration in the local music community he calls home.
“[The music scene] is competitive, but it also is supportive. There is something to the ethic of making do, and there are artists rising out of this local scene that are making a splash nationally and even internationally,” Lopez says. “That’s the trajectory my band and I are trying to make happen.”
