Growing up in the rural South, I’ve always been surrounded by country music. I remember one of the first CDs I ever bought was a Charlie Daniels album—I loved “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” My (rad) mom saw this in me and took me to see him live at Silver Springs in Florida, where I got to witness his dinner plate-sized belt buckle in person. As a teen, I remember people saying things like, “I like all music except country,” and I couldn’t blame them when Florida Georgia Line was always on the radio. Though I still liked my ‘90s Walmart country like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, I began to venture out into other “cooler” genres like dubstep (2012 was a wild time). As with many folks, I think I learned to dislike country somewhere along the way. Although I still am not a fan of a lot of country out there, New Orleans has produced many great acts that lead me to revisit the genre. One such source of this quality country music is Gar Hole Records. Their founders Nick Shoulders and Kurt DeLashmet have made it their mission to bring the larger world of American traditional music back to its roots. Featuring local artists like Sabine McCalla, The Lostines, Chris Acker, Maddy Kirgo, and Mr. Sam & The People People, Gar Hole has always had a home-away-from-home here in New Orleans. Originally based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the label formally changed headquarters to New Orleans back in April. I met with the founders to talk about the move, their roots tying back to New Orleans, and their vision for country music.
With Gar Hole Records, y’all have always had one foot in New Orleans. But to start, why move here now and change the headquarters?
Kurt DeLashmet: It was really just things happening in my personal life that kinda kicked it off.
You’re from Mississippi, right?
KD: Yeah, I’m from Jackson, Mississippi. I had been living in Fayetteville for 10 years, and before that I went to college in Central Arkansas and lived in Little Rock for a bit. So I’ve spent most of my adult life in Arkansas, with the exception of a brief stint in Northern California. But yeah, it was just kind of a life choice that resulted in some decisions with the business that had to be made. Honestly, if there was any other place for the label to live besides Northwest Arkansas, it would be New Orleans. As you pointed out, we’ve always been kind of steeped in New Orleans music stuff because of Nick. I mean, that really kind of goes back to the way that the label started.
Nick Shoulders: When we started Gar Hole in the summer of 2020, I had only been back in Arkansas for four or five months. I was fresh out of New Orleans, and part of my motivating factor getting with Kurt to start the label was the density of talent from the scene that I had just been in, and how I had just been given all this attention. I felt like so many of our friends were so deserving and talented, and so similarly illiterate in industry stuff, as I was. I personally felt like we were not only projecting the best image of Arkansas that we could, but how it ties to our neighbor to the south, and how much those scenes did intertwine even if they seem disparate and distant.
Nick Shoulders performing at Tipitina’s in January 2025. Photo by Steven Hatley
I interviewed Chris Acker years ago. He mentioned that when you were living in New Orleans, y’all had gone on tour together for the first time and that led to Gar Hole in some roundabout way.
KD: It kind of started with this cassette label that I was running in Fayetteville for a while called Tape Dad, which I started in like 2017, 2018. And after we got going, I can’t remember if I reached out to you or if you reached out to me, Nick, but Nick was one of the first non-Fayetteville artists that we released on Tape Dad. That was definitely my first touchpoint to the New Orleans music scene. We put out a Chris Acker tape on Tape Dad. We put out a Lostines tape too. There were a few other New Orleans bands that we worked with, like a couple of Caspian Hollywell’s bands.
Yeah, of Twisted Teens?
KD: Yeah, it was Chardonnay and Scissorbills, both really good records. That was really where it started. By the time COVID hit, Nick had already released Okay, Crawdad, his first full-length record, and I was making the tapes for it and then everything went to shit and eventually Nick decided to get out of New Orleans and moved into the spare bedroom in my house.
NS: I’ll ramp back a little bit on the Chris Acker stuff just to flush out that context. I had played a show with Chris in, I think, late 2016, and he hit me up and was like, “Hey, I saw you play drums for that other band. Do you wanna go out on tour playing drums for us?” I was like, “Sure, I’d love to.” I showed up in New Orleans to load up the van, and very quickly realized, “Oh, this is Chris’ first tour and he’s not just opening for somebody else.” It was a wild ride, but I really felt endeared to those folks after that tour. And pretty quickly afterwards, I’m living at my grandma’s house in Little Rock taking care of her, thinking: “This is not such a fun existence. Things are starting to stabilize here. I don’t think I’m needed on the ground in Little Rock. I think I want to go join these new friends of mine in this special place that I just got to interact with.” So I ended up moving to New Orleans in October 2017. I was there for the better part of three years. COVID hit, and for lack of a more succinct way to put it, I had a bad mushroom trip and lockdowns were starting and I was like, “I don’t want to be here. I want to go back to the woods.” I ended up moving into Kurt’s back room and, during all of this time, my career went from subsistence level to what-the-fuck internet attention pretty much instantly in February, March 2020. The industry had virtually shut down, and I felt that there were a lot of predatory forces out there that would love to take advantage of a naive person who’s just entered into this bigger music world. I felt that to protect myself and protect those dear to me, it was pretty essential that we had a place to launch from in this post-COVID musical world. Kurt was down and had the technical know-how and had been in the trenches with Tape Dad for years.
Chris Acker, Odd, Ordinary, & Otherwise
Kurt, did you ever live in New Orleans before, or is this your first time in the city?
KD: [Shakes head no] Just moved, living down here. I mean, growing up in Jackson, just three hours away, we were down here all the time. As a child, I was exposed to lots of the magical parts of New Orleans. But it wasn’t until I was in college that I ever started to come down here as an adult and go to shitty bars and drink on the street. But I mean, honestly, I hadn’t really had a ton of exposure besides those things until I met Nick and we started working together, and then I started meeting all these other people down here.
Can y’all expand a little bit about why New Orleans? There are a lot of major music cities in the South to choose from. Out west, there’s Austin but then there’s Nashville, Memphis, and Atlanta. Obviously y’all had the connections to New Orleans already, but was there anything else that drew you?
NS: I think there’s a vast difference between New Orleans and those other cities you mentioned from a pure material circumstance perspective. New Orleans has experienced profound disaster, and as such, it is just a fundamentally harder place to exist not only for your average person, but for entrenched corporate musical endeavors. It’s a harder place to create that kind of hyper-exploitative, monetarily-driven music scene. It has a much more egalitarian, personal sort of music scene. I’ve been to Nashville. I’ve been to Austin. Fayetteville brands itself as a Southern music city, but we’re just a Walmart-sponsored company town. New Orleans has these cultural vestiges in the music, the syncopated beat patterns, the way the melodies are put together, that has roots in music being mostly for social dance purposes. The purpose of early country music, string band music, etc., was to have something to dance to. What I encountered in the Austins and Nashvilles of the world, their country dance scene and their general reaction to the music was much more contrived and much more a constructed cultural reaction. Whereas the dance world of South Louisiana, be it Cajun or blues, swing—that was still alive and well from its roots. New Orleans is not classically associated with capital-C country music, but the roots of country music, [such as] jazz [and] blues, they all obviously are revered within New Orleans and are part of the deep, rich musical history. And I think that’s something that spoke to me. This is something closer to the root that made this vital and beautiful and something to actually interact with on a visceral, physical level. I think the Nashvilles, the Austins are cool and all. But it kind of feels like that episode of SpongeBob where they are wishing Sandy goodbye, and they throw a Texas party, and they’re like, hey, we made peas in a can pie, and we’re wearing 10-gallon hats, and they’re literally [wearing] water jugs. It’s all kind of make-believe. And what I found in New Orleans is that pretense really was stripped away, and it was just the music and dance.
Sabine McCalla, folk
That connects to what Gar Hole seems to be about, which is the whole anti-capitalist, back-to-the-roots country but also reckoning with it. Can you explain the term y’all use, “unAmericana?”
KD: For me, what it represents is less of this… What people used to call alternative country, but now that has a different connotation with the Wednesdays and MJ Lendermans, but I think that world gets so saturated with so many things that sound the same. I think pursuing the unAmericana is our conviction to work with music that has conviction and trying to amplify people who are making music that’s less commercial but equally as worthy as everything else out there. I think part of that relates to working in Arkansas and New Orleans. In one sense, they’re kind of similar. Arkansas has a very rich American musical history. Obviously, New Orleans is the same, but neither of these places really has a large music business infrastructure set up.
I will say, not many record labels choose to come to New Orleans.
KD: I know that you could definitely say within the music community that Nick came from out of New Orleans. Not a lot of the people that really started to make it did so out of New Orleans. A lot of them left. I think part of the reason for that is because it is kind of hard to break out in New Orleans. It is kind of isolated down here. It doesn’t have that saturation of music business people. And in the end, one of those traditional routes of “making it” involves exposure to that professional community, and then getting sucked up into the atmospheric level of the music world where they rain down blessings and tour dates and opportunities. UnAmericana, I’ve never really thought super deeply about it.
NS: I have.
KD: I know you have. [laughs] Go ahead.
NS: This requires a whole lot of historical context to really flesh out, but when early country music left the South, that’s when it actually began to become associated with conservatism and with white nationalist politics, and with the things that turn people off about country music. Country music in the South is a far more diverse, far more culturally distinct artifact. What Americana represents to me is kind of the path of whiteness in the United States, not only as a fake ethnicity, but as more of a sociopolitical and economic identity. What whiteness requires is homogenization. And what Americana to me represents is flattening and homogenizing all these regionally distinct cultural artifacts that went on to create what we now call country music, and essentially creating a variety of that homogenized music that lacks the overt association with white nationalism, while becoming whiter in its own way. And the South being [the] least white [region] in the United States, and country music having its roots in Black and Indigenous contributions… [it’s] a cultural construct that actually has roots and has relevance to people alive today. It’s not just a fossil. It’s something that people grew up interacting with and really love and are protective of. Most of our artists that are based out of New Orleans—and I’m speaking about myself here—aren’t from New Orleans, but they adore what New Orleans represents. I mean, New Orleans is the least American city in the United States, and people love it for that reason. It’s the least flatly homogenized. It’s the least tampered with by the project of economic whiteness. And I think so many folks who end up gravitating towards that scene do so because they are aware that they’re interacting with by far the most vital and beautiful core of what makes American music unique enough and beloved enough that it spread all over the world and became something where you can hear Nigerian country music and you can go to Japan and see a bluegrass jam.
Angela Autumn, Millionaire Money
In interviews, Nick, you’ve said that it’s like grandpa music, right? Like it was the music that your grandpa was listening to or participating in.
NS: As much as that was my inroad into traditional music via my family’s singing tradition, it was also how I was pushed away from that stuff in my youth. I associated the way my family sang and how it connected to country music and Southern music more broadly as something I should be embarrassed about and something that I should reject. It did not resonate with me as something that I should protect and perpetuate and try to preserve, but something that I should be ashamed of. When I started getting into punk and metal in my teen years, I started hearing a lot of messaging in songs about endless wars and bank failures and just a reaction against industrial capital. When you go back to old country music, you hear songs about mining wars. You hear songs partially critical of patriarchy. You hear songs about the struggle of the peasant class and about the urban proletariat. It’s all over the music, and I suddenly realized this punk and metal that I loved so much had a precedent and a throughline to this older anti-industrial, anti-capitalist music. Country doesn’t mean anti-urban. It’s talking about a reaction to being exploited by an industrial economy. To be nostalgic for country isn’t like, “Oh, we just like dirt.” We are hyper-exploited in these urban environments. We are hyper-alienated in suburban environments. So a connection to land and a connection to older culture… It’s possible to weaponize that against modern industrial capitalism rather than it being a reactionary, nationalistic sort of thing. I was drawn to the music for that reason, and then realized how much my family’s singing tied into these origins of country music. Not the modern commercial product, the “she-thinks-my-tractor’s-sexy” type of country music, but the early stuff. I think that’s what separates Gar Hole’s little universe is that every artist on this label is distinctly aware of, researches, and loves this corpus of older music that we are standing at the top of.
Meet the Lostines
And you were able to find an office space or something to operate out of now?
KD: We have. Chris Ackler said that it looks like the basement of a pirate ship. It’s an old warehouse in Mid-City. We rent a space in it. It’s actually cheaper than what we were paying in Fayetteville. The label is at an interesting point right now where I think we’re really starting to do a better job helping artists break through into more of a national and international consumer level, like basic audience growth. But then also in the professional spheres too. That can end up being a make-or-break thing for an artist. In the end, it’s just having help.
That’s kind of what made you start Tape Dad, right? You wanted to be able to have a larger part in the music scene you were around?
KD: Yeah. Well, just helping people, you know? Everybody starts off doing the music thing pretty much by themselves, most of the time. And most people stay in that place for a really long time. I think the success you can have on your own is very much based on the bandwidth you have able to devote to it, and also just fucking luck.
NS: Big time.
KD: Most of the really cool things that have happened within the label’s history have been just lucky, like Nick exploding in popularity in 2020. You could say that there was a healthy dose of luck involved with that. There’s so many things that you just can’t plan for. But one thing I always tell artists is: You can try to do a better job of putting yourself in the pathway of good luck. In the end, it’s a lot of work. Even just that one extra body and brain contributing to the cause can be a huge difference maker. That’s always been something that’s motivated me. It’s really exciting to get to the point where it’s like, now we’re working with artists with teams, and we’re helping people build their teams, find agents and managers. I’m glad that New Orleans is going to be the place where, [we grow into] this next phase of the label where we’re getting more immersed into the business of the music world.
Just out of genuine curiosity, where did the name “Gar Hole” come from?
KD: There’s layers and layers to it, trust me.
NS: It’s like an onion, you know? Just like Shrek. [laughs] Gar Hole is both a physical place and a colloquialism. To be “gar-holed” is a hunting and fishing term for trying to fish a swimming hole that is providing you with no fish, and you realize, “Oh, it’s because there’s giant predatory fish in here, so I’m not catching anything.” But “The Gar Hole,” where the term for the label came from, is a swimming hole kind of between Eureka Springs and Fayetteville on Gar Hole Road. It’s almost like an early meme in Ozark nomenclature where it’s like, “Oh yeah, it’s up on Pine Hill.” That’s a joke. Everywhere’s Pine Hill. Or like, “Oh, we’re going swimming in Blue Hole.” Everywhere’s a Blue Hole. There’s like 40 Blue Holes around Fayetteville. Same with Gar Hole. I went swimming at multiple places that I heard multiple people refer to as “The Gar Hole.” So it’s just like we have a lot of spotted gar. Our creeks are unique in how our hydrology works to where we end up with these big cold pools next to gravel bars that gar congregate in. So they’re just a very visible feature of nature here. It’s just something I heard often, and I don’t even think it was like a light bulb going off. We were just spitballing about the label. I was like, “Gar Hole?” They were like, “Yeah, Gar Hole. Let’s fucking go.”
KD: It is kind of funny how the colloquial term resonates with what our mission ended up being, which is trying to fish for cool stuff in places most people would consider to be not great spots.
NS: Irredeemables.
Dylan Earl, I Saw the Arkansas
I wanted to ask because I remember when I was a kid growing up in Florida, there’d be dry seasons, and whenever that would happen the ponds would dry up and the last thing that would be left was always the gar. It would just be like a mud puddle full of gar. I wasn’t sure if that was maybe a thing, but that makes much more sense.
KD: Well, it connects back to the colloquial term because gar can breathe air. So they will last in a mud pool longer than anything else.
NS: Yeah, what’s Dylan Earl’s line? [something like] “I do pretty well in poor conditions.” I think that sums up the tenacity of the gar. As this crumbling empire shrivels and dries up around us, we’re gonna try to be the last air-sucking, minnow-eating fish left while all the other fair-weather friends go elsewhere. We will be at the bottom of the puddle when all this fails.
Top photo by Dalton Spangler: Kurt DeLashmet holds a copy of Okay, Crawdad at Gar Hole’s new Mid-City office
For more information on current and future releases, check out garholerecords.com and @gar_hole_records.
