Following his utopic DIY tour of the North East corridor documented in Midbrow here, Philadelphia-based musician Tyler Maxwell is headed South on a less idealistic mission: To survive as a working artist amid housing hardships and financial uncertainties at home. Follow along here as he writes about life as a performer and audience member traveling through Georgia, West Virginia and the Carolinas over the next few weeks in search of new sounds and scenes — and in lieu of, at times, a sense of security or stability.
Little Mazarn, Tree Spots
Yellow Racket Records
2311 E Main St.
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Oct. 5, 2025
I awoke at 4:45 in the backseat of my car in North Carolina, my legs bent and stiff from the cramped space. Slipping my shoes on to get out and take a leak, I got inspired by the way the dead of night cloaked everything: I walked around the field, filled with people hours earlier, now serene and peaceful in the moonlight, the stars dense and bright above me, though for some reason dogs barked loudly somewhere far off in the distance. Suddenly wide-awake, with a seven-hour drive to Chattanooga ahead, there was no doubt I’d be best served by starting the trek, going until fatigue set in. The roads were sweetly silent and mostly empty. I drove as far as I could before needing to rest, and went back to sleep at a rest area. The sun was out in full when I awoke.
Yellow Racket Records is an excellent record store in Chattanooga, artist-run and founded as an offshoot of an independent record label of the same name. Much like Autumn Records in Winooski, these are folks who both love music and make it, and that same artist-led attention to detail and obvious love of the artform prevails. Their side room plays host to events and shows, and sounds great (Mike took great care of us running front-of-house and mixing us all night); I played here with a rock band in September ‘24 and was happy to return. My travels intersected with those of Little Mazarn, the Austin-based duo (sometimes a trio with Carolina Chauffe, aka hemlock) of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lindsey Verrill and Jeff Johnston; they also performed at FEAST, the festival that I wrote about here. They’ve been on tour since September 24th, and will be home by the time this is published. Separately, uncoordinated, we charted course for Chattanooga, each stopping in Asheville along the way to stretch our legs and break up the long drive, my longest yet this year.
Little Mazarn’s set, in the close confines of Yellow Racket, was revelatory, a sonic feast unto itself. Live, Verrill’s voice is a deceptively strong thing, like when you’re armwrestling someone and straining hard and they don’t appear to be trying at all, just biding their time before they casually embarrass you in front of everyone. She sings softly yet holds out these long notes, with subtle microtonal shifts in her pitch, in muscular control; she and Johnston would intonate to one another, in deep-listening accord, Johnston pitch-bending his bowed saw to an unbelievably precise degree, Verrill sustaining, laser-focused, like a taught line. These moments were breathtaking, spellbinding, like time itself stopped. (I brought this up to Verrill after, and she smiled, saying, “Yeah, we have fun.”) Though cavernous reverb and delay were generously employed, there was an arid quality to their sound, like wind coursing through a dry creekbed, a moon not commanding tides so much as the drift of bones. Switching between harmonium, cello, banjo and saw, it’s not enough to say that Little Mazarn’s songs evoke the vastness and empty spaces of Texas, the curiously psychedelic way you rapidly cover ground on interstates for hours on end while so little around you changes. These two masterful musicians changed the speed of the air in the room: this was music of a hot and slow stillness, as still and dreamlike as that Hillsborough field at a quarter to five.
