Intimate. Integrated. Shitty

The Shitty Barn started as a handful of Spring Green friends who loved music, brewed beer, and were tired of white-knuckling it back from Madison shows at 2 a.m. As a co-founder, producer, and creative director I helped shape the vision from day one: a homegrown, intimate listening space built from a raw agricultural barn that Furthermore Beer wasn’t using for much beyond seasonal parties.

At the time, I was designing for Furthermore, making beer labels, packaging, posters and event materials for their launches, and getting increasingly obsessed with the intimacy of house-show culture (Soirée de Poche series, David Bazan’s living-room tours, all of it). During a Furthermore tasting event I helped pour, I floated an idea that had been gnawing at me: what if we hosted our own version of that here, in our homes? Chris Staples pointed back to the barn. That was the spark.

A small group of us began meeting and building the idea out. We brought in MJ Hecox from the Madison music booking scene to help us navigate the zero knowledge we had on the topic, partnered with local sponsors, donated our band’s PA as the first sound system, and launched a five-show pilot season. I led the entire visual and narrative identity: branding, website, social media, show marketing. I designed and screen-printed posters in my basement. Once the first season proved a second and third, the number of shows scaled and the poster series along with it. I brought in other talented designers to help and curated designer posters for the first eight seasons.

Before our very first show, I remember asking a local shop owner if I could hang a poster for the event. He smiled and said, “Good luck. You’ll never get people from Madison out here for music.” Fifteen years and over 350 shows later, the Shitty Barn proved otherwise.

Most importantly also taught me something I’ve carried into every creative project since: if an idea keeps tugging at you and you gather the right people around it, you can turn something improbable into something unforgettable. All of us original founders have since moved on and the barn is now in the hands of twelve incredible local co-owners. I’ve passed the designer poster series to Tracy Harris, one of the first artists I trusted to help make posters in those early seasons. The ethos remains the same — chase the idea, build the thing, and let a devoted community make it bigger than you ever could alone.

(David Bazan ended up kicking off the barn’s 5th season, which felt fitting)