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Tyler Smith’s – Keys To The Kingdom Of his roughly 1 million followers, Tyler Smith figures most people have no idea he’s a Christian artist. “Most of my following came from remixing sounds,” Smith says over coffee on a frigid January afternoon. His following – rather, followers of tylerhateslife, his artist name – is huge: 600k on TikTok, 187k on Spotify, 188k on Facebook Video. “My biggest videos are remixes of covers from bands who…

Josiah Levon Fiveash likes the game Jackbox. “The game Jackbox is where you try to tell if what someone says is the truth or a lie, so the goal is to be as elusive as possible,” explains Fiveash – who goes by Joe, with Sire as a nickname, and SiBL as his stage name. “So I say, ‘I sing because I’m happy,’ then ‘I sing because I’m sad.’ It’s hard to know. I’ve always used…

The notion of standing on the shoulders of giants feels especially true when discussing music and the arts. In jazz, as Louis led to Dizzy, and from Dizzy we got Miles, we can often directly attribute our successes to our mentors and heroes. From my father, my first guitar teacher Crisanto Bautista, my jazz teacher Paulo Siqueira, to David Morgan and through Dr. David Banks who invited me to the Columbus Jazz Society in the…

“My dad was a bluegrass guitar player and loved traditional country, bluegrass, and gospel,” Charlie Starr says when asked what music he heard as a child. “My mom liked the Stones, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan. And my sister liked Rock 103.” Speaking by phone two days before Christmas from his Atlanta-area home, Starr – a Chattahoochee Valley native, having bounced across the river a few times growing up between Chambers County, Alabama and Troup…