Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Katie And Tim Jones. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Katie and Tim, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Tim:

Soon after Katie started working at The Garden Theater, she was approached about a collaborative project called Stories That Heal. Northwest Michigan Arts and Culture Network partnered with composer Molly Sturges and Interlochen Public Radio (IPR) to create this intergenerational program which focuses on healing through the arts. The Garden was purely asked to be the space for gatherings and the final performance.
They were looking for another facilitator to guide the songwriting process. Katie mentioned me as I had been doing similar work for years through the Country Music Hall of Fame and other organizations working with kids, vets, indigenous tribes, and corporations across the country leading them in creating songs for greater human connection and understanding. From there, it just became a bigger part of Katie and I’s focus and energy. We could see the impact our writing sessions and open meetings were having on our community.
The project culminated in a performance of local community members sharing their stories through poetry, essays, and song. One woman who had lost her husband to an accidental overdose sang the song we wrote with her about her love for him and what it feels like to be left with her two young sons. It was extremely powerful and a moment that reminds you why we do what we do as artists.
The project is now going into its third year and has been incorporated into the local high schools as a weekly program. IPR has a podcast about the process and individual community members. The songs that were written through this process have been recorded and are available on streaming platforms. For our little community, this feels like a way that Katie and I can share our skill sets in giving back in some way.

Katie and Tim, 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?

Katie:
I am the executive director of the nonprofit Friends of The Garden Theater in the little Northwest Michigan town of Frankfort, Michigan. The Garden Theater was originally a single screen movie theater built in 1924 and it now is used as a performing arts center and event center as well as moviehouse. Tim travels for his musical career for half of the year and collaborates with me in productions the other half of the year. If someone would have told us this 20 years ago, or even 10, or even 5, I would not have believed it.
For most of my adult life, I worked in filmmaking. Originally as an actor, but dabbling in different varieties and settling in the producing side of films. Organization and problem solving came naturally to me and I liked being behind the scenes, but my passion for the process was waning.
Tim signed to his first record deal at 21 straight out of college. He had been working with bands and supporting himself and our family as a musician ever since.
We had only ever lived and worked in major cities, Los Angeles, Chicago, Nashville. When the pandemic hit, I joke that Tim and I lost our minds and moved to the town where we vacation. It is our favorite place and we wanted to be closer to family and immersed in nature. Since then I’ve realized that if we had lost our minds, I am not interested in finding them…or whatever version of them that existed before.
We always dreamed of creating original events and building a venue from the ground up. The Garden Theater had just become a nonprofit organization. They were looking for someone who could run it as an arthouse movie theater as it always had been, as well as a performing arts venue. My appointment to the role of executive director became our family’s chance to live a life as artists in a different way than we had previously experienced. I can put on events and rely on Tim to gather and lead the talent.
In the time that we have been here, the community raised 3.3 million dollars to restore the theater building, build out the performing arts capabilities, and put a solar garden on the roof. We might be a small year round town, but the summer swells with tourism. At the theater, we provide a variety of music, theater, dance, and original artistic experiences for the vacationers. This helps keep the lights on at our 300 person theater in the wintertime. The community has celebrated having more access to the arts at The Garden and we feel lucky to be able to facilitate this.
When we came to The Garden, I quickly realized what I was missing in my filmmaking career. I am driven by the ability to help and create for others. Working at a nonprofit fills that desire and lifting up other people makes me fearless.
I think Tim found the balance in his life he didn’t know was possible. He is now able to travel and perform around the country, but spends the bulk of his time at home with family while still existing in a creative space.
There was so much harm that the pandemic brought into the world. We feel lucky to have found a sliver of good. It allowed us to stop time and reevaluate our life. To think outside the typical lines of a creative path.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Katie:
When Tim and I met in Los Angeles, we were driven by our individual goals of success in our separate industries. Tim just signed a record deal with his band Truth & Salvage Co. and was leaving to go on tour with The Black Crowes for several months. I was bartending and desperately trying to get auditions as an actor. Success was a different concept to us in those days. I am not even sure I can remember what exactly that was for me but certainly being able to support myself solely as an artist was the main goal.
For the next decade our careers took shape in different ways. I transitioned to behind the camera and was working steadily. Tim was writing, teaching, and still travelling heavily for shows. By 2020, we had two little girls who went along for the ride traveling at times to see Daddy and moving for stretches of time to be on set near Mommy. But one thing remained the same, it was still a constant hustle. Hustling for the next gig, paycheck, job, and sense of security.
Having kids shifted what drove Tim and I. Our former goals seemed less important. Providing a secure upbringing was really the only goal. But we started to think about what it would be like for us to be able to be creative and be home with our kids more. I know we each carry a little guilt about different times when we both worked heavily during our infant’s lives.
Essentially our kids brought us to where we are today. To the community that we create in and serve. Our talents are celebrated by our community and that instantly redirected our mission. It became very clear from the first event that we threw for our town that connectivity between people is always the goal.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Tim: For the longest time I felt like if I wasn’t making a living by performing and selling recordings of my original compositions or those I had created with collaborators, then I wasn’t achieving the perception of success I had created in my mind. But even while I was doing that for most of my life, I felt unsatisfied. Constantly in pursuit of some other “level” of happiness. In Nashville playing for tourists on a weekly basis, I started to come to understand that what I loved the most about being a songwriter, and especially performing, was facilitating the mystical connection you can make with strangers. I love making people happy. Katie and I are both middle children. We love to entertain. The narrative I had told myself of what I needed to be happy wasn’t true. Finally stepping away from almost all of it when we first moved to Michigan really helped me divine that the human connection part of watching an audience get turned onto to music and enjoy themselves, whether it’s 50 people at the local pub or 9500 people at Red Rocks, is what I’ve always wanted. And I actually prefer the 50 people because it’s a closer connection and comes without the pressure of the pomp & circumstance of touring, promotion, sales, etc.
Katie has been able to create the perfect stage at the Garden Theater with an audience hungry for this connection to music in the same way that I’ve been wanting to deliver my whole life. I/We really feel like we’ve landed at the right place at the right time. I wouldn’t be so content if I didn’t have all the other experiences to compare it to. I’m just so grateful that the stars have all aligned in this lifetime.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.gardentheater.org
• Instagram: timleejones, thegardentheater
• Other: https://www.interlochenpublicradio.org/podcast/stories-that-heal

Image Credits

Rachel Haggarty