Local music brings a sense of community and entertainment anywhere. Fortunately, Columbia offers a variety of local and touring artists with varying music styles. From artists at The Blue Note and Cooper’s Landing regulars to the annual Roots N Blues Festival, Columbia allows everyone to get their live music fix.
Whether you’ve lived in Columbia forever or just moved to mid-Missouri this week, here are local musicians you should check out on your next night off.
J. ARTiz
Artist Josh Runnels was slated to perform at Roots N Blues in 2020 in band Loose Loose, until the pandemic canceled any plans for live music. The band’s subsequent breakup complicated Runnel’s chance to perform on the Roots N Blues stage.
Runnels (J. ARTiz) developed his genre “future soul” while playing in Loose Loose. The music collective exposed him to a variety of sounds, and he became invested in learning music history and genres. Now, he works to educate and develop a community around soul music in Columbia.
“Essentially the definition of future soul is music that is in reflection of our past,” Runnels said. “That’s projecting the future whilst in our current cultural state.”
Runnels writes music and poetry, pulling from classic soul artists and Louder Than A Bomb Chicago poets. He works in Orr Street Studios, but he says his writing comes spontaneously.
In 2021, Runnels created MO’ Soul Collective, a group of young artists performing and practicing soul music together to further develop their artistry. The collective holds soul sessions every month and Runnels hosts the “art and music showcases.”
“MO’ Soul Sessions was created because this town had a void that needed to be filled,” Runnels said. “There was no community in soul music, and there was no space for Black people to come regularly and hear live music.”
MO’ Soul Collective gave musicians in the community collaborating opportunities and Runnels said new bands launched from the group. The collective and its musical branches have brought more soul music to Columbia.
“It’s for the community to come together, and the goal is to pretty much keep building this thing up and let it be here forever,” Runnels said.
Outside of creating music and art, Runnels works in education and entrepreneurship. He began educating in Chicago, where he was born. Runnels worked in Chicago Public Schools and joined local group Move Me Soul to teach and showcase spoken word poetry to younger audiences in the city.
After moving to Columbia in 2017, Runnels continued art education. Recently, he worked with Access Arts and Vidwest and brought art and technology to young people in the mid-Missouri area. He also travels to Chicago to teach spoken word poetry at a high school on the west side of the city.
Runnels will perform at Roots N Blues for the first time this October, alongside MO’ Soul Collective. Runnels hopes the festival stage will allow the soul movement in Columbia to expand nationally.
“We want to continue to contribute to the music industry, tell our story, create sounds that are familiar but also take it to the next level in the future of soul music,” Runnels said.
Meredith Shaw
Meredith Shaw began writing songs of teen angst and friendship outside of her MU sorority house in the early 1990s. Three MU degrees, three children and over thirty years later, Shaw is creating music again.
As a country singer-songwriter from a farm town in the Northeast region of Missouri, Shaw writes about the scope of her own life and landscape in mid-Missouri. Shaw performs original songs and cover songs to audiences at Cooper’s Landing and Dive Bar, but she’s also looking forward to playing Roots N Blues this year.
“The best songwriting is rooted in truth,” Shaw said. “If you just make things up too much, then people know. People want to be able to relate to things.”
Shaw pulls inspiration from her daily life to write music. She writes down lines from conversations with friends or creates stories based on news headlines.
After a gig where Shaw played a song about selling the family farm, an audience member approached her and mentioned their experience with a similar situation. Moments of connecting and relating to an audience are some of Shaw’s favorite performances.
“Those moments when your music spoke to some and their personal life, that’s what I’m trying to do,” Shaw said. “I’m trying to tell it in a way that people can feel like it’s their story too.”
Shaw also writes comedic songs with innuendo that work as attention-grabbers at open-mic nights and bar performances. While performing a call and response song called “Just The Tip” (a song about tipping a musician, obviously) in Nashville, Shaw had a crowd of strangers singing along to her music.
“A whole bar in Nashville is singing along and at the end, I go ‘this is all I ever came for! I’m done,’” Shaw said. “I don’t know what I’m trying to do after this. I had a whole bar in Nashville singing along and that was my dream.”
Following her self-taught guitar lessons in undergrad, Shaw took a hiatus until 2017 when others encouraged her to perform and start writing music again. She has learned more about writing, producing and performing in the last few years in Columbia and Nashville.
“Everyone here that I’ve been a fan of has been welcoming and helping me learn things and just been so supportive along every bit of the journey, like when I was too nervous to get up there and hardly even play an open mic,” Shaw said.
Shaw plans on writing more music and connecting with more people in Columbia and Nashville. Since landing a spot on the Roots N Blues setlist, she has received invites to play new gigs, such as the Mexico Soybean Festival and the Saint Louis Art Fair.
“I’m fifty and things are just starting and they are going really well,” Shaw said. “Do I wish this all would have happened when I was 20? Yeah, but I would not be writing the same music. I’m writing much better music now then I think I would’ve. Things happen the way they need to happen.”
Ruby Lane
Local jam band Ruby Lane first practiced together at a home on the group’s eponymous street after brothers Forrest and Adam Wilson decided on starting a band. The two met drummer Michael Wambua at their grandmother’s church and added pianist Luke Anderson and bass player Dylan Riggs in 2018.
Ruby Lane combines a variety of genres including blues, rock and reggae. The band pulls inspiration from The Grateful Dead and classic blues musicians to combine the interests of everyone in the band.
“We let the music form itself,” Forrest Wilson said. “We get together and play what we enjoy. It isn’t always what everyone else is looking for, which is fine, but it’s fun for us and that’s the whole goal.”
Ruby Lane often plays at Eastside Tavern because the venue features many different music styles The band enjoys playing with musicians from diverse genres, such as country or metal, during gigs.
With their longer sets, Ruby Lane does not usually plan ahead for gigs. After deciding what to play on the fly, the musicians will change how they play a song and go off what the others are doing, so audiences will never experience the same show.
The band practices together in the basement of a house where four of the members now live together. They also experiment with original sounds and riffs to create new music.
“I feel like all of our songs have their own story behind them just because they were written differently every time,” Wilson said.
Ruby Lane is currently working on new music, and they want to prepare a tour for next summer.
“It’s our goal to start playing places other than Columbia, so we can broaden our reach a little bit, but we don’t plan much,” Wilson said. “We’re still trying to figure it out.”
Ruby Lane promotes future shows on their social media @rubylanestinks.
Edited by Egan Ward | eward@themaneater.com
