Transcript edited for length and clarity.
Clay Wallace, WUKY
Good morning. You're listening to 91.3 WUKY NPR Lexington. I'm Clay Wallace. With me today is Michael Holstein, an award-winning executive producer and director with more than 20 years in television, documentary film, and live music, including senior roles at WETA and credits alongside Ken Burns, Leon Bridges, and Harry Connick Jr. Thank you for coming on today, Michael.
Michael Holstein, Where The Mountains Sing
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate it.
Clay
Your current project, Where the Mountains Sing, zooms in on the Laurel Cove Music Festival in Pineville, Kentucky. Pineville is a pretty small city. It's not even the largest in Bell County - Middlesboro is about six times the size of Pineville! So, what brought that festival and that town onto your radar?
Michael
It started with the festival. I've been a fan of and become friends with Cole Cheney, and I saw Cole, gosh, maybe late fall up here in Washington, D.C. at a small club. I was talking to him after the show.
We're both big NASCAR fans. I'm doing some work with NASCAR and I said, "Let's get down to a race. I can introduce you to folks," and whatever, and he said, "Oh, you should come to this festival I'm playing."
I had not heard of it. He told me the name and I went home and looked it up. The first clip I saw was probably the one a lot of folks have seen, which was when Red Clay Strays played at Laurel Cove. From there, I just did this deep dive. I read the People Magazine article that said it was like an "Appalachian Red Rocks." I was reading about the affinity that artists and fans and everybody had for this place. It just seemed really special and unique.
So, Cole introduced me to John Grace, festival organizer. Within a day, maybe, of being connected via email, we got on the phone and we talked, and we ended up being on the phone for a couple hours. I said, "Alright, listen, I'm going to hang up and try to write up a treatment of what I think this movie might look like. If you like it, let's figure out a way to do it, and if you don't like it, no harm, no foul. But let's see, because I think there's a story to be told here."
Sometimes, I think, like most writers or creators or producers, I struggle with writer's block. This was the opposite. The words just came pouring out. I'm a very hard critic of my own writing and normally will edit things a hundred times and still not like them. But I read this over and I was like, "I actually kind of like this." I sent it over to John and he called me right back like, "Hey, Bub, let's do this. I want to do it. I love it. It's perfect. Don't change a word."
(We've since changed many words.)
That was back around early December, right before January when they do the party announcing the bands that are going to be playing at next year's festival. So, they invited me down for that. I got to see some of the bands, got to meet some of the people, got to see the venue in the winter and the off-season, and I was just blown away by everything. The deeper I dove into the mythology of it and the history of the event and what it means to the town, I knew there was a great story here.
It's been a challenging time in the entertainment business the past bunch of years. To some extent, it started in COVID when we couldn't do things live anymore. And then we had the actors' strike and writers' strike and all the mergers and acquisitions with TV networks, so projects would get frozen while that stuff went through. And, now, AI is taking people's jobs away. There's been so much turbulence. Our company's managed to do really well, which I'm super grateful for, but it's also been a little disinspiring to be in this industry over the past few years.
This project, for me - selfishly, personally - just awakened the spark and the love I have for telling these stories. And that's all because of how special the event is and how amazing the people are who run it, go to it, play it, volunteer at it, support it - it's just been the most amazing community. I almost get choked up talking about how much I love everybody.
Clay
Laurel Cove Amphitheater has been described, as you said, as the "Red Rocks of Appalachia." Can you describe what it's like to be there?
Michael
My first impression was, oh my gosh, it's so small. I think in the videos and pictures I'd seen, I had envisioned something bigger - maybe because the impact it has is so outsized. Seeing it full of people is obviously very different than seeing it empty. But even when I went back this summer to start filming, it is small. It's in the woods in a beautiful state park.
But it's stunning - from the creek to the sounds of nature that surround you, to the way they integrate nature into the setting. It did have a Red Rocks vibe. It's different, obviously - Red Rocks is carved out of red rock, it's huge and imposing, with that awe-inspiring view behind the stage all the way down to Denver. But Laurel Cove definitely has that same feeling that you're in this magical, ethereal place. And when you hear the music start playing, I don't know if it's a natural amphitheater or if they just have a great sound system, but the music sounds better there. In the quiet moments, you literally hear frogs croaking and crickets chirping. It's so powerful.
I've worked at Red Rocks. I've filmed My Morning Jacket there, and through them I learned what it's like for an artist to play one of those celebrated venues. Playing Red Rocks, playing the Garden - there are certain bucket-list things for artists. And you're going to see why Laurel Cove is one of those. It starts with the way the staff treats and greets artists, but also the casual nature of it. Check your ego at the door. You're not going to pull up your massive tour bus and be putting on the ritz while you wait for the show. It strips away a lot of the pretense. It's just an incredible, magical place, top to bottom.
Clay
I was watching some of the footage and I kept seeing shots of this little stuffed critter that people were holding up in the crowd. Who is that?
Michael
Oh, that guy's no good! That's Cleve. Cleve is a taxidermied raccoon that Blake Carpenter - one of the founders of the festival - acquired on a road trip several years back. He tells the whole story in the movie. The way they found Cleve is amazing.
Cleve started just as a joke - they propped him up on stage in the early days of Laurel Cove - but he's really become the mascot. People get to touch him. He is ratty. He's up to no good. He's got sunglasses on, he's smoking, he's drinking. In a weird, silly way, he almost functions as a real embodiment of the festival. It's this ragtag thing that is elevated. Everybody loves Cleve. Everybody rallies around Cleve. He's on the movie merch, he's on the festival merch.
And this year, during the World Cup, Erling Haaland came back to Norway and walked off the plane holding a taxidermied raccoon with a vodka bottle - and it looked just like Cleve. I thought, the stars are really aligning. Taxidermied raccoons are having a moment. Let Cleve capitalize on that, and we'll make him the next global superstar.
Clay
Some other superstars featured in the film include Kashus Culpepper, Evan Honer, the Creekers, and Cole Chaney. What brought them to Laurel Cove?
Michael
The Cove is a place where artists want to play. And if they've played before, they want to play again. They have a rule - you can do two years in a row, and then you have to take at least a year off before you're booked again.
For Evan, he was there the previous year, and essentially the whole weekend got rained out - monumental floods and storms. But Evan wanted to give the fans a cool experience anyway, so he grabbed his guitar and went down to what functions as a green room - really just a vaguely covered area at the bottom of the hill - and played an acoustic set for the folks who stuck around. So for him to come back, headline the big stage, and have the full experience, I think was really special. And Kashus played there as an up-and-coming artist; to come back and be one of the headliners meant a lot to him too. The Creekers are somewhat local and have ties to the area.
John Grace has a really unique and gifted eye and ear for talent. He finds artists on the way up. Booking Red Clay Strays just months before they got huge - that wasn't luck. That was an eye for talent. And giving bands that festival exposure when they haven't had it before, while giving fans the chance to see artists on the rise, is one of the things that makes Laurel Cove so special.
This year you had bigger names like Evan, Kashus, and The Creekers - but some of the best shows I saw were from people who will soon be moving up. Bill Taylor and his band were amazing. I'm sure they'll be on the main stage next year. Jordan Lee King, who played an earlier set, was probably my favorite performance of the weekend - and he's become one of my favorite people involved in this project. He and Wyatt Flores are going to be our narrators when we need narration in the film.
A lot of credit goes to John for spotting bands on the rise - but a lot of credit also goes to these bands who could play bigger places for more money and still carve time out to play Laurel Cove. With only 1,400 tickets and reasonable prices, the festival can't pay everybody what they'd normally get. But so many times I heard, "We'll play this for less. We'll do an underplay because it's special to us." It's a give-back from the artists because they enjoy it so much, and because the festival took a chance on them earlier in their careers. It's a really beautiful ecosystem.
Clay
You describe this film as "uncautiously optimistic." What are you optimistic about?
Michael
People want to portray us as the divided states of America, and I don't believe that's true. You have a really loud 5% on the far left and 5% on the far right, and 90% of us are somewhere in the middle. The fringes are the loudest, and it makes things seem so divisive, but I don't think we're as divided as we seem. We have problems, of course, and we have to work through them - it's been turbulent, and there are things that aren't right that should be fixed! But Laurel Cove is an event where none of that matters. It doesn't matter what your politics are, what God you worship, what gender you identify as, who you want to date or marry. If you're there and you're a good person, you're treated like family. It's healing. It's good for your soul.
Kentucky is fascinating to me because it's ostensibly a red state - but the governor's not, and he might be president. More to the point, if you're at the Cove, folks don't care. If you're a good person and you're nice to be around, those things don't even come up - or if they do, it's: "All right, well, we may not agree on this, but we both enjoy this music, so let's sit here and enjoy the music."
When people say it's a movie about a music festival - yes. But honestly, for me, it's a movie about America: what it was, what it can be, what it should be, and what it hopefully will be again. We're more defined by what unites us than what divides us. That's where the optimism is - that the chaos and the turbulence and these loud 5% voices on each side will eventually be marginalized. The 90% of us who aren't screaming about one polarizing position or another - wiser voices, quieter voices, saner voices - will prevail. This festival just embodies all of that.
When I started doing research for this, I went down so many internet rabbit holes. And if you look at videos online about Appalachia, about Kentucky, so much of it is what's called "poverty porn" - some TikToker driving through a holler going, "Oh, look at these run-down shacks and these hillbillies." I don't like it. It's not fair. It's not an accurate representation. It's painting with way too broad a brush. If you watch this movie expecting to see "crazy rednecks in Kentucky," you're going to be in for a surprise - because this is going to be about how amazing the people are and how beautiful the scenery is.
Bell County is among the poorest counties in the country, and you would never know it from a second's conversation with anybody from there. There are problems, of course, and hopefully problems that can be solved. But you would never know it from the kindness, the joy, the neighborliness. This is not going to be a hard-hitting "peel back the layers and expose" documentary. This is a celebration of the state, of the music, of the country, and of what things should be.
Clay
When and where can people watch Where the Mountains Sing?
Michael
We're finalizing some negotiations. We have a couple of offers on the table. We know we can be on Amazon Prime, and I think that's where we're going to end up - but we're also talking with HBO, Netflix, and PBS. The most important thing to me is that anybody who wants to see this movie is able to see it. So I don't want there to be gatekeeping, whether that's a subscription-based service or anything else.
I really want to make sure we get a PBS version made, and that honestly wasn't on the radar when we started. We didn't budget for it, and there are certain things we'd have to do - edit for timing, language, alcohol, things like that. Cleve smoking - I'm not sure if that's allowed on PBS. So we're hoping to raise a little extra money to make a PBS version, and an educational version that can play in classrooms.
Regardless of where we end up with our network partner, we know it's going to be widely seen. The way we're rolling it out now: some previews and screenings towards the end of this year, around November, and then a wide release in mid-January. There will be some live screening events - we're working with The Burl, and I think we'll do a premiere party there. They've been a great supporter of the artists in this film, and of the film itself - they've donated to a charity auction we're doing. And Ale-8 has been a great partner too. Hopefully they'll have the pawpaw variety available - come have a cold Ale-8 at The Burl in January and see it live. Then it'll be on televisions around the country, and we're speaking with foreign distributors around the world as well.
Clay
Tell me more about the charity auction. It's open through late August - what's on offer, and who does the money support?
Michael
When I started talking to John about the festival's benefit to the community, I was really touched by the fact that they operate on such a shoestring and he still makes sure to give back to charities. I wanted the film to do that too.
So we put together a charity auction to give back to local and regional nonprofits - some that the festival works with and a couple of others we found. It was also a fun way to get artists involved and spread the word about the movie. The auction runs through the end of this month, and there's some really cool stuff. The top package - we called it "The Big Cleve" - is VIP tickets to next year's festival, hotel, all of that. Hotel rooms near the festival are worth their weight in gold, so that's probably the most expensive item. The second most expensive, and maybe the most fun, involves Bill Taylor - who has become a good friend as well as being in the movie. Bill is a ginseng hunter; he and his father had a show on Discovery for a while. So he's going to take the winners of this package on a ginseng hunt in season, then come sit on his front porch for some picking and playing, and then go see a show. That's a really cool experiential item.
The Burl offered a date-night package. Ale-8 has offered up some merchandise. Cole Chaney's got some things up there, Red Clay Strays, and so many of the bands involved have contributed. It's important to us to not just have big-ticket items but also lower-price options - folks who want to win a Laurel Cove gold foil poster, for instance, which is normally only available to artists.
Everything we raise from the auction will go back to supporting the community and increasing awareness of these nonprofits.
We're also doing something concurrent - and this one doesn't end at the end of the month, it'll be ongoing - a low-key crowdfunding campaign where 100% of the money goes toward the PBS version we're trying to make. With that, we have some really neat benefits at various price points. You can donate a dollar if you want, but at certain levels you get movie merchandise, invitations to the red carpet, the opportunity to host a screening - all the way up to being an associate producer, being in the credits, and walking the red carpet with all the glitz and glamour. Both are hosted on the Givebutter platform.
It's an opportunity to help the community, hopefully spread the word about the movie, and make it available to everybody via PBS and educational broadcast - but also to give back to folks who want to support it. People really feel like they're a part of it, because they are. We're editing the movie now, and I think people will be surprised by how human-centric it is - more so than even I expected at the beginning. The most important stories and through lines are these fan experiences. Of course there's going to be music throughout, and you'll see amazing performances - we've interviewed all the artists, and I'm talking to Red Clay Strays in a couple of days. But it's a human story. The people are at the heart of it.
We also hired an almost entirely Kentucky-based crew, and we're doing the red carpet in Kentucky. This is a Kentucky project. I wish I was from there - I'd much rather live there than outside of D.C. But we're going to benefit the community and be part of the community as much as possible. And the community has been so welcoming that giving back - I can't imagine doing this movie and not doing it.
Clay
I'm really excited to see more of Cleve. Thank you so much, Michael.
Michael
Yeah, he's trouble! Be careful.
Clay
This has been a conversation with Michael Holstein about his upcoming documentary, Where the Mountains Sing. For 91.3 WUKY, I'm Clay Wallace.