John Fullbright got his start at the legendary Blue Door listening room in Oklahoma City. It was there that he recorded a live album and found his base, opening for many other writers including fellow Oklahomans Kevin Welch and Jimmy Webb. His 2012 studio debut, From the Ground Up, received a Grammy nomination for Americana Album of the Year, and later that year he won ASCAP’s Harold Adamson Award for lyric writing. In 2014, Fullbright released the critically acclaimed Songs, toured all over America and the UK, and appeared on Late Night with David Letterman. A true songsmith, Fullbright inhabits his songs’ narrators completely, his old-soul voice fleshing out complex characters and subtle narratives with a gifted sense of understatement. An incredibly talented songwriter, Fullbright’s Songs certainly has its moments of darkness, tracks born from pain and heartbreak, but for a craftsman like Fullbright, there are few greater joys than carving emotion into music and taking a stab at that lofty goal of immortality through song. It makes him—and his fans—happy, and there’s nothing bad about that. His MusicFest performances are classic Fullbright turned “up to eleven.”