Small-town renaissance
Silverton's Julian Hood on making music, art and film at 9,300 feet

Sleepy little Silverton is quietly becoming a haven for artists carving out new creative lives in the shadows of the mines. One of them is musician, filmmaker and screen printer Julian Hood. His screen-printing shop, band, Half Bandit, and upcoming film, “Tommyknockers” are evidence of the small-town artistic renaissance. Ahead of his band’s Nov. 1 show in Durango with ORA, Hood sat down to talk community, creativity and the strange magic of making art at 9,300 feet.

SS: Julian, how would you describe what you do?

JH: I am a musician, a filmmaker, and I’ve been making my money primarily from screen-printing T-shirts in Silverton.

SS: How did you end up in Silverton?

JH: I took a job dogsled tour guiding in 2017 in Snowmass. I was in Texas playing music full time but wasn’t supporting myself well. I needed a reset. I surrounded myself with 200 dogs and 10 other guys for six months with no connection to the outside world. My roommate was from Durango and told me I’d love it there. I visited, loved it, packed up and was on my way when I stopped in Silverton. Within two weeks, I had a job, a house and people to play music with.

SS: What has it been like to drop into a community like Silverton and start making music?

JH: When I got here six years ago, there was zero pressure in any performance sense. I had come from bars and venues where all eyes are on you. Here, people just didn’t care, which was a relief. After a while, it got weird. I got apathetic toward performing. I played a bit in 2019, started playing in Durango in early 2020, then everything shut down. I holed up and started writing. That’s where a lot of my newer songs came from.

The community didn’t really start here musically until the past two years. Because of the Powerhouse, there’s now a place for musicians to land. I’ve played in several bands, and it’s been a strange musical renaissance I didn’t see coming.

SS: You’re alluding to the Silverton Powerhouse?

JH: Yeah, the Powerhouse is an art space run out of an old industrial building, also known as Scotty Bob’s Skiworks. A group of artists got together to start running it. I was one of the founding members three years ago. I needed a place to put my screen print equipment. I moved into the Powerhouse with four other members, and now there are about nine of us renting space there.

SS: Tell us about your musical project, Half Bandit, which has a show coming up Nov. 1 in Durango with ORA at the Fort Lewis Chapel.

JH: Half Bandit is my music, but it doesn’t exist without John Bailey, whose drums helped launch the sound into the space it needed – beachy, tropical, kind of circusy. Then some friends joined, including Mario Letayf. Bailey kept saying, after every idea, “when we full band it,” so we called the band Half Bandit. We’ve played at the Ouray Film Fest opening night for the past two years. That’s our residency, and this show will be our first time branching out.

SS: Do you have any recordings coming out?

JH: Yes. We recorded about a year ago. We set up microphones, did a practice, then forgot about it for six months. I sent the recordings to James Mirabal in Nashville. He mixed them, and I put together. We released it on Instagram and will release a small EP by the Nov. 1 show.

SS: What’s on the horizon for you?

JH: I’ve been filming a hybrid documentary-narrative portrayal of Silverton for the past year. We’ve been calling it “Tommyknockers,” based on Cornish mining lore about creatures in the mines that protect and trick miners. It’s based on the idea that the town has more people dead than alive, and that the environmental work people like my girlfriend, Nora Dwyer, do is a form of atonement – connecting with the land scientifically and humanly.

We made one film last November following filmmaker Noam Kroll’s rules: no script, no shot list, shoot in one day, all sound from set. We made it, I entered it into Raindance (Film Festival) in New York City, and two months later, we got the email that we won. I thought it was a hoax, but it was real. (It) was a huge validation.

We’ve developed “Tommyknockers” from that idea and hope to finish filming next month and release it this winter.

SS: That sounds incredible! Do you have a website where people can find your work?

JH: I’m polishing it, but right now, I’m posting on thees.us, which is a shortened version of my T-shirt company site, theestees.com. I’d like to connect more with the creative community in Durango and the Southwest. If anybody wants to reach out through my email or Instagram, I’d love to see the creative community become more cohesive so we can all support each other and remind each other that we can do this, even if we’re not in a big metropolis.