Katie Kirchner

Katie Kirchner works the side of bluegrass nobody buys a ticket to see. Contracts, routing, advances, hotel rooms, merch orders, and the long email chains that make a Friday night show exist at all. She came to it from the stage, which is most of why she is good at it.

The band came first

Full Cord started in 2008 in Grand Haven, Michigan, and Katie is a founding member. She fiddled and sang. She has since handed the fiddle chair to players she rates higher than herself, and she stepped away from touring with the band to run her own business full time.

"I'm a fun fiddler around a campfire when everybody's been drinking."

The band is built around three core members: Brian Oberlin on mandolin, Eric Langejans on guitar and Todd Kirchner on bass, with fiddle and banjo chairs that rotate among players the band trusts. They won the band contest at ROMP in Owensboro, Kentucky in 2021, then the Telluride Bluegrass band competition and the IBMA Momentum Band of the Year award in 2022. They record for Dark Shadow Recording in Nashville with Stephen Mougin producing.

The name is a cord of firewood, not a chord on an instrument. It gets misspelled constantly, on posters, on show bills, in listings.

"You just saw me send over 90 emails over six months trying to plan this and sign contracts, and you still spelled it wrong."

The wood runs all the way through. The logo carries a jack pine saw blade. The albums are called Ready to Burn, Chop and Cambium. The merch leans wood themed and is mostly made by Michigan artists, and Katie puts all of it together, down to the lighters. The lighters carry a policy: bring an empty one back to the booth and you get a new one, for life.

Learning the other side

Before music was the whole job, Katie spent years in senior living, moving up into executive leadership and doing acquisitions around the country. COVID ended that chapter. The musicians in Full Cord, who had watched her tour manage them, told her she was good at it and should do it for other people.

"Having been a musician on that end of things for so long, you see the other side of things, and you see what's lacking. And that's where I come in."

The first client came at IBMA in 2022. Katie told banjo player Ned Luberecki she wanted to work with more artists. He pointed her to a back room where Becky Buller was sitting, and said Becky could use the help. They have worked together ever since. In 2023 Katie was nominated for the IBMA Momentum Award for Industry Involvement, barely a year into the work.

The roster grew from there. Chris Jones & The Night Drivers. Rebecca Frazier, who records for Compass Records. Kristy Cox, the Australian bluegrass singer with five Golden Guitars from the Country Music Awards of Australia. Mike Compton and Joe Newberry, who work as a duo and separately. She also manages Desmond Jones, a jam band out of West Michigan, and she is blunt about the difference: bluegrass radio, podcasts and magazines say yes to almost anything, and the jam scene mostly does not answer. Anj Way works the same side of the stage and tells a similar story about the hours.

Artist hours

She does not keep office hours. Her artists live on artist hours, so she does too, which means a day that starts near eleven and a phone still going at three in the morning. There is a standing Tuesday call with Becky Buller at nine, which she admits she has missed more than once. Chris Jones gets caught in airports, because getting home to northern Alberta takes him several flights.

The job is also comfort. Venues and festivals do not always think about what a touring band needs, so she does. Food, rest, a room that works. Once it meant arranging a Latin Catholic Mass for a musician on the road. She sends emcee sheets ahead so announcers say and spell the names right. Her operating principle is to be nice, and she says the back-scratching that follows is exactly how this world works.

What she thinks is coming

Part of her old job was reading trends, and she has turned that on live music. Small venues are closing. Single-genre festivals are folding or cross-pollinating to survive. Audiences save up for destination events and skip the fifteen-dollar show down the road. Fewer bands carry openers, which was how most people used to find anybody new.

"People will buy thousands of dollars worth of tickets, airlines, hotels to destination venues or festivals, but they won't spend $20 with a $6 fee to prove some kind of point, and it's really, really affecting people."

Her call to action runs two ways. Fans should buy the ticket, pay the fee, and buy it even when they cannot go, so the band can come back. Bandsintown and band newsletters, she says, now do the job Facebook posts used to. And the biggest artists, the ones whose fans will follow them anywhere, should spend some of that pull telling people there is good music one rung down.

She would rather be wrong about all of it.

"I would like to come back in the fall and listeners can prove me wrong about my predictions."