In front of a smattering of plastic lawn chairs — blue, white and red, most of them — Michael Jullian and Matthew Seabury make themselves comfortable on the Oasis Stage, kicking off their set with the former on guitar and the latter on the electric bass.
Similarly attired in dark pants and hats (Jullian with a feather in his), Jullian takes the lead on singing the melody while Seabury harmonizes. They play a mix of Eric Clapton, Jonny Lang, and self-composed songs, such as “Cornerstone,” which Jullian wrote while in Costa Rica after not having “written anything in a year and a day,” he explains.
A man in a skull-spangled tee shirt capturing photo and video for the duo smiles, holding onto the stem of his glasses with his teeth, as the pair finish Clapton’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.”
Later over at the South Plaza Stage, the Murray Concert Band plays “The Empire Strikes Back,” and the group that follows, jazz. Mike Raleigh, subbing for the Riverton Jazz Band, has been playing the trumpet for 65 years, and enjoying it more every day. He claims he’s “no expert of the things on the page” but that it’s “fun to get with the guys and improvise a lotta good harmonies.” During the night, the heavy metal band Loss of Existence will take the stage, their first time playing at one of the few venues in which you can find such an eclectic mix of genres all in one place — the Utah State Fair.
The one with the connections and the know-how to assemble them all is Jaime Poulos, the mind behind the music of the event. As I spent some time at the Utah State Fair, which ran through the first half of September 2025, I sought to understand the local live music scene through accountants whose passion is heavy metal and musical nomads who have only recently found their way to Utah. Especially striking was the common thread through an otherwise diverse array of ensembles — the draw of live music in an increasingly digital age.
From Accounting to Music Promotion
Poulos has been working as a band promoter and booker for 13 years through her business Evanston Staging and Events, opening the doors for local musicians to play in shows in Utah and the surrounding areas.
Poulos grew up in a musically oriented family, with varied interests embraced by all. Her dad loved country — Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings — and her mom pop, hip hop, Madonna and the like. Poulos was raised by her grandparents, who would listen to Big Band and swing. When she was in high school, “it was all new wave,” she says, “Howard Jones and Devo, those kinds of bands.” Her first concert was Billy Joel on BYU campus when she was 13 years old.
While living in Evanston, Wyoming, she heard some guys playing music down the hall from her apartment, so she walked up to the door and started singing with them. “It just evolved from there,” Poulos says. “They started wanting shows in Salt Lake, and so the next thing I know, I’m looking for venues and the venues are telling other artists, ‘Hey, I have a girl that’s booking music … and then it just took off.'”
When I ask Poulos what genre of music is her favorite, she holds up her arm, a bold “HEAVY METAL” tattoo splayed across it. She’s dabbled in playing music herself, but hasn’t played her acoustic guitar too often for fear of wearing off the signature that’s on it — that of the former lead guitar player of Megadeath.
With a background in accounting, she says she loves heavy metal because of how “mathematically measured” it is. “I like to keep track in my mind of a song mathematically,” she says. “I feed it from both sides — the intellectual and the creative come together in my brain with heavy metal. I’m a Gemini, so it works.”
As passionate as she is about heavy metal, Poulos is also conscious of others’ musical interests in her work booking bands for various venues, from clubs to fairs. Her measured, careful consideration of the complex aspects of heavy metal music mirror the deliberation with which she approaches crafting musical experiences for a multitude of ages and interests. Booking bands for a state fair, she explains, is a bit different from booking bands for a club, who might have a narrower theme — a night of 80s covers, or exclusively rock, for example.
At the fair, Poulos has to ensure that there’s music for everyone — 40s swing for the older generation, classic rock for those who grew up with it in the 60s and 70s, punk music for the younger crowd, and more. Even the time of day plays a part in the planning — the concert bands play earlier, because the older people tend to visit the fair earlier in the day, and “the metal heads come out at night, you know, they’re vampires,” says Poulos.
The exciting thing about the fair for the musicians, Poulos explains, is that they get to share their music with more people than most of them ever have. During the year, many local musicians play in bars and clubs, but the fair opens up the possibility for them to reach people that they otherwise wouldn’t play in front of (on a typical day, anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 people come through the fair, with 50,000 to 150,000 expected on the closing weekend. “The musician is like, ‘I’m reaching someone new, I’m getting my message from my music to someone new, maybe I’m going to open their mind to something, maybe I’m going to educate them, maybe I’m going to entertain them,’” she says. “It’s like a whole different world for them.”
Catching Fish on the Fretboard
After my conversation with Poulos, she drops me off, in the golf cart she uses to make her rounds, at the Oasis Stage, where the behatted Jullian and Seabury would be playing.
Jullian started out as a singer songwriter in his 20s, performing in Philadelphia and Vermont and touring across the country twice out of his car and has been playing music for 35 years. Eventually he had the desire to play with other people, and started playing in and forming bands and even created his own studio (“I wanted to teach myself how to do it all and how to play everything,” he said). He started to get hired for certain gigs based on his vocal and instrumental abilities, and from there, his career continued to grow.
Growing up in Tucson, Arizona in the 70s, Jullian found a love for rock music, which continues to this day. A Tom Petty poster hangs on the wall of his room, he’s a top contributor on the Tom Petty Nation Facebook page, and in a Facebook ad where he reached out in an effort to form his new band, he asked for a “Lead Electric Guitar player who is a DIEHARD Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers enthusiast." He’s spent time living in California, New England and Costa Rica over the years before moving to Utah a little over two years ago. In Utah, he connected with Anthony Van Horn, who welcomed Jullian into the music scene in Utah and passed away unexpectedly in 2024. “He was like my brother,” said Jullian. “He was the one looking out for me in terms of being new to Utah … [He] was the reason that I got connected to the rock and roll scene, the music scene here, and the blues society here … Anthony was a beloved person.”
A self-proclaimed “lover of music and teacher of music,” Jullian finds the greatest degree of exhilaration being in a rock band, and pursued that passion with a Facebook ad about a new band he wanted to start, the Lightkeepers. The response to the ad was overwhelming. “It was a big deal,” he said. “I’m not from here, I didn’t have a record, I didn’t have a single, I hadn’t written anything in a long time.”
Jullian has written his own songs over the years, but upon starting fresh with his new band in Utah, he says that Tom Petty is the key to success. “In order to get established and play in front of people, the bars, and get a following, you’ve got to play covers,” he says.
Though covers remain a core part of his approach, he also has his own album in the works. His approach to songwriting usually involves starting with a melody on his guitar. “Songs are like catching fish,” he says. “Once you’ve got something on the line, you’ve got to stay on that thing … because that idea might totally leave. It’s like a spark, and then somehow the fire controls you, you’re not controlling it.” His song Cornerstone, which he wrote last year, came about in such a way while he was living in Costa Rica.
For Jullian, live music is “the ultimate experience in music,” he says. “It is the pinnacle of everything, for us as musicians and for people who go watch live music.” That said, Jullian doesn’t approach performing as a way to get validation from the audience. “My job is to make myself and my bandmates levitate at least 40 minutes in a 3 hour set,” he says. “If we disappear up there, that’s when people really turn on.”
That perspective towards performing is something he learned from a musical mentor when he was a “novice … caught up in some insecurities,” he says. “I was writing pretty decent songs and getting to open for some pretty big people. I was preoccupied with that … ‘I don’t know if they’ll like that [song], is this one good enough for this gig.’”
One day in Massachusetts, Jullian found himself in a studio with Franklin Cokely, who worked for Sony, and for CBS as a producer. On a break during the recording session in which Jullian was lending a musical hand and ear, Cokely leveled with him.
“You’re playing because you want people to like you. That’s not what music professionalism is about,” Cokely warned Jullian. “You’re trying to be on the stage with one foot as a musician, Somehow you think you’re going to step all the way out in the audience and have a boot out there watching you … your legs aren’t long enough to do that … If you’re not doing music 1000% for you, for your soul, for your chi, you’re in the wrong business, young man.”
“It hit me like an arrow,” says Jullian. “Ever since that moment, I was like, ‘I’m going to intensely just do the box,’ because if you do that, everything else comes to you.”
On the Oasis Stage, “the box” for that day, Jullian does just that.
The Flavor and Feel of Live Music
Why the ongoing pursuit of live music in a digital age? Ed Smith, part of the heavy metal band Loss of Existence who performed at the fair, says that live music is just more personal than music recorded in the studio. “You can sit there and spend all the time you want in a studio and make the thing perfect, perfect, perfect,” Smith says. “But in reality, that’s not … reality.”
Poulos agrees. “When you record something, everything has to be perfect … but when it’s live, it’s more improvised, there’s things to accommodate. The open space might change how everything sounds so there’s also mistakes … [a musician] will incorporate those kinds of things into the music.”
Diane Taylor has been part of the Murray Concert Band since 2001, and is in her second year as director. “Live music has a different flavor, a different feel than recorded music,” she says. “You can feel the energy and feed off of the energy of the audience.”
“I think the best thing about [live music] is being able to feel it,” says Poulos. “There's a difference between listening and feeling, you know?”