The Palomino Grant
Trying to give back a little to the Zenith City
We in Trampled by Turtles, in partnership with the Homegrown Music Festival, recently announced the two winners of our now annual Palomino Grant. I had the idea for this grant a few years back when looking at applying for my own grant, a process I never really completed. As I stated, our Palomino Grant has two winners. The prizes have varied a little year to year, but this year’s grand prize winner received $5,000 to spend on their creative life and two years of free dental care provided by our very dear friends at Cambridge Family Dental in Cambridge, MN. The same dental office contributed an extra $2,000 which ended up being the prize for second place. For those of you that aren’t familiar with grants in general, they are usually a bit of money for which someone can apply and they are usually project or genre specific. For instance, the purpose of our grant is to fund a musician from the Duluth, MN / Superior, WI area. Anyone to be considered must live around there. People apply on our website and include a music sample, a little bio, and a description of how they’d use the money. We don’t ask how they’d use the dental care. This year we had about 30 applicants which was down a good bit from last year so maybe we need to do a better job of promoting the thing.
I feel incredibly lucky to have started my own on-stage musical journey in Duluth, MN. In 1999, while attempting to go to college (an adventure that only lasted one year) I started to write a few songs. I found an open mic at a wonderful little place called Amazing Grace and my goose was cooked from there on out. In Duluth I found a surprisingly deep and wide pool of music. I say surprisingly because Duluth is not a huge city or even one that has nationally been known as a music hub such as Nashville or LA. Duluth in the early 2000s was as vibrant a music scene as one could find anywhere, even if the population necessitated it be a bit smaller than its shinier counterparts elsewhere in the country.
I loved the size of the scene. Duluth was just big enough to house a handful of venues, but small enough where there was only really one of each band. When starting a new band in fact, there was usually a conscious plan to not sound like anyone else in town. We already had a Charlie Parr and a Low and a Keepaways. No one wanted to be seen as a copycat. The scene had a very 90s DIY punk ethic permeating within. The term “sellout” was the worst thing an artist could be called and the priority was, at least outwardly, making something interesting versus making something financially successful. This is, of course, hindsight and thus romanticized. But that is how I really felt growing up in the Duluth music scene of that time. Many of TBT’s early shows were shared with punk bands, hip hop artists, jam bands, garage rock, whatever was around. We all seemed to like each other and support each other. This all culminated in the Homegrown Music Festival, our partner in this grant. I am working on a bit of a love letter to Homegrown for the book I’m writing so I’m not going to go into it too far here, but suffice to say it’s the coolest festival in the entire world.
I haven’t lived in Duluth for a long time now. I also have middle school aged kids and my teeth are usually in the glass well before midnight when I’m not on the road. That being the case, I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the Duluth music scene like I once did. Each year listening through these grant application songs and reading the stories that accompany them is like my little window into what’s happening there now. I am so happy to report that Duluth is still fostering incredible music. There’s something about that Lake that has always drawn artists and poets to its shores. I’ll drop a little preview of each of this year’s winners below. It’s a little confusing as the winning band is called Baharat, but all of their music recorded up until now has been under the name of the singer, Lyla Abukhodair. I’m sure you’ll get the picture. Enjoy and check out Duluth Homegrown Music Festival . Hope to see you there next year.