By Tamma Hicks, STEAM Magazine
Dustin
Welch grew up in Nashville where his father, Kevin Welch, was a songwriter for a publishing company for about 20 years. So needless to say he grew up around some of the finest songwriters in the industry and all his friends parents were in the business somehow. Dustin began playing in bands at the age of 12 with a bunch of neighborhood kids and then after college music really started to take hold of his future. There was a bluegrass string band with Cory Younts (Old Crow Medicine Show), then a stint with the Scotch Greens, a cow-punk/Americana group out of San Diego CA to play banjo, mandolin, and slide guitar. They had two days of practice before piling into a van and driving straight to their first gig in Madison WI. From there they gained speed and toured for 3 months strait opening for the likes of the Reverend Horton heat and Flogging Molly as well as joining the Warp Tour and touring Europe. The band had started performing some of Dustin’s songs before it ran out of gas. At that point he’d been writing songs mostly for other people and that’s about when Dustin headed to Austin for himself. He’d never fronted a band before, but thought he’d give it a try. House Band and Sam Hill both had good runs but, like with so many musicians, everyone had other projects they were committed to. Since 2009 Dustin has been committed to helping improve the lives of veterans and in 2011 started the non-profit organization Soldier Songs & Voices. Between the organization, writing songs, MAR 2018
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performing, and touring, Dustin partners with Kevin Welch at songwriting clinics all over North America. He also has a new album, Amateur Theater, coming out this spring. (Kevin also has one too, Kevin Welch: The Dead Reckoning Years, due out also this spring.) I’m just going to jump straight in here, so how did you get involved with Soldier Songs and Voices and working with veterans? I believe it was about 2008 or 9 when the Welcome Home Project asked to use a song I had written about a returned Vietnam vet to put on the compilation disc Voices of a Grateful Nation. And so subsequently we would go out and support that record at their events. I always performed that song at my gigs as well so I'd talk about the song and the project. And it seems like I always have somebody come up to me after a show and they tell me how they always wanted to write a song or learn to play an instrument or both. And finally after hearing this so many times my dad and I saw that we could make this happen. So, we talked to the people from the Welcome Home Project and they brought me on as a board member. We approached Kent Finley at Cheatham Street Warehouse, because of anybody I could think of, he was such a huge advocate of songwriting; he's just the main guy and he would promote it throughout the community. At the time I wasn't aware that they had the Cheatham Street Foundation, so we kind of fit together. I was still living in Austin and I would come up here every Monday, as long as I wasn't out on tour, and we put the word out that if any veterans wanted to come in and learn guitar learn to write a song. After a couple of years, the folks from a Welcome Home Project had less and less time to dedicate towards this project and honestly it was rising so fast. So, at that point we applied to be a non-profit and started other chapters around Texas. There was one at Saxon Pub in Austin, at Sam's Burger Joint in San Antonio, and others. The
one at Bugle Boy in LaGrange is still running. At this time we've got chapters in Fort Worth, Santa Fe NM, Florida, Arkansas and a couple chapters in Portland OR. We’re just getting ready to start one in Columbus Ohio. They're all over quite honestly. It sounds like chapters come and go. Yeah, it kind of depends on the volunteers and how much time they've got available as well as the venue they're in. Sometimes it's because the musician that's leading the group has gotten too busy or gone out on
We didn't start doing this because we could see the therapeutic benefits; we started this because playing music is fun and maybe this is something that would help them feel better and have a good time while they try to figure out the next step in their lives. Dustin Welch tour and wasn’t able to have someone else take over. My father and I went to Australia and helped a different group, who took on our ideas, and started up a program there for their veterans. Because it's in another country and we're a nonprofit, it couldn’t be the same program as ours. But really music is a universal thing and there are trauma victims from war everywhere. So the program is run by volunteers and meetings are at venues?
All of the chapters are run by professional or semiprofessional musicians who volunteer their time, there's no paid staff. And a veteran coordinator in that area helps get the word out. And we set them up with a whole bunch of guitars that have been donated. We hold the meetings in social settings, so people aren't quite so isolated. Venues seem to be more than happy to give us time and space in their club. The venue has to be a neutral ground, so it can't be at VFW's or Legion Halls or clubs like that because it's too easy for a veteran to fall into an isolated comfort zone and what we want is to create a comfort zone without isolation. That's one of the big issues with PTSD is that you isolate yourself until you're just cocooned in your own room and you have no interaction with anyone else. So, we keep the door always open. Is this something participants have to attend weekly or regularly? Most chapters meet every other week, occasionally it's once a month. The one that I run here in San Marcos meets every Monday and has for the past seven or eight years now. It’s not one of those groups where you’re required to attend or have three versus done by the next meeting. It’s an open group and so the numbers and dynamics are always changing. Do people who attend your meetings have to be veterans? Can other people who suffer from PTSD attend? We specifically work with veterans. We can't call this “music therapy”; because I'm not a therapist, I'm not licensed. But this is what we do and we know through science that music heals. This type of program can help anyone with any type of brain trauma or brain injury. You see it in Alzheimer's patients and with all types of different disabilities. Anybody who's been through any kind of traumatic experience from a bull rider to a football player, what we've seen is astounding! People get their cognitive memories back and they suddenly start remembering