Rising Stars: Meet Taylor Burlage of Bozeman, Montana

Today we’d like to introduce you to Taylor Burlage.

Hi Taylor, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
The Dead & Down is an experimental roots rock band based out of Montana and we started in the spring of 2022 as everyone was sort of recovering from Covid and getting back into going to shows and whatnot. I was looking to get a band together and over the course of that summer things just sort of fell into place with band members and we started playing shows.

It didn’t take too long for us to realize we had something good going on and decided to record an album. We had 7 songs ready to go and none of us had any studio experience but we tracked down a good place to record and made it happen. That really kicked things off for us in terms of really starting to take it seriously. A year later we had our second record ready to go and we released that in January of 2024. It’s called No Broken Bones and we are immensely proud of it and it really pointed us in the direction I think that we want to go. When we started out we were thinking it would be some sort of Cosmic Country kind of deal but the mix of players in the band just naturally leaned towards more of a rock oriented sound so we ran with that! The past 6 months has been a little interesting for the band as we had some changeover in our lineup – we parted ways with our lead guitar player and our bass player moved away. We found some incredible players to fill those holes and the sound is evolving still because of that!

So now we have Matt Angelo on Keys, Josh Higginbottom on Drums, Jed Nussbaum on Guitar, Ben McLandress on Bass, and myself (Taylor Burlage) on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. Its such an interesting dynamic and over the past couple of years we have become great friends and collaborators. The thing about this band is that it isn’t just one person composing and writing everything out. We work together and everyone has a part to play (literally) in crafting each song and our one of our strengths, I have found, is our ability to workshop songs on the fly and come up with new ways to play old songs or build solid foundations for new ones. It feels like we really have something special going on and I think it shows both on the records and at our live shows.

We are super excited to be getting out on the road this year both for Festivals (we played Treefort Music Fest earlier this year and Under the Big Sky in July) and to tour. We’ve worked really hard just to get to this point and it feels like we are just getting started. For a small town band from Montana, every step we’ve taken has felt massive and at some point in the past felt unattainable but here we are, plugging away at this thing and having a good time with it. We are especially looking forward to touring through Colorado in the fall and we would LOVE for folks to come out and see the shows.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Definitely not. Starting out as a small town band is a challenge in and of itself. There isnt a lot of money to be made and it isnt an entirely feasible thing to do for everyone so it has taken a massive amount of commitment from everyone to get this far.

We definitely had our struggles with one of the members of the band who has since left, and that took a massive amount of energy to navigate whilst playing and getting out on the road. it’s inevitable that there will be conflict in this line of work (and in any line of work for that matter) but for the most part this band gets along really well with eachother, especially with the new members and thats been a relief.

I have definitely struggled to find confidence in what to do on the administrative side of things. No one tells you when you start a band that there’s a massive amount of work on the back end whether that’s booking, promotion, art work, video, logistics, transportation etc and I have certainly struggled to 1) feel like I know what I am doing and 2) stay organized and balanced enough to get those things done and still have room for creativity. There has to be momentum on both sides for it to have any level of success and that can be truly difficult to maintain. We all love to play and create art and at the end of the day that’s what we want to do, but in order to do that we have to put ourselves out there and make money and sell merch and make sure our van runs and its a constant battle just to keep our heads above the water.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
We are an experimental roots rock band out of Montana. That entire sentence is somewhat of an anomaly around here – there’s loads of country bands and bluegrass bands and certainly overlap with some of what we do but I think our sound really stands out in the Montana music scene. In all honesty we jumped the gun on some of the steps – we had barely been together for a year before we recorded our first album, and then we just went ahead and made another one and we are incredibly proud of both. I can say with conviction that in terms of production and overall sound they are some of the best to come out of this state in recent years. There is so much to improve always and all of us are very committed to the craft both with our instruments and with the writing and composition and that is reflected both in the albums and in our live shows.

I guess I should describe our sound. Just from an instrumentation level we are a 5 piece band with drums, two guitars, bass, and a whole pile of keyboards so we have a wide range sonically and we really push the envelope with what we can do onstage. Matt, our Keyboard player, really helps to set us apart and is probably has the biggest impact on our overall sound whether thats with the organ or the synth or the electric piano and he leads the way with some of the more experimental sounds that we do. We love contrast and so we will take a song that at its core is really just a folk song or a country song and somewhere in the middle of it all we take a hard turn into something a little more fluid and psychedelic and that has become a bit of a trademark for the band.

We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
Definitely. In the middle of any sort of crisis whether it’s personal or on a larger scale, there has to be something good that comes from it and in our case (or at least my case, I can’t necessarily speak for the rest of the band on this) a lot of songs came out of it. You have to keep creating always, rain or shine, even if you can’t play live or you can’t go into the studio. Coming out of Covid I think a big takeaway is that we all need human connection both in playing with others and playing FOR others and I know that is important for so many other people as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: thedeadanddown.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedeadanddown/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedeadanddown/
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/67p6rZ4zLPXOHwVPM1Ir3w?si=nEMIcdkbSLWcM6PtrzAKxQ

Image Credits
Robert Bowes Jason Myers