Make Music Day 2020: Boarding Gate Studio Spotlight

The Brand New Luddites preparing to strike down their robotic overlords.

Boarding Gate Studio, where dreams take flight, as owner Todd Moses says. This Make Music Day, Boarding Gate Studio will host three artists: John Howell from noon to 12:30pm, Jim Ruffing from 1 to 1:30pm, and the Brand New Luddites from 2 to 2:30pm, as a part of Big Heavy World’s Make Music Day live-stream.

But before we feature them this Sunday, I wanted to take a quick dive into the backstory of this southern Vermont studio. Who Todd is, where the name Boarding Gate came from, and whatever other details find their way into the story of Todd’s itinerant life.

Within minutes of speaking with Todd, I understood his passion for music. After hearing the phrase, “back when you were making music,” or something along those lines, Todd quickly corrected me, pointing out that retirement does not mandate that one put away their drumsticks, guitar picks, and embrace a soulless silence. He still plays live, even though his days of on-and-off-again professional musicianship are behind him, and now enjoys music as something innate and detached from constructs like money, fame, and pandering to senseless producers with doggerel lyric ability. Now, he’s just a man and his studio.

The studio, nestled in Bennington, sits at the (current) end of Todd’s long, country-crossing career as a musician. Since growing up in the arms of a rockin’ ‘n’ rollin’, potato mashin’, polka-lovin’ father to mixing EDM beats in college and drumming in Nashville, Todd has been around the scene.

The journey from a kid with some sticks to a retired producer began under the influence of his family. His father was an old school rocker—back when suits were mandatory for bands to perform on TV, and rock and roll was the devil’s music. He jived and jaunted, pairing rock and roll with polka and other eastern European influences too. And while his father was performing, Todd was absorbing, listening to him and the music of his friends and siblings, which included bands like the Beatles. This means he was regularly inundated with music from across the spectrum of rock, pop, and polka. Over the years this range has grown and grown.

In college, Todd worked sound production for an EDM band before graduating and moving around to Ohio and eventually Nashville to embrace the music life. There he battled among the other 1352 drum striking Nashville cats, and learned first-hand about how hard one has to fight and scrap to find their place in larger music scenes. He played in the background of recordings and on stage and worked hard to forge a career in the nation’s musical capital.

Eventually, the responsibilities of fatherhood caused a change of direction for Todd, putting music on the back-burner. This and other concerns brought Todd home again to Vermont, where he’s resided ever since. 

Back home, he got to work building Boarding Gate Studio, a project inspired by dealing with difficult producers and having to “beg, barter, and steal” in order to put together his last album.

Boarding Gate Studio comes as a mix of passion and pragmatics. After dealing with complicated producers, Todd now seeks to provide the simplest model for music production. A studio which keeps money out of the way, allowing for the music to take center stage. A lot of young studios attempt this; no producer wants to be that producer whom every artist seems to know: the thief, scammer, or milker who creates a new wrinkle in order to snag a few extra dollars. But what separates Todd may be his life’s worth of experience, and the passion that has pushed him through all of these decades.

Through all of this: decades of professional musicianship, busking, recording, and producing, and chasing a passion cross-country like Will Hunting, one could only imagine the knowledge and experience acquired. This leads us to Todd’s current passion: artist development. A somewhat forgotten role in the modern, hyper-independent music scene. Artists may have the talent, be it songwriting, a voice, or a skill with picks and strings, but they may lack the experience and aptitude to fine-tune their professional process. Like a guiding hand, or a musical Yoda, Todd wants to share his decades of experience with young acts still finding their way in a wide and scattered musical field. The internet drastically changed the music scene over the last two decades, and it will likely change again, according to Todd, and he wants to be there when it does to help artists through this mercurial field.

Tune in to Big Heavy World’s live-stream at noon this Sunday to hear the artists of Boarding Gate Studio, and nearly a dozen more, jam it out across the state for Make Music Day!

Text by Luke Vidic.

Photo courtesy of Todd Moses.