The Cedar sat down with Chicago-based, Minneapolis-born, lifelong musician Tommy Goodroad. Learn about Tommy’s venture into country music, what it means to perform with his older brother and friends, and his reluctance to conform.
The Cedar: Where am I reaching you today?
Tommy Goodroad: I'm in Chicago in my apartment.
The Cedar: What drew you to Chicago? Why did you go out there?
Tommy Goodroad: I moved to Chicago six years ago for college. I went to school for music here and didn't really love school, but I loved the city and I loved all the people I've met. I have not left since then. Also I like that it's close to Minneapolis, which is where I'm from. I am pretty seriously considering spending some extended time in Nashville soon, probably next year.
The Cedar: Why did you choose to go to school for performing arts?
Tommy Goodroad: Growing up, I always wanted to be a performing musician, a touring and recording musician. I knew my parents were gonna make me go to college, so I was like, “Okay, I'm gonna go to college for music then.” I studied music composition, because when I started college, I was really, really into music production and arrangement and stuff. There was a program at Columbia College, which is where I went, that was more geared toward being a touring musician. It seemed like it was kind of like a scam because I feel like that's the kind of thing you can't really teach in college, so I decided to do music composition.
There were some classes I definitely really liked, but overall I'm like, “Dang, I could have probably learned all that on YouTube.” When I try to complain to my moms about it, they'll just be like, “But think of all the connections you made and all the people you met,” and I'm like, “I guess you're right, but like tens of thousands of dollars!”
The Cedar: What was the eventual goal? Did you want to be a touring musician? What did you want to be doing with that degree?
Tommy Goodroad: With college, the goal was just to get done with it to make my mom happy. Basically throughout all of college, I was making a little bit of my own music on the side, but the assignments I was doing were kind of draining. I wasn't feeling super creative for most of college, so it wasn't until after college that I started being really serious about touring and playing. The band that I have now, the Highway Birds, they're all mostly friends from high school. The first time we played together was June of 2020, which was right after I graduated.
The Cedar: During the height of pandemic? Also, why did you start a band with everyone from Minneapolis, since you’re based in Chicago?
Tommy Goodroad: Yes, everybody in the band except our pedal steel player’s from Minneapolis. These are the only people I knew that would want to be in a country band, and I knew that they all played music, but I had never played music with them before. Plus there was COVID, so if I was going to start a band with people in Chicago, I would have to sort of grow my bubble that I was in. I didn't know how my friends would feel about that, but I was going to Minneapolis every couple months, maybe like every month at the time, I was going pretty regularly. I would get tested for COVID on my way there, and all my friends would get tested and I would get tested on my way back. My bubble here in Chicago seemed to be pretty cool with it. I don't know, I didn't even really consider playing with people in Chicago. I considered having people from college play on like a record if I were to do one, but I never really considered having them play shows with me. Once COVID happened, I was like, “I'll just play with the people that I already know really well, and then I don't have to worry about being around new people.”
Tommy Goodroad & The Highway Birds. Photo courtesy to Isaac Dell.
The Cedar: Were you flying or driving back to Minneapolis?
Tommy Goodroad: I was mostly driving.
The Cedar: So you know that road between Minneapolis and Chicago pretty well. What's on your playlist as you're on the road by yourself?
Tommy Goodroad: Let's see, it was probably a lot different than it would be now, but I listened to a lot of Jason Isbell. I was big into Brandi Carlile then. John Prine always. There was this one time that I drove to Minneapolis and the whole drive, I just listened to the discography of this band called Turnpike Troubadours the whole way on shuffle. I really liked them. They're probably one of my favorite bands.
The Cedar: I would say listening to your stuff, I hear a lot of John Prine in it. It's a lot of storytelling. When you're listening to this stuff, are you drawing from it or how does it usually work in your brain?
Tommy Goodroad: I think it's kind of subconscious how I draw from it. It's rare that I listen to a song to hear what the parts are doing or to hear what the singer is doing, but I definitely can hear myself drawing from it when I'm writing songs or when I'm arranging songs with the band. I'll make a playlist of songs that I like the feel of. If we're about to record a song, I'll make a playlist of songs that I want this song to sound like. But I’m drawing from a lot of different songs.
The Cedar: Do you know the artist Gregory Alan Isakov? He said something like, “We are always just taking everything in and then we barf it back out, you know?
Tommy Goodroad: I’m like that, because I think that's true. Even with songwriting, I can get really into how a song was written and I'll be like, “Wow, that line is so good,” but when I’m writing a song, I'll never be like, “How can I emulate that songwriter?” I mean, everything I listen to, I do just barf it back out.
The Cedar: Why country music, though? It's not lucrative in making money like top 40 radio music is.
Tommy Goodroad: It's actually interesting, because I didn't grow up on country music. I grew up listening to rap, almost exclusively. When I was young, it would be Lil Wayne and T.I. – the ones that were really popular on the radio. Then in early high school, I got really into Young Thug and Future. I was also really into Kendrick Lamar. Young Thug was my favorite.
The Cedar: Rap music also contains a lot of storytelling in its core elements, as well. So what pivoted to country music?
Tommy Goodroad: My older brother, who is the lead guitarist in the band, was a punk rocker in high school. He had an epiphany and realized that the most punk rock thing you can do in Minneapolis is listen to country because everyone hates it. So he started listening to country and he listened to all kinds of country. He even bought a Chevrolet Silverado. He went all in. We would drive around in his Silverado when I was in high school, and he would play all kinds of country music. He would play the top forty pop country radio hits. I didn't love it at the time, but I loved doing the drives with him. I thought it was cool. There were some songs that I picked up on and started listening to.
I did grow up listening to John Prine my whole life, ‘cause my moms were into him. When I moved to Chicago, I felt so far from that, like driving in my brother's Silverado and listening to country music. There was a transition period from like September of 2017 to like January of 2018 when I was starting at Columbia where I transitioned to listening to almost entirely country music because it made me feel like I was home. I was living in Downtown Chicago at the time, where you’re surrounded by skyscrapers. I had a lot of really good friends, but a part of me still really missed Minneapolis and really missed my family. So listening to the country music that my brother had showed me really filled that space for me. Then I started discovering my own stuff that he had shown me and all of a sudden it was like all I was listening to. Then it's definitely the storytelling, sorry, the storytelling drew me to it, for sure.
The Cedar: Did you find it came naturally to you when you began composing this type of work?
Tommy Goodroad: Yeah, I was making different music when I found country. It was more like computer-based music. I started out producing beats for rappers in Minneapolis. I was a piano player and a drummer and a singer forever, but when I started taking music seriously, I was making beats. So I started taking a lot of that country influence and making it into this like electronic computer music that I had been used to because I didn't know how to play guitar. It wasn't until late 2019 that I taught myself guitar. Once I learned guitar, I figured I should just be making country music. If it's all I listen to, I'll just make it. I had all these songs that I'd written that translated perfectly into country songs and I started writing a bunch more.
The Cedar: How do you feel you are as a guitar player? I mean, four years is not a relatively long time.
Tommy Goodroad: Yeah, not super good. My band tells me that I've done well for how short of a time I've been playing. It was late 2019 too, so it's actually been three years – almost exactly three years. I started in late November, 2019. I can do a lot of things that I want to do. I don't feel like I'm held back by my guitar playing; I have a lead guitarist and a pedal steel player and a fiddle player, so I don't have to take the lead. I’m more part of the rhythm section, just holding down the tempo.
The Cedar: You said you were self-taught? When you are self-taught, do you feel you learn things in a different way because you have to? Are you making different creative choices in how you play?
Tommy Goodroad: Yeah, I got to choose which techniques and stuff to work on. The first thing I learned, because I'm so obsessed with John Prine, was fingerpicking. Now I'm pretty good at that. I’m still learning new chords and new chord positions every time I play, but for the kind of guitar that I want to be playing, all I need is to know where the chords are and how to finger pick. I have a full-time job outside of music, but if I had more time, I think I would like to learn how to play lead guitar, because I think that would be really cool – and probably get back into piano, because I played piano for many, many years when I was little into high school.
The Cedar: Tell me about your song “Teaching Me to Paint.” How did that come about?
Tommy Goodroad: It's written about my girlfriend, and I wrote it years ago. It was around the time that I started playing with the band that I'm playing with now. We just recorded it this past August.
The Cedar: Are you still connecting to songs that you wrote years ago?
Tommy Goodroad: For sure. There's a lot of the songs that I started with when I started making country music that I had written years earlier, and four more electronic type songs that lyrically and the melody could have been country songs. I took that song, I turned it into one verse of a country song and then added another chorus and then made it into a full song. For our next album, we're going to do three songs that we put on our first album, which we recorded ourselves. I mixed it and mastered it, and I'm not super happy with how it sounds, but I still connect with a lot of the songs. I wanted to redo them in a professional studio setting, so we're going to redo three of them for this next album. Then for the next album, we're going to rerecord three more.
The Cedar: Are you booking your own shows for your tours yourself? How well-attended are the shows? Do a lot of people show up?
Tommy Goodroad: We did one two-week tour in November that was similar to one in June. They were both two weeks. The June one, we did the South. We went to St. Louis, Nashville, Savannah, Asheville, et cetera. Then this one in November, we went East and did Ohio, New York, Philly, and Pittsburgh. This tour was much better attended than our June tour was.
The Cedar: Why do you think that was?
Tommy Goodroad: I'm not really sure. It could have been the bands we were playing with had a better local draw or we had a better draw. The Minneapolis show was insane. We played at Palmer's, and they told us we sold it out twice. Enough people left and came back that we sold twice the amount of tickets that they said we would sell.
Tommy Goodroad. Photo courtesy to Maya Cruz.
The Cedar: Would you rather be a struggling artist and gain character or would you rather be on a show like The Voice or American Idol and have things laid out for you? Which is better?
Tommy Goodroad: I would much rather be a struggling artist and gain character. I don't want to be one of those country singers who doesn't get to write their own songs. I don't like to talk bad about any music, but I don't really like the sound of the country music that’s currently being played on the radio. Most people don't. I feel like most people I've talked to really like the old country, like bluegrass and old time influences. I just want to be able to make the kind of music that I want to make. I would be so depressed if I had someone telling me what kind of sound I had to make or what kind of song I had to write. I don't think I would do well with that.
The Cedar: Tommy, what if it was like in the movies, and you were at a show and an A&R rep was in the audience and he's like, “I’ve got to sign this artist!” then you have to compromise all of your beliefs and your morals to make music?
Tommy Goodroad: I would say no. I've actually had that experience before. And I mean, I would, I would consider it, you know, I would look at it. I had a family member, who is a lawyer, look over the contract and she was like, “Yeah, I don't know, this seems kind of weird.” It was a good label, but I was not a big artist, so they were trying to take advantage of me. I was really excited about it. I went out to LA and met with them, but then it was a bad deal, so I didn't do it. I'm glad I didn't because I was making a different kind of music and I would have been stuck making that kind of music.
The Cedar: Tell me about this show in Minneapolis. You also have a bunch of up-and-coming Minneapolis artists, like Pit Stop and Dusk [from Appleton, Wisconsin], on the bill too. Yeah. Did you put this show together?
Tommy Goodroad: I actually did not. My bassist, Cooper, whose cousin is Shasa [Sartin], did. He lives in Minneapolis, and he really wants to start playing more. Our draw in Minneapolis is much better than our draw in Chicago, so he's been taking it upon himself to start doing some booking, which I actually really appreciate ‘cause I have been having to do it all myself.
The Cedar: What can somebody expect to see at your show if people have not seen you before?
Tommy Goodroad: They can expect a balance of really loud, fun honky tonk songs and really slow, sad honky tonk songs.