Category Archives: Music

Music by Jessie Veeder

On Nashville

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This week on the podcast I catch Chad up on the Nashville trip and the recoding process. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts

“Live in THIS moment.”

That’s what my fortune cookie said as I finished my takeout dinner in a hotel near downtown Nashville.

“Ok, cookie,” I said out loud to myself as I laid it on the desk next to my planner and pages of typed up lyrics scribbled with notes. These songs I’ve been writing and re-writing for the past eight years were all just stacked up there waiting for the next morning to go into the studio and come to life in the hands of some of the best players in the neighborhood.

The amazing session players and producer in OmniSound Studios downtown Nashville

If you would have asked the sixteen-year-old version of me what most intimidated me as a young woman pursuing some sort of music career, I would have told you it was this. This exact situation. Bringing songs I wrote on the floor of my bedroom in the middle of nowhere to sit before musicians who are truly professional and have seen it all. Surly my songs about the hard clay of home and hard people who live there wouldn’t resonate. Surly they would laugh me right on back to where I came from.

Me and Wanda, master of the dobro, fiddle, banjo, guitar and more!

I faced my fear of Nashville with my last original album in 2015. I was a grown woman by then and had done plenty of things that scared me, so I hopped a plane, figuring all I had to lose was the money. And though I had no real idea of what to expect, I was greeted by an experience in the studio that was so open and encouraging that it successfully rearranged my view of what it can mean to make music.

Nashville Songwriter Kirsti Manna and producer Bill Warner. Kirsti wrote Blake Shelton’s hit song “Austin” among others.

I’m sure you wont be surprised to hear it’s about the people. And in this business there is plenty of competitive drive and ambition that can make things ugly, but I had long stripped away any ideas of fame and fortune by the time I stepped into a Nashville studio for the first time. I just wanted to make the best songs I could possibly make and so did every person in that room with me. And that’s it. That’s all it’s about.

Listening to my rough tracks

This time I flew into Nasvhille on the tail end of a storm that was lighting and thunder and rain and the migration of Taylor Swift fans to music city for her concerts. As the rain and the superstar and the fans left music city, I made my way to a studio on music row and stood under the same roof she once had, and so did Janis Ian and Alison Krauss and Faith Hill and Miranda Lambert and on and on and on the famous names lined the walls and it wasn’t fancy but it was friendly and for the record I’m the only one name-dropping here

And in came the bass player and his big upright and the drummer who sits perfect in the pockets of songs and the sweetest guitar player and a woman named Wanda who can play every stringed instrument you can name and so began our day together, working through the notes of the twelve songs I brought from North Dakota prairie.

If you’re curious about the process, in short I hire a producer, who rents out a studio and hires session players. That producer charts the arrangements for the songs and gathers us all up for a day (or more) of laying the groundwork for each track. In both my experiences, we tracked the entire album, twelve songs in one ten-hour day. That means these musicians often only heard the rough-cut demo of each song once, which is typically five minutes before recording, and then they get to work. My role is to listen, sing my parts and make sure it all goes in the direction I had in my head. But every time, it goes above and beyond. The next day all those musicians were likely scheduled to work on entirely separate projects in different studios with different producers across town and I’ll stay for the rest of the week to work on tracking vocals.

And that’s the just the beginning. Over the course of the year I’ll schedule release dates and concerts and find my favorites and your favorites and make videos and tell stories like I always do, and see where it all goes. But for now as I write this, sipping coffee from a paper hotel cup, I’m just here facing those teenage fears and living in THIS moment.

Honoring the women who made me who I am

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Greetings from Nashville where I’m deep in the woods of recording an album. I’ve been here since early Sunday morning (like 4:30 in the morning) where I blew in on the back of a major thunderstorm and will be working out these songs until the end of the week.

I’ll share more about this experience, but for now I’m focused on the project and will be tracking vocals all day for the next few days.

In other music news, it has been a busy couple weeks of performances where I’ve had the honor of speaking to rooms full of women across the state as they celebrate Mother’s Day and spring and just good ‘ol fashioned fellowship at a variety of brunches, all so sweetly planned and executed.

So that’s what this week’s column is about, specifically about my hometown event where I was overcome with emotion and gratitude looking out at the room full of women who have had such special impacts on our community.

No podcast for this week as I’m not sure I’ll be able to fit it in, but I’ll sure have lots to talk about when I get back. Also, I heard Edie wrote me a note to read when I get back home and it says something like “Never ever ever ever leave me again!” so now you know how she feels about this situation. Rosie? Well, she’s had some really great days and mostly just wants to know what I had for supper and also if i am going to get her a treat while I’m here.

To which I say “of course!”

Honoring the women who made me who I am

Recently, I had the honor of sharing stories and singing for the Lutheran Ladies in my hometown at their annual Sunday brunch. They were celebrating this sunny spring afternoon with tiny cucumber and egg salad sandwiches, homemade mints, and a tea bar. Each table was decorated and set by different women who stood up to introduce their guests and explain the stories behind the centerpieces and dishes, silverware and place settings.

I had come off a week that sent me back and forth across the state to speak and sing in front of rooms full of people I had yet to meet, and I was, if I’m being honest, exhausted. I got ready that morning with a little apprehension. Truthfully, performing to a room full of people you know is sometimes the most nerve-wracking. I wondered if I had anything to say that they hadn’t already heard.

My mom, little sister and I were invited to sit at our neighbor Jan’s table decorated with her childhood cowboy boots, a vintage lunchbox, and themed around her grandmother’s colorful old ceramic pitcher.

This woman was raised right alongside my dad. Her mother, who was at the table as well, was my grandma Edie’s best friend. Sitting next to her was the grandmother of one of my best friends. Next to me was Jan’s daughter, who used to come to play at the ranch in her beautiful pink boots of which I was so envious.

I’m setting this scene here for a purpose, and I’ll take a moment to explain, as it took a moment for me to realize the significance as I stood up in front of those women that afternoon, behind my guitar talking about the crocuses blooming on the hilltops and holding my grandmother’s hand on a hunt to pick a perfect bouquet.

I told them a story about my great-grandmother Cornelia’s yellow roses that still bloom in the barnyard. Then I moved on to a bit about community and how our role is to help build it, like my great-grandma Gudrun — an immigrant from Norway, just 16 years old on her way across the ocean to raise crops and cattle and 12 children on this unforgiving landscape — did.

It was then that I realized, looking into those familiar faces looking back at me smiling and laughing, or closing their eyes and nodding along, rooting for me, quietly encouraging me, that the lessons I was offering that afternoon were lessons I learned from them.

As is my motto, I felt like I had to say something then. It sort of washed over me, and out of my mouth came an effort to thank them, not just for their collective spirit, but for what their perseverance and individuality has meant to this community and to girls like me trying to figure out what it means to grow up here.

I got home that evening and had a chance to reflect a bit on the fact that there was more I wished I could have articulated, so I want to say it now.

These women, they are leaders and caretakers. They show up, they bring food, they stay to put away the chairs and wipe the counters and offer a laugh or advice on the way out the door. They have vision, they’re loyal, they’re feisty, they’re elegant and artistic, just like the event they put on that afternoon. They’re teachers, coaches, handywomen and true friends who will say what needs to be said and who hold secret recipes to casseroles and bars and that boozy slush she serves every Easter.

When I tell stories and sing songs about strong women in North Dakota, I am singing about them. And their mothers. And the daughters they’re raising. I grew up in this small town under their gaze, under their care, under their expectations, or I was raised alongside them, or I am getting to know them, happy they’re here.

Some of them wash and put away the dishes, some of them stop at Jack and Jill for the doughnuts, and some of them make tiny sandwiches and homemade mints and bring the good dishes. You would think those things are small things, but I will tell you now that they are not.

They are big things, rooted in the unspoken rule that you show up the best possible way that you can. And if you can’t, they’ll wrap a plate up for you. If you forget for a moment what you’re made of, if you let them, if you listen, they will remind you.

Rosie’s Spring Song

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On this week’s podcast episode I have a short visit with Rosie before preschool about her new song and why spring is her favorite season. Listen here or wherever you get podcasts.


Rosie wrote a song about spring to sing at open mic at my mom’s coffee shop in town last week. Her first experience a few months ago singing her own song in front of a crowd gave her the confidence she needed to do it again. She’s only five, let me remind you, but no “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” for her. She insisted I get out my pen and my guitar and help set her idea to music. “Spring is the best time of the year. It’s so happy and full of cheer.”

Yes girl, yes it is. The snow banks are melting and the creek is rising and the mud on our boots is sticky and tracking into the house and everything is dirty and a combination of brown and blue and gold. And so these suddenly become our favorite colors when white has been our existence for all of these long cold months.

“Easter comes by and it’s so fun. Because there are Easter egg hunts,” she sang, her little legs dangling off the chair, the microphone in both hands held up close to her mouth so we could all hear her words.

Rosie’s my hero. It’s possible I’ve said this before, but in case I haven’t, I am saying it again. She has been since I met her. Her very existence was improbable given the fact that I struggled for so long to keep a pregnancy. We had our first daughter and thought that might be it for us, but we tried again anyway thinking it could possibly take another ten years. But Rosie was ready to be born and so she didn’t make us wait. She came to us quick and easy at the height of one of the most difficult times my family has endured, my dad clinging to life in a hospital bed in Minnesota and his future so unsure. We gave his name to her, Rosalee Gene, because the belief that he would ever meet her was nothing but a faint light. She was a sweet distraction, a quiet force for hope that can come even in the most desperate and dark moments. She made no fuss about it. She just breathed and sucked and pooped and lived and as she grew my dad grew stronger and here we are with both of them at the ranch waiting for the snow to melt off and the baby calves to be born. Spring is hope and renewal and so it reminds me of my second daughter, singing so confidently this song about her favorite season.

“Outside the window spring is here. Bunnies and chicks and baby deer.”

The elk take a stroll through our horse pasture

Lately there has been so much tragedy exploding from the news feed, and our small communities here in western North Dakota have not been immune to it. Renewal and hope aren’t easy words to sit with when loss and uncertainty sit heavy in your guts. But time continues to change the season. Time continues to move, eventually bringing with it a thaw. The water breaks free under the ice and rushes the draws.

In a week or so we will have baby calves on the ground, still wet out of the womb. In a few more the bravest flowers and buds will start to emerge at the coaxing of a warm sun. The pair of geese will return to the stock dam outside our house. The wild plum blossoms will dot the brush with vivid green and we will climb to the top of a hill to find a dry spot and lay down in it, knowing well that it could storm again the next day, burying the ground and the new buds and babies in the chill of a white blanket. But it will be hard to imagine it then with the warm spring sun on our bare arms. If you’ve forgotten what hope is, nature can remind you.

“A big blue sky and bumblebees. Tweet-ely birds and green green trees,” Rosie sings into the microphone to a small crowd of community members gathering for coffee. They tap their feet and hum the tune on their drive home…

Little moments to be brave

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Hear Rosie’s perspective on this week’s podcast where I interview her and she sings her song. Listen here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

For as long as my youngest, Rosie, could talk, she’s been asking me when she can have her own band and perform on the stage. My answer at first was to offer to accompany her, but Rosie wants her own band. And she wants to play her own guitar. And she wants to write her own music. And just this morning she informed me she wants to play drums too. So now I tell her she has to practice.

I’ve been working on writing some new songs these past few months as I prepare for a new album I’ll record this spring. This means the girls have been wandering in and out of my practice and writing sessions quite a bit lately. A few weeks ago I heard their four little feet march up the stairs and fling the door open and suddenly my lonesome little love song turned into a collaborative writing session with Rosie, who was determined to live out the promise I made to let her sing at open mic night at Gramma’s coffee shop in a few weeks.

She recently (as in, right that second) decided her song needed to be an original. Now I could skip over this part, but I don’t want you to get the impression that this was any kind of made-for-Hallmark movie-moment. Rosie’s first attempt at writing a song ended with six harmonica solo breaks, a speech about how this song is not just about her being a cowgirl, but about families working together and a stomp-off because, when her big sister wanted to try her own song, she was stealing all Rosie’s words. My husband called it their first “intellectual property dispute.” I call it the first of many dramas in the family band.

That’s where we left it, a little song unfinished on a scrap piece of paper and we all went outside to play (drama comes and goes quickly around here). Fast forward to my arrival home from my week away in Elko after taking the 17 hour drive in one shot, where I was greeted by hugs and a reminder about open mic.

Tomorrow.

She had been telling everyone at preschool, including her teachers. And they were coming to cheer her on. This was serious. I can sleep when I’m dead.

So the next morning, we finished her song and practiced it all day (I mean, are you really a rock star if you don’t cut it close?) and headed to the coffee shop to make her debut. But as the big moment grew closer, Rosie started to experience nerves, something her little five-year-old body wasn’t expecting. Her eyes were watering as she thought about not getting it right in front of a crowd. In the car, her big sister tried encouraging her and I followed with some pep talk, so completely aware of exactly how her little heart was beating. We walked in the back and practiced the song again before it was her turn. They called her name and I knelt down beside her with my guitar in the front of that tiny coffee shop filled with our smiling friends and family. It was her turn. Rosie buried her face in my arm as her cousins and big sister came up to offer hand-holding, sing-alongs, hugs, cookies or whatever it was going to take to make her brave. I whispered in her ear “come on now, you can do it!”

But little Rosie couldn’t do it. Not right then. It was all too overwhelming I think, the idea that in her head, she was a professional singer, but in real life she was still only five and she’d never done this before. Oh, I could relate. Just a few days before, getting ready to walk out to a theater full of hundreds of people so far away from home, I wondered if I truly belonged. If I was good enough. If I could pull it off. My stomach was in my throat, the same way my daughter’s was in our hometown that night. I so badly wanted her to do the thing she wanted to do, but I didn’t read the chapter in the parenting book on this.

So I told her we’d try again.

We went to the back and gathered ourselves. I wiped her little tears and told her she was brave. We practiced the song again, three or four more times. She said she wanted to try again in a little bit. So out we went to listen to the other performers and get a hug from her teachers, who promised her a pizza party if she gave it another go. Bless those two lovely women because that did it, the promise of pizza. I think that would probably do it for me too.

Her cousins and big sister at her side again, Rosie looked down, got a little teary, got it together, took a deep breath and sang.

“Daddy feeds the horses, sister cuts the twine, me and mom chase cattle, the dogs come for a ride…”

The small coffee shop crowd cheered and Rosie was so proud. She even got a tip, which she can’t get over. She didn’t know she was that good! But to everyone in that room that night, it was less about being good and so much more about being brave. That’s where it starts, at little open mics, little rodeos, little gymnastics meets, little dance recitals, little talent shows, little opportunities that we create in our little communities to help each other grow wings. I’m so thankful for the efforts of those who make things like this happen.

Anyway, if you’re wondering, Rosie’s big sister got wind of the tip and is working out her own song for next month as I type. So if you like drama, stay tuned for the saga of the sister band.

Notes from the road and the top of the hill

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Well, I made it home for Elko on Sunday after a 17 hour straight drive. Turns out it takes a couple days to recover your sleep equilibrium after a trip like that. It also takes a few days to come back around to the real world after an experience like the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. It was such an honor to be a part of it.

Click here to read an interview with myself and poets Yvonne Hollenbeck and Patricia Frolander about opening up the festival with our “Welcome to Elko Town” Show in the Elko Daily News.

This week’s podcast I sit down with my husband and rehash all the highlights of the trip while he patiently listens, covered in sheet rock dust from holding down the home construction project and keeping the kids alive while I was away. I am lucky to be able to be gone, and even more lucky to have place like this, and people like him, to come home to.

So that’s what the column is about. Finding refuge and grounding in my walks through the hills, where I’m most inspired. Most lonesome. Most nostalgic. Most myself.

Photo by Sweet Light Photography, Charlie Ekburg

From the top of the hill
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Listen to this week’s column here or on Spotify, Google or Apple Podcasts

Sometimes, when the day is coming to a slow close and my head is spinning — with worry and lists, schedules and as the dishes sit waiting on the table, the kids playing in the yard, desperately needing a bath — I slip on my boots and head out the door.

I’m usually not gone long, and my husband has grown accustomed to this behavior, understanding it’s not a storm out, or a give up, or a frustrated stomp, but a ritual that I need to put a flush in my cheeks and make sure I’m still alive out here where the trucks kick up dust on the pink road and the barn cats quietly wait in the rafters of the old buildings for a mouse to scatter by.

I tell him I need to go walking and he knows which trail I’ll take, down through the barnyard, past the water tank and up the face of the gumbo hill, the one that lets you look back at the corrals where the yard light glows, the one that gives you the perfect view of the barn’s silhouette, tall and dark against a sky that is putting on its last show of the night as it runs out of light.

It’s a ritual that needs timing, because that sun, once it decides, goes quickly to the other side of the world.

Sometimes if I get out early enough, I head a little further east to check out how the light hits the buttes in my favorite pasture, making the hills look gold, purple and so far away. Sometimes I just keep walking until dark. Sometimes the evening finds me sitting on a rock or pacing in the middle of the ancient teepee rings that still leave their mark on the flat spot on the hill. I like to stand there and imagine a world with no buildings and no lights on the horizon. I examine the fire ring, close my eyes and think about sleeping under the leather of a teepee, covered in the skins of the animals, under a sky that promised rain and wind and snow and a sunrise every morning.

The same sky that promises me these things, but cannot promise anything else.

I think of these people, the ones who arranged these rocks, hunted these coulees, and watched the horizons and I am humbled by the mystery of the ticking thing we call time.

And I wonder what they called it.

Because I take to those hills and look back at my home — the sections of our fences that have been washed away by the melting snow, the old barn that needs to be torn down, the threshing machine looking ancient and ominous in the shade of the hill — I’m reminded that time takes its toll on this land the same way it puts lines around the corners of my eyes, and there is not one thing man can make to stop it.

This understanding is neither comforting nor nostalgic. It just is. Time builds roads and oil wells, new houses and fences and bigger power lines stretching across a landscape. Time grows the trees, erodes the creek banks, crumbles the hills with the weight of the snow, puts blooms on the flowers and withers them away just the same.

I climb that hill, look back at that farmstead and remember those kids we used to be, running through the haystacks and searching the barn for lost kittens. I climb to that hill and I remember my grandmother in her shorts and tank top, exposing her brown skin while she worked in the garden. I remember my first ride on a horse by myself, getting bucked off near the old shop, hunting for Easter eggs with the neighbor girls in the gumbo hills behind my grandmother’s house, branding cattle in the round pen.

From the top of the hill, I could still be ten years old and my grandmother could be digging up potatoes. From the top of the hill, my cousins could be hiding in the hay bales and my dad could be waiting on the side of the barn to jump out and scare them, sending them running and laughing and screaming. From the top of the hill, the neighbor girls could be pulling up in their dad’s pickup, dressed in pastels and rain boots, ready to hunt for eggs. From the top of the hill, you don’t notice all the work that needs to be done on the fences, the water tanks, roof of the shop and the crumbling barn.

From the top of the hill, that yard light is still glowing the same color it was when I would come in from an evening chasing cattle with my dad or catching frogs with my cousins to a yard filled with the smell of my grandmother’s cooking.

From the top of the hill, the only thing certain to change is the sky and everything else is forever.

The music continues…

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This week my mind is on the music as I work on a new album and pack for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. I sits down with my husband to talk about what it means to still be recording and creating music at 39 and I answer a listener’s question about the songwriting process. Chad’s been busy building the addition, so he gives a little sheetrock-covered update too. 
PLUS, I shares a rough cut of the song I wrote about my Great Grandpa Eddie at the end of the podcast, so stay to have an exclusive listen. 

When I was a young teenager, like 13 or 14, every spare minute I had at home was spent trying to teach myself to play guitar on the pink carpet of my room. Leaned up against the frame of my waterbed (hey, it was the 90s) I pressed stop and play and stop and play on my CD player trying to figure out the chords to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” or Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” I found these songs in my parent’s album collections and there was something about them that spoke to me more than anything I was hearing on the two FM radio stations that came in at the ranch.

Maybe it was the fact that the first songs I ever heard were coming from my dad playing and singing around the house. I knew the lyrics to Emmylou Harris and John Prine songs before I even heard their original versions. And when I began to discover my own musical tastes, when I could buy my own albums and play them on repeat, I was surprised to find there was something lonesome about it. Because I couldn’t imagine a world beyond my nook of rural America where real people like this existed, playing guitars in coffee shops and clubs and forming and breaking up bands and writing and recording music.  Somehow, it made me feel even more isolated, more landlocked, more obscure in my community and so very far away from a world where people create music for a living. I suppose I felt that my only access to it was to learn to play it myself and to attempt to write my own.

MEDORA — AUG 5: Tour of Teddy Roosevelt National Park. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Center for Creative Photography/University of Arizona).

I was only fourteen or fifteen when I wrote some of the music for the first album I released my senior year of high school. If I knew then what I know now, I wonder if would I have put myself out there that way. That’s the thing about adolescence—the naiveté keeps you brave.

I’m thinking about this today because for the past month or so I’ve been knee deep in working on music for another album. There was a time I would have told the 39-year-old version of me that I’m too old for this now, that to be creative, to have something to say, you must be relevant, and 39 didn’t seem relevant to me when I was in my early 20s driving up and down the middle of the country trying to write songs about places and things I knew nothing about. There was also a time when I thought that in order to be successful you had to remove yourself from all the familiar things and build yourself back up again somewhere more important. Go to Nashville. Go to California. Go to New York City. Then you’ll be something. Then you’ll have something worth saying.

I grew out of that phase somewhere between South Dakota and Oklahoma in my Chevy Lumina with a caved-in trunk I couldn’t open because of a fender-bender I still hadn’t dealt with. The man I loved and the place I loved was hundreds of miles away, I just cracked the front of my tooth off on a granola bar and I was supposed to be playing in a Nebraska college town in two hours. Was it this I loved? Or was there something else to it?

Last weekend I spent countless hours on the carpet in my grown up room working and re-working songs that could only be written by the woman I am now, hollering down to my daughters to “shush for a minute” and “play walkie-talkie in the basement please!”

I pulled out my harmonicas and immediately I saw two sets of bare feet under my bedroom door. Soon my daughters were playing harmonica too, dancing, singing and requesting for assistance writing their own songs.

I couldn’t help but think about the smoky smell of my dad’s guitar case on the 1980s shag carpet and me sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening. And then another thing hit me: this is how it can start, yes, but this can also just be how it is. There doesn’t have to be more to any of it except that it brings you some sort of peace or some sort of release or some sort of joy. If my daughters ask, that’s what I’ll tell them. Not everything we do with passion has to come to a famous, star-studded, glamorous end. Sometimes the best part is in the learning, or the listening or the creating or the dancing along.

As it turns out, the teenage version of me was right. To write it continues to set me free. And so that’s what I’m doing here, leaned up against my bed frame on the carpet in my room.

Mr. Tanner and the Joy of Singing Along

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Dad in his high School band, Cherry Creek,

I’m excited to share this week’s column and podcast that hones in on the music and the stories and what makes them so significant and important in our lives. And so of course I sit down with my dad on the podcast and we hash out some of our favorite folk songs and the stories behind decades of making music together. You get to hear my dad in his element, reciting lyrics and talking about his favorite musicians and all his time spent performing in his 50+ career as a musician.

Enjoy and thank you for believing as much as I do in the power of the story of the every day characters, the fabric of our communities.

The joy of singing along

Listen to the podcast here, on Apple Podcast or Spotify

There’s a Harry Chapin song I grew up listening to on my dad’s tape player. Harry Chapin was a Grammy award winning musician in the 70s and one of the greatest folk songwriters of his time. He created characters in his three to five minute songs that took you along to fall in love or break a heart or, in the case of “Mr. Tanner,“ the owner of a dry cleaning store in a small town in Ohio who sang while he worked long hours in his shop, to follow the encouragement of his friends and neighbors and use all his savings to “try music out full time.”

In the performance and recording of the song, in the backdrop of the chorus among the instruments a deep and pure baritone voice emerges as Mr. Tanner himself, singing the chorus to “Oh Holy Night.”

It’s beautiful, the whole thing, and the song takes you to his performance at a concert hall in New York. And if you’re listening for the first time, you hope for the outcome of fame and accolades for Mr. Tanner and his beautiful voice because “they said that he should use his gift instead of cleaning coats.” 

But Harry Chapin doesn’t deliver that fairy tale. That’s what makes him one of the best. Mr. Tanner’s debut performance was met with cold reviews, “Full time consideration of another endeavor might be in order…” And so Mr. Tanner went back to Dayton, Ohio, and the song ends with him singing to himself late at night while sorting his clothes, against the haunting lines of the chorus …

But music was his life, it was not his livelihood
And it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good
And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul
He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole

This song came back to me recently after a particularly challenging week where I was working to bring a renowned concert pianist to our small community and the logistics just weren’t falling into place the way I had hoped. I was anxious about his arrival and worried about getting the arrangements just right for him. The man has played for every president since Ronald Reagan and I wanted his time here in our little community to be up to a particular standard and I felt I was falling short. I was feeling flustered and tired and considering what it would take to retire early when the last song was played and the crowd emerged wowed and thankful for the opportunity. I watched as the pianist to the presidents signed autographs and chatted with the community and breathed the kind of sigh of relief you breathe when something challenging comes together in the end.

After the last guest headed for home and the pianist made his way to his hotel room, I stuck around the venue to gather our things and wrap up, always the last to leave. Then from the empty hallways of the big school I heard the trumpets, violins and high-pitched guitars of a mariachi band echo from small speakers and bounce off the concrete walls. Unexpectedly, a big, beautiful baritone voice joined in with the recorded singer, filling the dark school with life again and reminding me, in the best way, that at 10 p.m., the next shift had begun.

I stopped on my tired feet to listen from behind the wall for a moment, not wanting to disturb or embarrass that voice, not wanting him to stop. This man wasn’t singing for the crowd that had just dispersed. Or on a big stage, or for the president or on YouTube to be available for the masses. He was singing for himself, because “It made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good.”

And what I heard was filled with so much joy and exultation it turned my mood and immediately reminded me that at the core of it all, what really matters here. These gifts we’re given and how we use them, it’s up to us and us only.

I turned the corner and the man realized, like me, he wasn’t alone. He smiled and turned the music down. I told him he made my night and please, please ignore me now, and keep singing. And then I made my way home in the dark, with the music turned up, singing along.

New Album Out!

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You’ve heard rumblings here and there in the midst of the crazy that has become 2020, but I want to officially announce it here. The new album, Playing Favorites, is officially OUT!

I’ve been working on this compilation that features some of the songs that influenced me and songs I grew up singing, for almost a year. It felt timely and urgent to me for some reason to put these songs down, with my dad and neighbor Kelly and guitar player Mike who has played with me since I was a teenager and with other musicians who have been there for me along the way. Little did I know I was recording the album with a cancerous tumor in my airway that was working to threaten my life.

Little did I know I would wrap it up in the middle of the COVID lockdown.

Little did I know about the detour my life would take.

But now its release it feels so much sweeter. Because we’re in the middle of a time when we all want to be reminded of something familiar and comforting, and these songs are just that for me, and hopefully to you too. I am so happy to be able to send them out into the world.

Purchase your signed copy today

or Download it or listen wherever you listen or buy music. 
Spotify or iTunes

Playing Favorites Album Art

This album is dedicated to my dad and his red guitar. It’s for the characters in the songs we sing and for the characters we’ve played for on flatbed trailers at county fairs, in Legion Clubs and churches, at backyard barbecues, barn dances and potluck picnics in small towns across the mid-west. When we pick up our guitars at a campfire or in the living rooms of family and friends after a good meal with good company, these are the first songs we reach for because they are familiar, safe and forgiving of our imperfections, just like old friends. On this album you will hear the voices and instruments of my dad and I, of course, but also of our friends who have so often, when we needed them most, pulled up a chair to play along. This album is for them. And it’s for my daughters, my nieces and my nephews, for my cousins and their kids and you and yours, so that you might find a familiar tune and a place to sing along.
With much love,
Jessie ❤️

Sharing the story

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There was no new column this week because I was a little under the weather and little overwhelmed with the weight of the world’s issues these days. I just couldn’t find the right words or the energy to reflect in the way I felt I needed to.

And then of course, we were preparing for our branding and welcoming our favorite people onto the ranch to do the work we love, and so I let that consume me the way I needed it to.


Some news outlets have been reaching out, wanting to share the story of the health issue I’m facing, and I want to share it in the hope that it might encourage others. Being grateful is the only way I’ve found to move through life’s rough situations. But everyone has bad days, and I want to make sure it’s clear that I have them too, I feel frustrated and worried and scared, but I also feel optimistic and full of the same energy I’ve always had to do the work that I love and the things that I love to do with my family.

This is not the way I intended to promote this upcoming album, and I hope you stay tuned for more stories about the people involved in this project and the songs we chose.

Playing Favorites Album Art

This cancer thing is just a blip, a blip that helps put some very important things in perspective. But I want you to know that I feel the love you’re sending my way and I appreciate this community that has cheered me on throughout my time as a musician and writer, and especially now in my role as a mom.

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Quilts sent by a friend, with one for me so we have something that ties us together when I’m off to my next surgery. 

I am learning from you on how to lift and support others, because now I know what it feels like to be on this side of things. Lessons every day. Living with intention and open hearts. That’s what I hope to pass on to my girls while I grow to be an old, old lady and they grow up to be a healthy amount of embarrassed of me. Much love to you and yours. I’ll keep you posted, as always 🙂

In the meantime, watch the KFYR News story for an update below.

Jessie Veeder: Battling cancer and counting her blessings  
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New Album Sneak Peek

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Playing Favorites Album Art
Since October I’ve been working on an album that pays tribute to the folk music I grew up playing with my dad, neighbors and friends. It’s an eclectic mix of cowboy music, hymns, folk music, beautiful songwriters and it sound so much like us.

I wanted to record it locally so that we could bring in the musicians I’ve been playing with for years and so that we could capture what you might hear around a campfire, in the living room, on a flatbed trailer at a county fair or in the corner at the American Legion Club.

My plans were to be on the road with this album in May, but COVID and my tumor sidelined that plan, and so we’ve taken a little more time with it. (Also, can you believe I recorded an entire album with a giant tumor in my airway? Jeesh) Watch for its release mid-Summer and take a moment to check out this sneak peek, behind the scenes of making “Playing Favorites.”

Thank you for the love and thank you Makoche Studios for doing such a beautiful job telling the story.