Jackson Holte at Jimmys Roadhouse

Jackson Holte is a musician, writer, and mule packer. His first solo record, Sky Blues, will be released on October 17th. In 2025, he won the Wyoming Singer-Songwriter Competition and the Montana Quarterly’s Big Snowy Prize for creative non-fiction.

Sky Blues is cinematic folk music, a loosely autobiographical concept album about  what Marilynne Robinson called "the attentive quiet at the center of Western life" and Tom Edwards called "the hush of the land." The twelve collected songs are alluring, unadorned, patient, spacious, rarely sympathetic, devotional.

“I love the contemporary songwriters doing this kind of thing like Gregory Alan Isakov and Jeffrey Foucault, but Sky Blues is just as much influenced by prose authors like Mark Spragg, Gretel Ehrlich, and Ivan Doig,” Holte says. “The record is decidedly Western, but we really worked to keep it subtle and grounded. Singing these songs feels good. They’ve got the breath of the land…