Meet Jordan Eastman

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Eastman. 

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Laurel and I met at Roberts Western World in Nashville, TN back in 2014. I had been touring as a solo artist but was looking for someone to form a duo with. 

She sent me some links to her YouTube videos and I thought she was not only incredibly talented but absolutely adorable. 

I really wanted to sing with her, so hired her to play banjo on my next tour under the condition that she wouldn’t try to date me…we quickly became best friends and year later we were married and had formed Fort Defiance as a full-time project that we were touring 300+ shows a year with until COVID shut us down in early 2020. 

During the lockdown, we started raising goats and chickens on our little homestead “Fort Defiance Farm” and have been taking the time we’ve had off the road to write and record our new album “Problems” – a record we’re very proud of that chronicles the vast range of emotion we felt during our time alone through the pandemic and adjusting to the permanent changes brought on as we move past it. 

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Definitely not always smooth. I was used to being on the road, but it wasn’t as easy a transition for Laurel. That first year after quitting our jobs and relying solely on shows was really tough. We’d only been married 4 or 5 months when we did that, so there were a lot of growing pains initially. 

It’s incredibly hard to make a living playing music as a new, virtually unknown startup band, and I pushed us really hard. Probably too hard, in hindsight. 

Eventually, I think we settled into it, and when we started bringing the dog and cats on the road with us, it brought a sense of home away from home. 

By year 5, it was kind of just what we did and how we lived. 

We’d gotten really good at it and it was a pretty well-oiled machine at that point. 

When COVID hit, we were on our way to the west coast at the start of a 250-show run. That was probably the hardest thing for me since we had worked so hard to get to the point where we were playing bigger shows, for bigger money, and had some really huge things lined up for that year. We felt like we had a ton of momentum coming into the year and it all just stopped so suddenly. 

That took some time to recover from, but in the end, it ultimately ended up being really great for us as a family. It forced us to work together to adjust and grow after everything we’d been focusing so heavily on for half a decade just abruptly halted with no real sense of when it would open up again. 

We’d always had a lot of trust in each other professionally and musically, but I think in that time when everything got stripped away, we really realized how unified and close we were off stage as well. It was pretty beautiful. 

I think we really grew a lot as a couple in ways we weren’t able to while touring so extensively. 

We hadn’t been home for more than 2-3 weeks a year for 4 straight years, so to involuntarily be home and be forced to rest and reassess things ended up revealing a lot of unresolved issues that we were able to work through in that time. 

We’d never taken a second to just slow down and recover, so getting to spend time with each other without the stress of touring and having the opportunity to explore interests outside of music and start farming and raising the animals and everything ended up being a really awesome experience for us. I think we’re a lot closer because of it. 

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We always felt like what set us apart from others was our on-stage dynamic as a married couple paired with the unique and meticulous approach to everything we did. Everything we do on stage is intentional. 

We don’t use setlists – which forces us to talk to each other and communicate the entire time. 

We don’t have a drummer but use foot percussion that was intentionally built bigger than necessary to serve almost like a soapbox and command attention. 

We try to make every song have some element that forces you to watch and makes the audience feel like if they look away they’re going to miss something; whether it’s frantic stage antics or playing tiny toy pianos or singing into the same microphone or playing instruments behind our heads, or whatever – we want it be an intentional spectacle from the first beat. 

We’re both really particular about that and take it very seriously. 

Contact Info:

• Email: fortdefiancebooking@gmail.com
• Website: www.fortdefiance.com
• Instagram: Instagram.com/fort.defiance
• Facebook: facebook.com/fortdefiancemusic
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCztGNZ7VGesTAm9wq0jqAuA

Image Credits
Rob Taber
Joshua Lohrman
Scott Sievertsen
Jesse Eastman