Howdy! We're Music By KOTA, out of Jackson, Tennessee, a small city in the midsouth sitting right between Memphis and Nashville. Growing up there means growing up on both sides of that line, the blues grit and soul coming out of Memphis and the honkytonk twang coming out of Nashville. A bit of blues, a bit of country, and a bit of classic rock. That's Southern rock to us.
Three of us have been playing together for almost a decade now. Before we were ever Music By KOTA we were just playing covers all over West Tennessee, cutting our teeth the old fashioned way. At the turn of 2020, right after everything shut down, we decided to stop playing other people's songs and start writing our own. That meant starting from scratch in a lot of ways. We spent those next few years grinding it out in Memphis's DIY scene, playing anywhere that would let us plug in, just trying to figure out who we actually were as a band.
After a few years of playing all over the Southeast, it finally clicked. We were a blend of the soulful, bluesy country rock we grew up on and the modern indie energy that made us fall in love with doing this in the first place. That's what took us into the studio in Nashville to cut our first full length record, and that album is really the whole story of that transition, going from a scrappy DIY indie band to grown up, rooted Southern rock guys who finally know what they sound like.
If you like Kings of Leon, Mt. Joy, Whiskey Myers, or the Red Clay Strays, you're probably going to love us. Our live show is loud, high energy, and kind of infectious. But the music's only half of it. At the end of the day we're just a group of guys who work hard and love what we do, and we care about actually getting to know the people who show up. Somewhere along the way we stopped chasing viral moments and started building real ones.
That's the whole bet going forward. We think the next grassroots movement in music is coming, and we want to be part of it the old way, person to person. We're fully independent, no label, no management, and we've built every bit of this ourselves. So come catch a show, say hey after, and join the journey!
Contact: musicbykotabooking@gmail.com