JAMESTOWN -- Katie Rose Nelson and Dustin Moran first met just north of Salt Lake City around 2008. Working at Barnes and Noble together, they started talking about art: folk music, punk rock, poetry, Bob Dylan, movies, and every other topic they shared a mutual interest in. They started playing music together, starting with gigs in coffee shops around the area. Around 2010, they decided they both wanted a change of scenery, so they moved to Colorado, on the other side of the Rockies.
The two have always played music together, but in 2013, they decided they wanted to focus more seriously on writing and performing together. They released their first EP that year, which is labeled on streaming as Katie Rose and Dustin Moran, as when they initially released the EP, they hadn’t decided on a moniker yet. The two cemented their name using a line taken from one of the songs on that EP, “Spoon,” which goes “Oh, please come and show me to the fountain, I have seen so many mountains.” From that line, Many Mountains stuck.
By 2015, the two had cemented a band to back them up and started playing the brewery and coffee shop circuit. For the last seven years or so, they have brought the group back to a duo, focusing completely on their writing and performing together. Between 2013 and 2021, they released three EPs and two full-length albums, and at the beginning of 2024, they released the standalone single “Moment.”
Nelson grew up in a household that loved music. Her parents weren’t professional musicians, but they dabbled in various instruments, and music played in the house constantly. Nelson remembers being surrounded primarily by folk, country, and Americana sounds, and she credits that with influencing her sound. As a teenager, she became interested in writing and publishing poetry, and she casually picked up a guitar in high school, inspired by her friends. Once she met Moran, she realized she could use her interests in poetry and the guitar to pursue songwriting.
Moran has always been enamored with rock music. He remembers his father playing Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and excitedly telling stories about the concerts he went to (and sometimes snuck into) in New Orleans. Moran’s father bought him a guitar at a pawn shop when he was around ten, and he started teaching himself seriously for the first time at around thirteen. Playing the guitar has always been therapeutic for him, and he’s been writing songs for most of his time with the instrument. When he met Nelson, he realized they could combine her experience in poetry and his experience in music to write songs together.
A steadfast influence for the two over the years has been the contemporary duo pairing of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. They have always loved diving into Dylan’s catalog and have recently become more enamored with jazz. They have both played in various other groups, and they feel that allows them to embrace more techniques and integrate more skills into their duo performances. Moran, in particular, loves being able to bring music that the two play in a quieter environment in their bedroom to an excited crowd, playing it loud, and feeding off the energy of the audience. Even if the audience is small, the energy that comes from the crowd keeps the two going.
You can see Many Mountains performing at the Jamestown Mercantile, located at 108 Main Street in Jamestown, on Thursday, December 19, 2024, starting at 7 p.m. You can find their releases wherever you get your music, and you can learn more about them by going to manymountainsmusic.com.
