Rising Stars: Meet Aaron Konzelman

Today we’d like to introduce you to Aaron Konzelman.

Aaron, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I was born into the music industry. My parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents were a major Christian and gospel music group in the early days of the Jesus movement in the 1970s. They created seven albums and did several world tours across the United States and Europe.

My early childhood was spent in the back of a tour bus, sitting on the back row at a tent revival concert, or in the recording studio with my dad as he mixed albums for word records which at the time was based out of Waco Texas before moving to Nashville in the ’90s.

Our family’s house was situated on about 700 acres of land on the Brazos River just outside of Waco, Texas. This is where my grandparents ran their private record label, and where my father built his world-class and one of the first digital recording studios in the country in the early 1980s.

The walls of our living room were lined with every possible string instrument you can imagine. I started on the old upright piano that had been passed down in our family for years but eventually gravitated toward the acoustic guitar at the age of 8 years old.

I remember struggling as a child to find my voice, and how to communicate with the world. From the first moment that my fingers touched the strings of my father‘s old acoustic guitar, I knew that music would become my first real language.

I began writing music around the age of 12 and began performing in local coffee shops and churches at the age of 13. I helped form a little Americana rock band with some friends around the age of 14 and we began gigging almost every weekend around Central Texas.

My father was still working with word records all through the 80s and into the 90s so we would take a family trip up to Nashville multiple times a year to visit different executives at the label. Toward the end of the 1990s and early 2000s slowly but surely all of the rest of my extended family made their way up to Nashville and Franklin Tennessee.

Two of my cousins opened and currently run a very successful studio near Franklin to this day where they write and produce for many artists. There has always been a strong musical and creative tie between Waco and Nashville that remains to this day. The Nashville music, art, and creative scene have always felt like my second home.

In addition to music, my other main love was martial arts which I started practicing in 1988 at the age of seven and eventually achieved the rank of a second-degree black belt and a recognized sensei with the United States Karate Association.

By the late 90s, I was playing two or three shows a weekend, leading worship full-time for the youth and college groups at my home church on Sunday, and all through the week I was teaching and coaching the US junior Olympic martial arts team for national competitions.

In 2002, I met my wife Amanda at a community college here in Waco, Texas that has a thriving commercial music program teaching business, management, songwriting, and audio engineering. I knew that she was my soulmate the very moment I saw her in the hallway my first semester.

We immediately started singing and writing music together. I graduated at the beginning of 2003 with an audio engineering and songwriting degree and we were married about one month later.

For the next 17 years, we traveled the country working on staff at multiple churches leading worship, teaching and training sound, and lighting techs, and consulting on church planting. Outside of the church we were writing our own original music and performing multiple times a week.

In 2014, we moved back home to Waco from the last church plant we had helped start in Austin, Texas. I had been producing for a studio that one of my best friends had built in South Austin at the time on the side of full-time church work and touring.

When we moved back to Waco to be near her to our families, we had no jobs and no income, and we were actually living with my wife’s parents for a time. Growing up, my father had always taught me to be creative and to build things with my hands.

So I immediately started a sound design company doing consulting and live Soundsystem installs for venues as well as a custom built guitar business. I also started a small custom leather goods design company creating and designing products for many local boutiques in Waco one of which is the now-famous Magnolia Silos with Chip and Joanna Gaines.

We finally were able to get a new house in Waco where I built a small recording studio in one of the back rooms and began producing and recording local artists. In 2015, we reconnected with some dear friends whose daughter was an up-and-coming songwriter and artist in the Waco and Nashville music scene.

They owned a publishing company in Nashville called Platinum pen Publishing as well as the famous Omni Studios.

They asked us to fly to Nashville with them for a weekend to do some writing sessions and meet some of their team at the publishing company and we were signed as full-time staff writers within the next month.

This began about a year and a half-season of living and writing music in Waco and traveling to Nashville several times a year to record and write with the other staff.

During The next five years living in Waco, my wife and I were performing about 130 shows a year locally here in Texas. One of my favorite opportunities that I had was being personally invited to President George W. Bush’s Crawford Ranch to perform for his private birthday party and open for George Strait.

In 2016 we were discovered by Michelle McNulty executive producer of NBC The Voice and asked to be on the pilot of a new show she was working on for NBC called Songland. But before the show went to air it was shelved by the Network to be restructured and released several years later in a different format.

In 2020, I stepped down from 26 years of full-time church worship ministry and became a full-time programming and production Director for the local historic Waco Hippodrome Theatre which has been operating in Waco for the last 106 years.

During my career, I have had the privilege to work with artists like Gene Watson, Wynonna Judd, Steve Wariner, Travis Tritt, Shawn McDonald, George Strait, Johnnyswim, John Conley, Dave Barnes, Matt Wertz, Tommy Emmanuel, Jose Feliciano, Jennifer Wayne, Blake Shelton, and many other amazing artists.

At the end of 2020, I was contacted again by Michelle McNulty the executive producer of NBC The Voice, and asked if I would be on season 20 of The Voice. I flew to Burbank in the fall of 2020 to begin the filming process and ended up getting a chair turn from John Legend and Blake Shelton.

I chose Blake Shelton as my coach for the season and progressed about halfway through the show. I stayed in Burbank California for the filming of the show for several months and returned home in February 2021.

Currently, our family is still living in Waco Texas where my wife and I write and perform music, produce original music for film, and produce for other artists. We have two children a daughter who is 16 and a son who is 13 who also have started their journey in the world of music and Theatre.

I still run my custom leather goods and jewelry design company 1856 Supply Co, as well as making handmade custom felt hats at my newly launched company Three Arrow Hats.

We are currently working on a full 12-song studio album with some of our lifelong friends Brett and Emily Mills who have also been in the music industry writing and touring for over 20 years. We are thrilled to be working with some of the band members of the David Crowder band and Chris Tomlin band in our local studio here in Waco for this album project.

I am also building some relationships with different creators and boutiques in Nashville to begin selling some of my leather designs and custom hats as well as several lines of men’s beard and body products in the near future. There are a lot more crazy stories in this long journey that I could tell but this is about the most precise a highlight that I can right here.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I’ve never seen a smooth road in my life! Being centered in the Bible belt of Texas working as a worship pastor, as well as gigging in bars and clubs on the weekends has always been a tenuous dichotomy.

Also being married to my creative and business partner is an exercise in walking a tight rope between personal life and professional life.

But honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. In our 19 years of marriage, we have moved 11 times for church work and music. Very early on we realized the importance of defining home as each other and our community of chosen family rather than by where we lived.

There have been many ups and downs for us in our chosen life of music and storytelling. Seasons where the phone just wouldn’t ring, followed by seasons of sharing the stage with our musical heroes. But that’s how life goes. It moves in waves like the ocean.

And we have always held the understanding that for every crest of a wave there is a trough following it. And then for every trough there is a new wave just behind.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
In addition to being a songwriter and live performer since the age of 12, I have also been alive as a studio engineer for most of my life. I am honored to have shared the stage with some of my musical heroes and  engineer for many more. The highlights of this long career for me are definitely the relationships we have built along the way.

One of my most memorable moments was at a show that my wife and I were performing back in 2015 at a local music scene in Waco, Texas. Our crowd was probably not more than about 10 people and by the end of the show, I was beginning to question what we were really accomplishing in our musical career.

At the end of the night, I was cleaning out a few bills from our tip jar and in the bottom was a folded piece of paper with a handwritten note. It said, “thank you for singing and telling your stories tonight. You made my sister smile for the first time in a long time and I don’t have many more months to see her do that.”

At that moment, I realized that this is why I do what I do. To touch people’s hearts. To connect with people and share stories. To help people if even for a moment feel not so alone in this world. I knew at that moment that I was doing exactly what I was made to do and I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

I keep that note on my dresser at the foot of my bed and look at it often.

What are your plans for the future?
I have been receiving a lot more opportunities lately to write original music and score original music for film and TV. I am really excited about this as I love being able to help tell a story on screen.

We are also really excited about the new co-written album we are working on with our lifelong friends Brett and Emily Mills here in Waco.

The songs on this album are a divergence from any of the other music we have written in our career. They are true to life stories that need to be told about this journey we have been on.

The album will also be accompanied by a short documentary film about the process of its writing and the stories that went into the album.

It also is possibly going to be pitched to a TV network as a reality series about family, marriage, and music.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.theunionrevival.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/theunionrevival
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/theunionrevival
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/theunionrevival
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/theunionrevival
• Other: aaronkonzelman.godaddysites.com/

Image Credits
NBC The Voice