My career in the entertainment industry has enabled me to work with a diverse range of talent. Through my years of experience, I've recognized two essential aspects, industry professionals, their famous stars, or behind the scenes staff, have fascinating stories to tell. Secondly, audiences are eager to listen to these stories, which offer a glimpse into their lives and the evolution of their life stories. This podcast aims to share these narratives, providing information on how they evolve into their chosen career. We will delve into their journey to start them, discuss their struggles and successes, and hear from people who help them achieve their goals. We're ready for intriguing behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the fascinating world of entertainment. Hi, I'm Tony Mantour. Welcome to Almost Live Nashville. Today, the spotlight is on the dynamic duo, Chris and Ben, better known as Boomtown Saints. Crown Music Roe Magazine's 2024 independent artist of the year and CDX Nashville's 2025 group of the year, these guys are playing high energy music that have their fans hooked, with hits like Black Top Don and All Trucks Go to Heaven, their raw talent and authentic vibes are about to take over. The music tells stories that resonate deeply. Today, they're here to share their incredible journey from a meeting in a Nashville gym to becoming one of country music's hottest acts. It's a pleasure to have them join us today. So before we dive into our episode, we'll be right back with an uninterrupted show right after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for coming on. Of course, glad to be here. Thanks for having us. Oh, it's my pleasure. I love asking bands that have distinctive names on how they chose it. I really believe that your name is rather interesting. So if you would, can you give us the backstory on how you chose yours? Yeah, so it was, we originally had a different name. And we got involved with record labels and agencies. So we were an old flag football team name of mine. We were basically a cover band. It was called Hopscotch Mafia. I did it because we were playing the college circuit and it was fun and people remembered it. But again, when we got involved on the business side, everybody remembered us for different reasons. Half of them loved it. Half of them thought it was the worst name they've ever heard in the history of music. So we were in the studio actually. We were talking about a name change and there was a magazine that said Boom Town on it. And we started talking about what a Boom Town is. And Boom Town is a town that he's unexpected prosperity. You know, it's a coal mining town, oil town. That was kind of what was happening. We were in the studio recording after just being this cover band and just out of middle and nowhere, you know, coming out of COVID, we're sitting there recording in the state of the art studio. And then we have a strong background of faith. And so we were coming up with a visual. We wanted a visual to go along with it. And we decided why not give a nod to our faith and that's where Saints came from. Yeah, yeah, that's a great story. Now you said you was recording. Once you got the name changed and everything was rolling along, what led you to do? What you're doing today? Everything, the music that we've picked, the music that we've written, it was unintentional at first and then we figured out that oh shoot, everything we're doing has very much a positive twist, a positive message behind it. You know, you could even call it rooted in faith. And so we started recording these songs and we wrote some of them with some of them. Our record label had brought to us and was like do you like these songs and he's, he's no a Gordon and Gary Cran, they're incredible at picking music when we need pitches. And so we started recording and we started realizing we kind of had a sound, you know, a positive feel, a positive tone to our music, to our message. And it seemed to go right along with our live show, which is very much our focus is just make sure everybody has fun. It doesn't matter what that means. We try to reach everybody and make sure they forget what's happening outside of whatever venue we're in while we're on stage. So that kind of, you know, just kind of the way it's come about and what we've become was kind of organic, but it was all rooted in. Ultimately was rooted in just wanting to have a positive influence on something. Yeah, that's great. When you can be a positive influence on people, nothing better than that. So how did you guys connect? We met at the gym. Okay. And so I was a solo artist and I needed a base player. I asked Chris to kind of just help me find someone because I was at the end of my career being a solo artist. I was going to go back to medical school and become the worst doctor you've ever seen. I asked him to do that. And I said, man, I really don't have one point I couldn't find anybody. I said, you play guitar. You can play the bass. It's me. Hold a stick up there and make it sound halfway decent. Nobody pays attention to the bass player anyways. I'm just, I'm just kidding for all the bass players. We love you. If you want to see a show, go off track real fast. piss off your bass player. And so I asked him to do that. We went out and played in Athens, Georgia. This was what Chris almost seven years ago. Seven years ago. It was over seven years ago now and kept getting invited back. There was a different energy on stage. It was something that I had lost that he brought back to it. And it just became a party and then the Hobbscotch mafia. God bless our families for living through that because that was the weirdest name I'd ever heard in my life and had somebody come up and ask for they were like, where are you little white red neck? And I went, no, I'm big white red neck. I was, you know, it is what it is. I'm not going to go fly a rap name. But yeah, that's kind of how we met and how things got started. Yeah, that's a great story. Once you met, then you started performing things started working out. Everything started falling together. Everything had a positive vibe. It looked like it was going to work out well together. When did you start writing your own material? COVID. Okay, COVID we, we were kind of writing and we had this idea of what we wanted to do. And we actually started getting some traction right like last day right before COVID. I'm talking like a month before everything shut down. We started getting involved with, you know, talking to record labels because we were like, let's just try this thing. And so during COVID is really where we started refining, you know, you had over a year to plan your attack when it came out of it. And so we were writing and we were working on things. And yeah, that's that's really where it all came together. It was just in the planning phase because we had so long. We had so long to plan. Yeah, I hear you. There was a lot of bad things that happened during COVID. I mean, I had artists I was supposed to be recording. I had artists that was on tour. And because of COVID, all of it came to a complete stop. There were also some very good things that happened during that time too. Stories just like yours where people got together and started doing things. Once you got through COVID, then you realize that a lot of things that you were doing was actually working. What was next for you? So Gary Krain, our manager, he's a better friend of mine for 15 plus years. At this point, I just was a buddy with him. I was in the corporate world. I was doing healthcare stuff. And Gary heard what we were doing and we played for him one day. And he was he's in radio. So he doesn't take credit for it, but he's one of the key drivers behind Lighting 100 becoming the one of the biggest independent radio stations in North America or the biggest at least when he was the PD in North America. And so he heard it and he just made some phone calls and he was like, look, you guys have something here. When he got involved, it really kind of took off. It started. You know, we didn't have the role of the X. We couldn't call people, but he could. And he did. And so he called Noah Gordon and Noah Gordon at the time was with the record label, but he was getting ready to start his own record label. And they started producing us and we had four songs that we recorded and they came out. I think better than anybody expected. Yeah. Once we had that in hand, no, it was like, well, why don't we just start with you guys? And that's kind of how it started. We just kind of came out of the gates signed. It's kind of a very, very favorable position for us to be in and not a story many people get ill. Yeah. That's nice. When you went in the studio, were you recording your own songs or did you do other songs written by other people as well? A little bit of a mix of both, actually. It's been since since we started recording and every time we go in, it seems that we, except for one time where we only recorded one song and it was ours every time it's been about half and half. So I mean, our job is to put out music that people want to hear. And so one of the ways we do that is try to remove ego from the situation and we just try to catch the song that if it moves us, we assume it might move somebody else. And yeah, half of them we thought were good, you know, better than some of the pitches we had and the other half were better than the songs we wrote. So if we've just taken the approach of whatever's best, we record and half of them has been ours, half of them haven't. Yeah, I love that attitude. It is a great one to have. When you are looking for the very best song to record and release. When you can get the music performance and the vocal performance to go along with it. So when the listener hears it, they believe it. There's not a better way to get a hit record out there than that. So once you got the songs picked, then you got in the studio, you got them recorded, then you proceeded to get your first single out there. How did that go? I better than expected. I can tell you that it didn't flop. I mean, that was. That's that's what you're always. You're always nervous as an artist and you never know what's going to happen. You put your heart into soul into something and you put it out there and you hope it goes well. But you just never know and all trucks go to heaven. Our first release, it did very well. I think that set up for everything that we have done since. Yeah, that's great. It's always good to have something go better than what you expected. Now earlier, you mentioned your Christian faith. Does your music and your writing tend to lean towards that positive country vibe? Yeah. You know, it's one of those things that we found out that we wasn't, like I said, it wasn't intentional at first. Now we have a little more of an eye on it, understanding that we get a lot of, we get a lot of comments on the road because we were very intentional about positive messages were on stage. And we get a lot of comments, get a lot of messages in our social media of people telling us how positively impacted them and how things have, we get a lot of very flattering things that are said, things that are much bigger than us. And so at first, it was kind of unintentional. Even all trucks go to heaven, the song we didn't write it, but it was the first one we ever picked. And the song is about as long as you keep going, you know, you're going to be all right. Things, things are going to change, you know, things are going to change in your life. Everybody's going to age, you're going to lose people, you're going to lose things, you're going to lose abilities, you're going to lose material things. But no matter what you're going through, you know, it's told through a truck, all trucks go to heaven. Unintentionally, we picked that song and then as we've kept going, everything's always had a positive spin on it. Even our even our heartbreak songs, we have two of them. One of the very first ones we wrote with our friends Keith Nadion and Fallissay is called How to Lose a Lady. And it's basically you're going in, you're saying, look, I don't have the love of my life. But here's exactly what I did. And I'm telling you now what not to do because I could write a book on it. And these are the things that I did wrong. You need to change. So even that had a positive spin, which was taking something negative and turning it into a positive. But now the one that's on the radio right now, this side of the dirt, it was very intentional to write a song that had a positive message with a faith-based undertone. And the hook on it is, it got only gives us so much time on this side of the dirt. I mean, it's just talking about what you need to chase and how hard you need to love while we're here. Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's a truly great message. So what's the typical audience look like for you? You roll into the venue, you set up, you kind of have your feeling on what it might be, but every venue has an array of different people. You've got a great fan base. So where you go, you hope a lot of your fan base shows up. Then of course you never know who's going to be there right along with them. So what's your typical fan base look like? I think it's still kind of all over the place, like you said. I don't think we've gotten pigeonholed into any one kind of fan base, which I think is advantageous for us in the long run. Like it's not just metal people, it's not just country people, it's not just faith base. It's everybody because that's our show. It is for everybody. That's just great. It's always great to have a diverse crowd. They get something and enjoy your music. So you finish the show, you're at the merch table, you're doing your pictures, you're doing your autographs. What's the feedback you're getting? Um, a couple of things primarily. So first of all, I mean, we have a lot of people tell us how much fun they had. I mean, and that is not that's not saying like, oh, we must just, do we just must be fun? We've been very intentional about putting a show together that is so that people feel that way. And our first four songs out of the gates, we do such different things to capture different demographics, different types of audiences. By the time we're six songs in, we've given something for everybody, but the energy is we try to keep the energy as high as possible through the entire show. That's one thing. The other thing though that is probably the most impactful thing we get is we get people that come up to us and they tell us, I mean, you know, how the message that we were delivering on stage gives them motivation to keep going. Some people will come up and said, you've given me hope. And we're like, wow, that's heavy. That's more than us. But yeah, we get that quite a bit because we are very intentional about, look, Ben and I, we don't deserve what we have right now. In the past, we've, you know, if it weren't for grace, we wouldn't be able to have the wives we have now. We wouldn't have the daughters we have now. We wouldn't have this career. If it was based on things we did in the past, we should not be anywhere in the atmosphere we're in right now. And we make that very clear. We're on stage that if we can be here doing this, I promise everybody has hope to move forward and keep and keep driving. And we get a lot of comments based around that. Wow, that's great. Very humble, very deserving. What's your band makeup look like? What's your instrumentation and how do you range everything? So I'll tell you what we got and mega-tay about the people. So we carry with us. We have a lot of movement in our songs. So we do have to run our orchestra stuff through tracks. Some people love that. Some people hate it. But we can't carry an orchestra with us. Unfortunately, we have a lot of strings in our stuff. We do carry a bass player. Two guitar players in our drummer. And we have a very unique mix of individuals. Ben, you want to tell him about it, guys? We have a giant mix of everybody. I mean, Caleb is our drummer. He's our rock back there. And he's a marine. You can't say form marine. They get pissed off about that. He is a marine. He's so smart and awesome. And then you have you have Trey who plays bass. Trey was on the voice. He's just an amazing, amazing vocal talent. Interjected real quick. We actually realized recently that he was top 10 on the voice. I think season 10. And we realized about a month ago, we're like, why don't we have him singing? So we haven't had a... We've strictly been playing bass for us now for a while. So that was that was it. I know. I know. And then you move our tour. One of our band leader, our guitar player, Mark, who if you saw him on stage, you think he's just all intense, metal-heav, metal-hawk and everything else. One of the sweetest men you'll ever meet. One of the smartest guys you'll ever meet as well. He's changed a lot of our lives just by mentorship. And then you've got Jesse. And let me just put this way. All of us have kids. Me, Chris, I trade us and have kids. The main thing, we all have kids. Jesse has cats. Jesse's about six foot four. And he looks like he just crawled off a Viking ship. If you saw him in the middle of the night in a dark room, you'd think something bad is about to happen. And you walked up to him and he goes, hi, my name's Jesse. How are you? I just hear me, you'll ever meet Greg guitar player. Just great hang. So... Yeah, that's a great collection of people. Now, do either of you play while you're performing? I do. Yeah, play acoustic. Because it gets expensive carrying a seventh person. So I'm a big who stick as much as I can. There's three guitars up there. I've got to deliver vocals. It's like, I'm good. I'm not just going to sit up there and hold something and just make it look cool. It's like, that's, you know, I've got to deliver that. And everybody else is absolutely amazing in what they play. Yeah, that's great. Now, do you divide your singing up or does one do more than the others? How does that all work out with your performances on vocals? Ben carries the majority of the lead. We end our live. There are, we switch back and forth a little bit. I do 30% of the songs I all lead. But the thing is, I actually learned this from FGL. Yeah, love Brian. He's a super nice guy. But I'd never like it when the second vocalist sings when they're not supposed to be the main guy. And so, yeah, I, Ben, I can't match his tone. I can't match the way he sings this little period. So he just go ahead. We let him carry that. Just go on and say it. Just go on and say it. And I can't sing harmonies worth a never mind. I can't say that. I don't have him. Yeah, I don't worry. A lot of people cannot sing harmonies. That's something that I've found with a lot of bands that I've been in. And I had to carry the harmonies lots of time. So I get that. Now, how do you plan your show? Do you have a set plan for the first six or ten songs and then ad lib from there? So how do you put together your show so that you have a certain structure that you follow for at least a certain amount of time? Then after that, do you start kind of going with the flow of the audience? So that's one of the beautiful things about the band being together for so long. So we obviously have backing band, but they're brothers-bars. They've been with us for a very long time. One of the beautiful things is at this point, we know how long including talking points, including we know how long each song takes. So when we map out a set and we say, let's play, we have to, you know, we have a 60-minute set. When we put a song in, we know exactly how long that song is going to take from the setup all the way through to the completion. But when we build the show, we build it in a way. You know, there's a science behind it. You know, you come out of the gates heavy, you want to hit them with something. They don't expect after that. Then you drive a little bit with stuff they know. Then you drop them off a cliff, come back up, drop them off again, then you end stronger than you've ever played your entire life. And so we kind of know how that goes now. And so when we plan our sets at this point, this is not really much planning to do. We know exactly what needs to go where in order for the show to flow properly. Now in the beginning, it took a lot of trial and error. And there were a lot of times we walk off stage and be like, that felt really awkward in that part. But for the last probably two years, it's just we've been doing this so long that we just kind of know how it goes this point. We haven't built for whatever time we need to go. Yeah, that's perfect. It's really dynamics within a song and then dynamics within a set. Correct. So what's your plans? What do you see within the next five years? Everyone has a set of ideas of where they want to go and where they see themselves going. So what's the next step? Where do you see yourselves? We are, I mean, right now. So we have songs being released every six weeks through early 2026 right now. We already have CUDA. And we're, fortunately, we're actually coming towards the end of our tour schedule this year. It's been a very hectic summer. And when we get, I think, October is kind of the last big month we're gone for a couple of weeks in October. And then November, December, we're going to really absorb family time. We're in this not for, we got in this because it was the most direct path we had to setting up a legacy for our daughters. And that's why we're in it. So you can't be in it for that and then take all your time and do it. So we're going to take some time off November, December and just enjoy the family, enjoy the holidays. Well, I think we might have a holiday party here there that we're going to do. But I enjoy, enjoy some hunting season, baby. That's what we're going to enjoy. Yeah, I get to take the five-year-old out for the first time and go deer hunting with it. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that's great. Now, you say that you're doing this to build a legacy for your daughters. Give me a little more background on that. I think that's great. What's the scope of this? You know, when you, so I was, I guess, this kind of where it started. When I was in the corporate world, I was making more money and I ever thought I'd make my life because I didn't grow up with much. And I was traveling the world. And I mean, Ben, I'm using the solo artist and he was doing all these crazy shows and opening for the biggest acts, opening for the Florida Georgia line, doing all these things. And you find yourself in a bit of a void emotionally. I was very unhappy. And what I was doing, Ben, I mean, I know he had happiness, but it was, it was, it's loneliness. And I had daughters and I was just not, I was always gone. I was just wasn't a present father. And the thing about doing music is, you have to push really hard and it's extremely busy, but the thing is when we come home, we get to be home. When we come home, I get to pick my daughter from school. I get to be here to do homework. I get to take them out of the dinner. I get to watch movies at night because I'm not on the clock all day long. And when it's all said and done, you know, we're on our deathbed. People aren't going to be talking about that contract I won or that time Ben opened up for, you know, Travis Tritt. They're going to be talking about like, oh, remember when in this era, and they were home all the time, and this story when we went on this vacation together or dad used to always be there when I was home from school and sit on the front step. And that's where it started. We were like, what kind of legacy are we going to leave that they remember us by? But also have the opportunity to make the type of money, very quickly in this industry that sets them up so they don't have student loans and they get out of college. And they have a trust fund that they can fall back on when they get older. And that's kind of where it's all rooted. I love it. It takes a little planning, but everything you said matters, it accounts and it's doable. Yeah, one of the biggest things for, you know, for me is, and for Chris as well, it's like, my dad passed when I was 19 years old. And you're talking about, I don't have a voice recording. I don't have hardly any videos or anything of him. My girls can go on YouTube, modify, they can go anywhere. They know who dad was. That's that's leaving a legacy too. They can look up on the wall and see a couple of number one plaques. They can see all that. They know, they know who we were. That's that's meaningful to me. I agree. It's very important. A lot of people don't know what the reason why I'm here in Nashville is for exactly the same reason that you just told. One day, I was in the studio with a very well-known singer that was touring all the time. His son had come in town. This was right before cell phones. One of the session players told him about it and he said, oh, I didn't realize my son was in town. I'll have to give him a call. Unfortunately, he did not have a relationship with his 20-year-old son because he'd been on the road all the time. Eventually, he did grow to have a relationship with him. And then, of course, he'd had a younger son that he was around a lot more. So it worked out. So I saw that and I said, this is not going to be me. At that time, I was recording, performing, and I decided to move to Nashville, get into the production end, do development, do the record label management, and that's why I'm here today. There are certain things that are just more important than having those records on the wall. Absolutely not. That would be... I imagine that was a painful moment and one that we hope to not have to encounter. So... Yeah. Yeah. So this has been great. You've given that a list and there's a lot of information about yourself on why you're doing this and what you're doing now. But what are some of the things that you still think is important that they hear about your plans on what you're doing? And of course, what you're planning on doing in the future. And then, I'm sure you have a couple two. First thing is we're... The reason... I mean, we just talk about why we're doing this and just know that our objective is to, you know, I guess not to sound cornier cliche, but like ambassadors of hope, man. That's why we do what we do. And just know that when we're doing this, we are just like any artist, we're going to do it imperfectly. There's going to be things that we wish we could do differently. It's going to be shows that we don't deliver the way we want to deliver them. But I just hope everybody knows that we're out there giving it everything we have every time we walk on stage. There's no party after because we are so tired we go straight to bed because we literally leave it all... Actually passed out a few weeks ago after a show. We leave it all out there. Yeah. There's actually a podcast that there was a podcast that was there and they just got released yesterday and they actually talked about it. They talked about seeing we all the ground behind the stage. David, I literally... Okay, so back story on that. We went to Colorado for a week, okay? And so we were sitting there at 8,000 feet elevation, getting our butt kicked that way. And then we come back down to 1,000. And you're supposed to be better after that. I look behind the stage after the show and of course it was what? 96 degrees? Something like that? It was hot. It was hot. I look back over there. Chris and him and Mark, I think, are sitting on the ground going, oh, God. I was like, wow. Yeah. Okay. Got a listen. We genuinely leave it all out there. So if you come and see us play or even if you listen to us on our records, I mean, we don't stop until we think the records are perfect. Thank you to Noah Gordon and Gary Cranford being so good at that. And then but when just if you ever get a chance to come see us play just know that when we walk on the stage if there's one person or 15,000 people, we are leaving everything we have up there. Yeah. And so that's kind of the main thing I hope people understand about us. And and and also, you know, when we we say from the stage, hey, look, come over to the merch table. It's not we're just trying to sell merch or something like that. It's nice. Yeah, but we really genuinely love meeting people on a one-on-one basis. And that's that's why we're important to anything. If you can make a fan one person at a time, that means the world. And we've had relationships with fans for many years now, for seven years, some of them. And we love the people. We love talking to people. Yeah, I think that's great. It's always nice to meet people in person. And like you said, gain another fan and gain a friend. So now how do people find you and follow you? So on Instagram and TikTok, we are at Boomtown Saints on Facebook and and.com. We are Boomtown Saints music. And we give a little bit of different stuff on all of them. Also, please go follow us on things like Spotify, if you can. It actually does people don't realize how much an ease, a quick follow even on Spotify. Apple, it does for does for artists. It goes a very, very long way. So yeah, you can find us anywhere. It's either Boomtown Saints or Boomtown Saints music. Yeah, that's great. Well, this has been awesome. Great conversation. Great information. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. And thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it, especially somebody with your your background and your your cloud in the city. We really appreciate you giving us some time. Thank you, sir. Yes, in my pleasure. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks again. Thanks for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the show. This has been a Tony Mantour production. For more information, contact media at platomusic.com.
