About

What does Grand Ole Opry member, Hal Ketchum; 2008 Academy of Country Music male Vocalist of The Year, Jack Ingram: Americana Instrumentalist of the Year and Producer Extraordinaire, Gurf Morlix;  Singer Songwriter from Wimberly, Texas that No Depression magazine called, “The Queen of Modern Texas Country Soul”, Robyn Ludwick;  a film student from Pakistan, Zohaib Latif and a real estate agent from Las Vegas, Jeff Mix have in common?

Lost. Vegas. Hiway.

It’s a movie and album, of stories and songs, about down and out people in a dive motel in Las Vegas. It tells the stories of the people you may otherwise just write off. It’s a story of empathy. A glimpse into what really goes on behind closed doors of someone who hasn’t always had a fair shake from life. The songs deepen the stories and the stories deepen the songs. The film is is currently in post production and looking to start a festival run in Spring 2016, with the lofty goal of premiering at SXSW.

Jeff Mix, had a real estate client looking at million dollar homes. Turned out he was a conman on the run from AZ. Mix was impressed by how well he could lie and imagined him in his motel room coming up with the scams he was doing. “I thought I should write a song about this dude. Then I thought, why not a song about a multiple guests at a dive motel. The idea was to put together an album and and make a music video for the song, Fremont Street. Once we did that, it was like, let’s just make a movie with all of these characters” Mix said.

Mix regularly made real estate video tours of homes and hired Latif, who lives in Pakistan, on a website called ODesk. It allows people to work together from all over the world. That was where they first met and quickly became friends. The entire project continued to grow, with people being added and the movie getting longer. It will have a run time of approximately 60 minutes.

The film has the bigger names mentioned above, as well as  Blake Phillips( host on KUNV’s americana radio show ‘Our Kind of Music’), Tiffany Rose Thomas ( Killers at Play), Michael Blair (2015 best actor -Mrs. Mannerly). The film has also brought together so many musicians from the local ‘Vegascana’ scene. Featuring Ken Osborne (The All-Togethers), Jack Evan Johnson, Justin Mather, Chris Heers, Seth Turner, Paige Overton (The Clydesdale), Tsvetelina Stefanova (Same Sex Mary)Tom Meny of Austin Texas and winner of the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival 2015 and some of Vegas’s most beloved venues. The majority of the film was shot in and around Las Vegas and the opening scene was outside of Austin, Texas at the famed Devils Backbone Tavern.

Mix is hoping to help shed light on the burgeoning local scene in Vegas. “We’re basically trapped on a desert island here. We have nothing in a 200 mile radius of the city, compared to cities like Boston, where an artist can easily gig all over the place. We only have each other, which has helped make a tight community of artists and may give us our slant on Americana, we call Vegascana.” Mix doesn’t think we’ll achieve a “Bakersfield” brand, but Vegas has it’s own kind of slant.