We recently connected with Aaron Varnell and have shared our conversation below.

Aaron, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

To answer this question, let’s start with a somewhat simplified history of my career path. While I was going to college for engineering in Houston, I bartended and worked for a few catering companies on the side. I loved behind behind a bar and took a couple of unequivocally hedonistic gap years to move back to North Carolina (my home state) to sling beer at breweries. When I finished my degree, I went straight into the environmental remediation industry, which paid the bills but was never going to be my passion. There were moments during this time when I was playing music almost every night and slogging my way through the days. I would not recommend it to anyone.

When I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, I picked up a bartending job while I sought work outside of the environmental industry but my resume eventually pushed me back onto the engineering path. I kept a foot in the music world, starting a band (Cactus Cat) with the primary intention of having fun and keeping a creative outlet. A few years in, COVID hit and I started booking music on the side for a local independent movie theater (The Lyric) because absolutely no one was seeing movies and they had to start diversifying to survive.

After about six months of juggling an engineering job, a family, and a band with an increasingly demanding role at The Lyric, I realized that if I didn’t fully commit to the creative world that had been calling me for years I would regret it for the rest of my life. So I took the plunge, left the engineering job, and started transforming The Lyric into a multipurpose event space and music venue. Plus movies, of course, but they were no longer the primary focus. I’ll note here that I was part of a team that was responsible for this transformation, but played a major role in setting the infrastructure that we would build on in the years to come. It’s been a wild and challenging ride, but I can’t see myself doing anything else at this point.

To get back to the question at hand, I don’t really know why I ever did engineering. Math has always come easily, and I dated someone in college who was majoring in environmental engineering so that seemed as good a path as any to go down. But the drive to create music and community has always been churning loudly in the background of my life, and when I look back on some of the Lost Years of my 20s I wonder why I didn’t just start a band then and explore that world more fully. Now that I have a wife, two lovely young children, and a distinctly domestic existence, my schedule is the main limiting factor in Cactus Cat’s trajectory.

And my current job at The Lyric is as rewarding as anything I could possibly imagine. It’s more consistently challenging than anything I ever did in the engineering world. It utilizes every skill I’ve ever honed and pushes me to improve myself on a daily basis. Most importantly, I’m making something new in the world. I’m a driving part of a grand idea to bring creativity into all facets of life and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My current job title is Chaos Cultivator at The Lyric – an independently owned event space, movie theater, music venue, and creative hub in Fort Collins, Colorado. I used to call myself the Chaos Wrangler, when The Lyric was an untamed beast that needed to be corralled, but over the past few years we’ve built systems and now I view my role as tending to an overgrown garden. Planting an event seed here, trimming a sales margin there, and creating a cohesive user experience that transcends the eclectic nature of the space.

I’m also the founder and saxophonist for Cactus Cat, a 6-piece Adventure Rock band that dabbles in enough genres that we felt like we needed to make up our own.

So exactly do I do at these organizations? Very generally I make chaos, then I reign it in. I create the stories behind their trajectories and convey them to the world at large. I cultivate data-driven organizational systems in an attempt to solve unsolvable problems. I like a strong foundation with messy edges, because that’s where you find Really Interesting Things.

More specifically, I manage time and space at The Lyric. I book the movies, make our event schedule, write our weekly newsletter, connect the dots between employees who are working on parallel tasks, drive our creative vision forwards, and meet with potential event organizers to let them know what’s possible. With Cactus Cat, I pretty much just honk on a saxophone and ramble into a microphone and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

What we can do overall is first realize that the people who bring vibrance to our society need to pay their bills, and create programs that focus primarily on that end goal. With costs of living rising to an extraordinarily unsustainable level nearly everywhere, those who are pursuing passions at the expense of a regular salary are forced out of participation in society.

But the solution doesn’t just lie in government funding. Businesses can be a crucial part of the art ecosystem, and I’d love to see companies who have been posting record-breaking profits start giving back to their communities in the form of no-questions-asked rent subsidies for those who are making the world a more interesting place to live so that they can keep doing Just That.

As individuals, our spending power is limited. But our voices aren’t. We need to start demanding direct art support from the local governments and companies that control our immediate world in more ways than we realize.

How did you build your audience on social media?

My social media presence was never exceptional. I could never really get the tone or vibe right. But I did finally find my audience with the weekly newsletter I write for The Lyric, which currently has nearly 14K subscribers and a consistent 45-50% open rate (I’m pretty proud of that).

It’s authentic, it’s rambly, it’s irreverent, it asks big questions, and I always sign off as the mysterious Voice of The Newsletter. It’s probably my favorite part of my job, and I’ve been told that The Voice is a minor local celebrity in certain circles.

So I guess my advice is to find the right platform for your style, and make your own platform if you need. The quick snippets of thought that convey best on social media is certainly not mine, although I will say that my social media tone has gotten better after finding my voice as The Voice.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lyriccinema.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/cactuscatband/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/cactuscatband
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/@cactuscat844
• Other: https://www.lyriccinema.com/newsletter-

Image Credits
Milo Gladstein; Craig Vollmer; McKenzie Tharp