We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Julia Crow a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Julia, appreciate you joining us today. What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business

Somebody played MY bass on stage- while I was playing it.

Setting the scene- it was about 2016, I was freshly out of highschool and just moved up to Cleveland with my brother, Wesley Crow. It’s important to know 95% of my wildest music stories happen with him, as we’ve always played music together both for fun and professionally.

At this time, we had just started using the name, The Fifth House, which is still our band name today. While we had played around with various drummers at the time, it was primarily Wesley and I cutting our teeth on any opportunity we could take to get our name out there. So we didn’t discriminate- we played open mics, jams, radio features, etc.

At this point, we had no clue where the true hot spots were in the scene for original music, so we took our chances on this open jam/open mic type of event. It was a little outside of Cleveland, but we still made a decent 30+ minute drive to give it a shot.

We showed up for the start of the event, and there was a cover band that was hosting, so we sat back and listened to them play. After a couple songs, they opened the stage for other people to come up and play. We got called up and played a song, which the crowd seemed to love, then we stepped off stage. However, with a shortage of musicians, the cover band offered us another slot and to even jam with their drummer. We graciously accepted another shot to play, and since the drummer wouldn’t know our original tunes, we ended up playing a pretty well-known Pink Floyd song. It seemed to be one of the only mutual interests between us and the drummer. While we were there to play our own songs and a little caught off guard, we wouldn’t have declined an opportunity to play and have fun for a light hearted jam night!

As we get into it, feeling our way through the song and kind of playing by ear, there was surely a note or two that didn’t EXACTLY match the recording. But hey, we’re not Pink Floyd and we were just having fun, right?

Well, apparently not, as the bassist from the cover band came up to me, wrapped his arms around MY bass as I played, and yelled over the music, “play it like THIS!” Of course, just as quick as he came up to play my bass, he left and fled the scene for a while. Wesley barely saw what was going on due to our places on stage, but he’d noticed something was off for sure.

Now a side note, neither one of us would let that fly today. We’re older and experienced and know shady intentions when we see it. As well as just poor etiquette. But unfortunately at the time we didn’t really do much about it but fume quietly and discuss what had just happened after we got off stage.

We finished our song and set down our instruments, when another band member had come up to us. Barely even acknowledging the incident that just took place regarding their bassist, (who by the way, was old enough to be my dad even then) he says something about how the crowd is liking us playing, but he doesn’t want us to play anymore without more of their band involved because the attention should really be on them for the night, and the lead singer/keys player wanted to get back to their cover music for this one particular band they covered.

After that, I think wesley and I exchanged a confused look, offered to pack up our stuff, and flee. It got so fuzzy towards the end there but what we ARE sure of, is that wasn’t a truly collaborative experience to showcase local musicians as much as it was for this cover band to gate-keep some sort of attention.

For some context though, this might not even be THE wildest story I have. That leads me to mention why I brought up an overall negative experience, when I usually would like to focus on positives. This is something that I’ve unfortunately had to face more than once-not someone playing my bass, but the being spoken down to, taken advantage of, treated unfairly when I was a younger musician, and STILL as a woman in the industry.

It’s important to me to bring attention to the fact that the music industry, and the world as a whole, is full of these types of scenarios, and that it’s most definitely okay to make your voice and presence known if someone is treating you this way, to not take a passive approach and “tolerate” it like I used to. It’s vital to have your place and not be knocked down by micro aggressions and other egos. As much as it has pained me to be treated so poorly, I feel it’s another motivation for me to be as present as I can be in my scene and be a bridge to bringing other women and non-male folks to the stage. I want ALL to feel welcomed and included to creative spaces. I feel I have grown and learned a lot through the years, and I’m happy to say I think I can be a guide, a voice, and a friend in my local scene.

Julia, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve truly always been exposed to music since birth, and even in the womb. My dad would play guitar quite frequently, and allowed my brother and I to strum and sing to our favorite songs in the dining room of our first house.

That passion being nourished from such a young age kept us quite involved from school music programs to even forming our own band outside of school. My parents supported any interests we wanted to peruse, so when we started getting shows out of state, they took us in the family minivan as far as Florida and Tennessee because we were still minors.

When the time came for Wesley and I to leave the nest, we moved to Cleveland together for about four or five years to try out the music scene there. That’s really where our current band, The Fifth House, started to grow.

Through the years spent in Cleveland, and now back in Columbus, we’ve gone through a couple line up changes, and have landed on our dream team, and it’s never felt better. Besides my brother on guitar and vocals, and me in bass and vocals, we have Wesley’s now wife and my sister in law on keys and vocals, and Niki Weber, a dear friend of ours both since late middle school.

We feel something that sets us apart from other bands is the relationship we all seem to have with each other. It translates into our music and our energy on stage. Yes, it’s common to form a band with people you grew up around and went to school with. But Wesley and I, being about 15 months apart in age, are frequently told of how much of our own language and syntax we seem to have. Caroline has been a better part of the picture at LEAST since 2016. In our free time, we would learn songs and go play it for an open mic hours later or make recordings together. Niki was there with us commuting from Columbus to Cleveland and staying with us for week long recording sessions and whacky show opportunities. We’ve lived a lot of life as the group we are, so that language and syntax that we Wesley and I seem to amaze people with is now present in the whole group. I feel even in our biggest challenges from studio to tour, we radiated that synergy everywhere we went together.

So when asked to describe our sound, yeah we have some semblance of an answer. We’re somewhere on the sliding scale of rock and pop, but when you catch us live you’ll really understand us that much better. We don’t cram songs into a genre either, so you’ll be able to pick up on the bits and pieces of us and personality through out our songs.

Now having over 20 songs released as a band, we’re hunkering down for the winter to write more and continue to cultivate our energy as a band. We really want to get to know each other more (if that’s even possible) and make sure to highlight our talents as individuals making up The Fifth House.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

This is a seemingly little and silly one, but it really pertains to our resilience and dealing with the high stress levels we face as an independent-run band. Not everyone is as lucky as we are to have the coping skills to get through stress and panic together and come out stronger on the other side. A time I feel that shows resilience both as a band and for my role with leadership is the mini tour we put together for May 2023. This was our first venture out of state as The Fifth House, and for a string of shows, not just spaced out separate weekends. Tour is tricky in general, but we were navigating and juggling a lot logistically especially not having the support a band with a record label and massive funding would have behind them. Often times I don’t think people realize what a band has to go through, even locally, to get and successfully play a show, let alone TRAVEL for one. Wouldn’t you know sometimes you’re not even going to be able to park your car by the venue? You might have to walk a mile or something after you just loaded hundreds of pounds of equipment into the venue, whereas bigger bands may be able to have a parking spot be guaranteed for their arrival as well as staff to help unload equipment. On top of that, we don’t rake in the big bucks yet. What we get we are most grateful for and appreciate the venues that accommodated our tour so generously! But musicians as a whole are working other jobs to fund their music life and passions. That all comes with limited PTO and tight schedules, etc.

So our tour journey started like this: I took my SUV to go get a U-Haul trailer attached for tour. That was our most economical choice at the time. I took it back to my apartment, and one by one, band members arrived to load in equipment before we set off on our journey. But another detail worth noting, is Caroline didn’t even have a chance to go back home before leaving for tour! Thankfully, Wesley and Caroline being married and living together helps in terms of loading equipment as he had hers in his car at the ready. We swung by her work and picked her up and headed out to Indiana! Not going to lie, I started off super stressed, as you’re really not supposed to exceed a certain speed with a trailer attached to your car, and timing was tight. We had to head straight to our show three and a half hours away. This first little chapter got much easier as we got out to the corn fields between Columbus and Fort Wayne Indiana. We took our time, but we got there safely and thankfully, were able to park right up against the venue, load in, and play. So this show was DEFINITELY an outlier. We parked, got paid sufficiently (NOT based on ticket sales for once) and overall had a decent sized audience that turned into followers and fans. We went for ice cream at a local shop and settled into our hotel, all without any issues. The next day, however, was a bit different. Our next stop was Chicago, and in the heart of it. It was only another three hours (wavering on four with the speed issue) to Chicago from Fort Wayne, but we had a different obstacle this time. We knew we would like to drop off our bags at our hotel and check in before late, head to the venue to at LEAST secure a temporary load in spot, then hopefully park our car without walking miles back to the venue. But this is the biggest city we’ve played yet, and we know even parking at your own hotel can be iffy.

Soon, cornfields turned into sky scrapers as we neared our hotel, and traffic was already at a standstill. Then suddenly cars were lurching forward just to slam on their breaks again. The straightforward two lane highway turned into 6 lanes, all accompanied by people aggressively honking and cutting off other cars. It became a whole coordinated operation between me and Caroline checking for room to merge and hoping people would let us. The car had gone from laughter-filled to silent and anxious, and we were in high concentration mode. Finally we arrived at our hotel, and spotted a parking garage. Thankfully we were supposed to have a spot along with our rooms. So the time came to wind our way through the garage with our u-haul so we can unload and get show ready! So we started the upward spiral through the various levels of the garage… with u-haul. The turns were sharp, traffic was starting to trickle in and we barely had room to stay in our lane. The first two or three floors were full but we held out hope as the clock ticked towards our load in time for the show. But the next floor was taken, and the next one, and the next one. Honestly I’m still not convinced that we weren’t stuck some sort of horror video game at that moment, where floors just kept spawning out of nowhere. At this point we couldn’t even give up if we tried, there wouldn’t be anywhere to turn around. So we held out hope once again that there would just be room all of the sudden. Through nervous chatter and what-ifs, I felt myself losing patience and the ability to answer with anything certain. The pressure was on. I have a car full of people that are frankly here because I, as a band leader, set this whole thing up. Yet I felt like I had failed them. What if I missed a detail? Maybe I shouldn’t have done the u-haul.? What if there’s nowhere to park and we miss our show? These are my closest friends and they’re not here because I dragged them here, but I felt so much weight and responsibility to make this worthwhile. Finally, the sun quite literally shined upon us and revealed a parking spot! We made it to the final level of the building (and the cruel joke of a video game) and were able to snag a spot against the wall with our trailer. But after we celebrated our victory and complimented each other on handling the situation well, we realized our next big hurdle was ahead. Parking was this hard in our own hotel, what about the venue? We ruled out detaching the trailor to leave it at the hotel. But that meant we couldn’t even chance bringing this whole car and trailor, there’s no way there will be street parking to fit a trailer. We ruled out taking an Uber for all of us and our equipment because we couldn’t afford the highest space accommodation. And two Ubers was just as expensive! So what now? Somehow amidst the panic and unknown, as we had never been to the venue before, we devised a plan. We ordered a smaller Uber, put a couple people in there with the big equipment, and the rest of us walked with a guitar or two on our backs. It turned out to not be that bad of a walk, but this city was big and scary and new to us, so safety was of course, a HUGE factor. Thankfully, we all arrived at the venue on time. The last hurdle before setting up and playing was just getting in and figuring out where we needed to be. This was at a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright building, and it seemed to have a sprawling layout, and lots of levels. But we didn’t have any clue on where in the building to go. So we grabbed our equipment from the Uber and marched on in. We were immediately awestruck by the sight of marble and intricate crown molding, and just as we were about to breath a sigh of relief as we had finally made it to our show, a voice interrupted and said, “ you have to go around.”
“Go around? Go around where?” I asked.
“Around the building and through the back door.” We JUST got out equipment making its way through the doors and we have to go back out and find a whole new door? Why? We’re already IN HERE! Well, no use in fixing that now and we’re not about to fight whatever security issues that could cause, so we went around the back, got lost in the maze that was the back corridor, and finally made it back to pretty much the same room. That story doesn’t really end here, but as far as relevance, let’s conclude with how resilient we truly were. Went we found ourselves starting to snap in conversation from the stress, we stopped ourselves and elaborated our thoughts. When we felt there was no solution laid out for us, we MADE one. And we chose to still prioritize our safety, our relationships, and our passion for making music together. We came out the other side and even look back on it as a charmed memory. That’s something not every band, business, or relationship survives.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

A big piece of advice I have is to slow down your reaction time, especially in moments of stress. I’ve learned a lot of the situations outcomes are routed by my actions and reactions.

Once again, the Chicago story comes into play as a perfect example in my mind. The highway was stressful, I was white knuckling it the whole way through as soon as that highway split from two to six lanes, all while the band was asking me questions about the venue and the hotel and I really felt snappy and anxious. But I worked backwards mentally on where that was coming from. I have to slow down and really put my thoughts into boxes. Am I upset at them for asking questions? Nope! They’re allowed to ask questions, and I’m just stressed. That stress was coming from the highway. So in that case, I asked Caroline for help. I had her looking at my GPS and searching for the exits because suddenly taking my eyes away from what was ahead of me even for a second felt impossible. The rest of the stress came from the unknown, so we did our best to reiterate that we can only focus on the task at hand for the moment. We weren’t navigating this all perfectly by any means. I think we all can tend to get a bit short with each other here and there if we’re under so much pressure and nothing is familiar around you, but think about how much worse it could have been if I had given into my stress and snapped. That would have crushed the spirits. Because although we were all pretty stressed at such new and daunting tasks, it’s a lot clearer to navigate with full honesty with your feelings and your team mates! It helps to understand that any changes in the mood and atmosphere are only temporary tensions that can and will be worked through, because obstacles will appear in life. I’m really proud of my bandmates though. We did a good job staying grounded. And having fun! Shout out to Wesley Willis for the soundtrack of our tour!

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.Thefifthhouseband.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/thefifthhouseband?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fifthhouse/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqwTs8hGSqd9D–Eu75zyQw

Image Credits
Solo shots of Julia by Cameron Blair. Band group photos by Michael Furman.