Jackson Holte

Jackson Holte has spent the last decade as a mule skinner and performing musician in Montana and Wyoming. His writing turns on the axis between the two, studying nature and culture, landscape and lyric, terse Western sensibility and deeply emotive storytelling.

Holte has released two albums of original songs with his Missoula-based rock band, The Highway Patrol. He has also performed and recorded with Newlyweds, Gooseberries, The Western Family Band, Jimmy Timbre, and Marcedes Carroll. His songs appear in the feature film We Burn Like This and have been performed by jazz ensembles at Colorado State University. He took 2nd place overall in the 2024 Wyoming Singer-Songwriter Contest.
 

His first solo record, Sky Blues, is the work he had to do to form and authentic relationship between his inner and outer worlds as a young man moving West at eighteen, determined to make a home of a place with a heritage of displacement. True to that relationship, the twelve collected songs are as hard-nosed as any country music about rural poverty, as open-hearted as contemporary folk music about freedom and adventure, as wry and funny as “Americana” used to imply. Holte embodies the ethos that William Kittredge wrote about when he said that his father’s cowboys in the Klamath Valley “…dreamed of capabilities and beauty. They knew better than to imagine you could ever own anything beyond a coherent self.” This record is Holte’s buckrail fence around a coherent self not based on his claim to the West, but the West’s claim on him.
 

Recorded at Free River Studios in Livingston, MT with co-producers Jamey Warren (Free River Studios) and Shaun Carrier (The Lucky Valentines), mixed by Warren and mastered by Jon Neufeld (Kung Pao Chickens, Jackstraw, Martha Scanlan), the musical setting is alluring but unadorned. The record was tracked over a weekend by a band of close friends in Carrier, Hope Radford (Jimmy Timbre, Hope Grove), Adin Kloetzel (Sterling Drake, Barncat Country Band), Marko Capoferri (The Highway Patrol, Sterling Drake), and Brian Tremper (Jimmy Timbre, Tuesday Tuesday). The ensemble is augmented by session players Jeffrey Foucault, Eric Heywood (Pretenders, Son Volt, The Jayhawks), Bethany Joyce (Red Onion Purple), Tyson Gerhardt (Dusty the Kid, The Recession Special), Lacy Hotchkiss, Scott Martin, and Jamie Carrier (The Lucky Valentines). Altogether, the record is a collaboration between some of Holte’s closest friends and most distant heroes.
 

Holte’s life moves in a cycle, his place influencing his work, his work influencing his art, his art influencing his place. He currently lives in Pinedale, WY, where he writes, records, hunts, hikes, builds saddles, shoes horses, and packs into the Wind River Mountains.
 

Sky Blues will be available in 2025. Holte will continue to tour in the winters and spend his summers in the mountains.