Billy Moran
I remember there were early conversations with Jason, Rich, and myself where we discussed the potential of playing New York City, and some good venues that might be suitable for our music. I’d played the Mercury Lounge with Louden Swain two years prior, and I thought it was a really cool club; I loved the accessibility, the ADA compliance, things like that. I just thought it was a really great venue. So Jason reached out to them and got on the books.
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And then the question was, really - what was our band gonna look like? We knew Jason, Rich, and myself were gonna be at the show, but were we gonna fill it out with a full band, like we did in Nashville? And that’s where the conversation started to get real interesting. Immediately, Nick Morrison came to mind, the bass player Dick Jr. & The Volunteers played with at the OK Fest, in Oregon. I had remembered Nick mentioned that he lived in New Jersey, so immediately I was like ‘Well, we gotta reach out to Nick; see if he’s available.’ And he was, so we were super stoked. That was one piece of the puzzle, so the next piece was ‘Who are we gonna have on drums?’​​
I did the whole Tricky MC thing with Mark Sheppard, the tour, and we’ve been playing more often, so I’m like ‘Let’s reach out to Mark and see if he’s down to do the show’. And he said ‘Of course, I would love to’, so we were really stoked that he was able to move his calendar around and make that happen.
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On that Friday before the show, we had our actual first rehearsal for the show, and it was Nick, Mark, Jason, Rich, and myself, all just at the convention, in some kind of green room area, just stripping down the songs, and learning the stuff with the full band. It was really exciting, because that was the first time Mark ever got to play with Nick, so it was pretty cool we got the opportunity to do that.
The other cool thing that happened - we tried to keep as much of the Dick Jr. Nashville line-up intact as was possible; we discussed having Jules come up and play guitar. But Jules wasn’t available, so we actually reached out to one of Nick’s friend’s Craig, who also plays at the OK Fest (RSJrFW: Craig Brann, of Brothers Brann), and he wasn’t available either. So we’re just like ‘Well, we’re just gonna do whatever we can to make this show exciting…Rich will start playing electric guitar for the show!’ So that was a new change of pace. Rich got to play through an amp and play his first ever show, that I know of, where he was playing electric guitar.
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Emma was originally scheduled to be there. She had to cancel, because she had another opportunity that came up in Texas, that she had to take. Briana was gonna fill in, and then Briana had to cancel, and then when Briana cancelled, immediately I thought of Meredith. Actually, Meredith was going to be in New York City at that time - I think Rich reached out to her - so it just worked out perfectly. We had worked with Meredith at OK Fest, again, so it was this Oregon reunion in New York City.
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Meredith came to rehearsal, and we got to hang out with her a little bit, and she was bringing her boyfriend Forrest O’Connor, who is an amazing mandolin player. And we're like ‘Well, since you’re here, do you have your mandolin?’ And he did, so we just said ‘Ok, sit on stage for as long as you want - any song you want to play mandolin on’, and it was really cool. Really awesome. And that’s kinda how I love how these shows shape up – you never know quite what you’re gonna get, up until maybe a week before. And it was an awesome show. I remember being ‘I’ve never played with this guy before; these two have never played together before’ and that always makes it a little exciting for me.
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I had a really great time. Hopefully we get to do it again in 2026. I want to be able to play more shows in 2026 – that’s my goal. Always been my goal - to play more and more shows. So let’s see if we can get one on the books.