About

Stout Branch Bluegrass is a Northern Colorado band rooted in the foothills and front range towns that shape its sound. The band plays a mix of traditional bluegrass and original songwriting, blending hard-driving picking with the kind of storytelling that carries the feel of life along Colorado's Front Range: irrigation ditches, high plains wind, mountain weather rolling in fast.

It's music made by people who live where they play, for audiences who know that same ground.

The band's name is a nod to that same ground's layered history. Stout was once a booming sandstone quarry town west of Fort Collins, connected to Denver and beyond by rail, its stone shaping sidewalks, buildings, and streets across the state. When the mid-20th-century Colorado-Big Thompson Project called for a new reservoir in the foothills, the town was slated to be flooded, and by the late 1940s its remaining residents and buildings were relocated to make way for what's now Horsetooth Reservoir. Stout Branch Bluegrass carries a piece of that history forward: a town moved for water, a name now carried by a band that sings about it.

Based in Fort Collins, CO, the band consists of Justin Hollis (lead vocals, guitar), Quentin Cieslinski (guitar), Chad Tarkinson (bass), Eric Erli (mandolin), and Corey Clark (banjo). Hollis, Cieslinski, Tarkinson, and Clark form the vocal core of the group, trading lead and harmony parts throughout each show.

Formed in 2026, Stout Branch is heading into the studio this fall to… Read more