Dr. Jonathan Kolon, a Navy dentist who calls Park City home, is one step closer to seeing his dream of making a country-music album come true.
In November, Kolon, who named his band Mountain Town, released a new single, “Last Time Around,”, and earlier this month, Mountain Town released another single, “Ride the Raven.” That song is currently airing on UK’s Amazing Radio.
The goal of these songs is to capture the stories of the West, said Kolon, who spends a lot of his time working in the Washington, D.C., area.
“I have come to find that people on the East Coast are very unfamiliar with this part of the country,” Kolon said. “There are a lot of old feelings that we’re living in the Wild West. Sure they know shipbuilding, agriculture and farming, but they have never been to a mountain town. They’ve never met anyone who has been a miner, or visited a city whose heritage is mining. And that has made me appreciate what the West has as an area.”
That unfamiliarity with the West comes up when Kolon does interviews with the British press.
“They have no concept of dust storms, doughnuts and deserts,” he said. “So it’s been neat to bring these stories about the area we call home to these people.”
Kolon’s love for the West is one of the reasons he plays folk and country music.
“The folk world there is a good gravity for the image of the cowboy, and there is a bond there,” he said. “There are also a million stories that I can tell, and a million ways for me to tell them.”
One of the stories that Kolon addresses in his song “Last Time Around” is the loss of a loved one.
The song was inspired by his late friend Tom Lucas, a fellow songwriter he met years ago at the Kingston Trio Fantasy Camp in Scottsdale, Arizona.
“Tom looked very frail the last time I saw him, and I told my wife, Kim, that I didn’t know if he was going to make it to any more camps,” Kolon said.
A few years prior, Kolon had recorded Lucas singing an original song, “Take a Little Time,” which is about the loss of a loved one, and in turn, Kolon had played for him a song called “Down Here,” which was recorded in a songwriters’ circle in Park City.
“The premise of that song is that everyone up in heaven is doing great, but it’s been hard for those of us down here,” Kolon said. “That was the last song that I got to play for Tom.”
When Lucas didn’t make it to this year’s camp, Kolon decided to rope in his feelings and use them as inspiration for “Last Time Around.”
“I got up early one day and decided to work on a song just to see what would come out,” he said. “I sat down with a spiral notebook and started to hear everything — the verses, the chorus, the bridge — in my head.”
After recording a rough cut of the song, Kolon approached his friend Fred Grittner, who is also a songwriter and producer.
“We played through it and we started hammering it out,” Kolon said.
Kolon took the song to the 2021 Americanafest, home of the Americana Honors and Awards in Nashville, Tennessee,.
“The festival is on the radar for a lot of folk musicians, and you get to meet people in the industry,” he said.
Kolon was able to network with many studio owners and session players who helped him master the song at NashVox Studio.
“It was fun to get the session players some work, and get that Nashville style in the song,” he said. “It’s a cool song to write, and I’m very proud of it.”
The plan now is to get the songs ready for a full-length album that Kolon wants to release next Thanksgiving.
“All the music is done being written, and the art for the cover is already picked out,” he said. “We want to do a 300- to 600-unit order with (producer) Animal Farm so we can at least get the music into the hands of those who attend my live shows.”
For information about Mountain Town and Jonathon Kolon, visit facebook.com/mtntownband and mountaintownband.com.
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Navy dentist’s band Mountain Town releases new single, “Last Time Around”
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