Local musician PJ Moon has to make music.
It’s an artistic endeavor he’s always chased, even when he moved to Denver back during the pandemic. As the music business was on a forced hiatus, Moon went back to his profession as a paramedic for an ambulance crew and a wild land firefighting team, but while reacquainting himself in the EMT world, he still found time to write music.
Moon is now back in the Southwest. He’s reassembled his band PJ Moon & the Swappers and is back to pursuing music full time, which consists of recording new material with his band at local studio Scooter’s Place, as well as playing out, which includes two shows on Saturday. The band will perform at Purgatory Resort at 1 p.m., followed by another show late afternoon, an eighth of a mile down the road at The Nugget Mountain Bar.
“I’ve been a paramedic for the last five years, and I’ve just been itching to play full band shows again. I’ve been doing some solo stuff here and there, but it’s hard to see all my friends doing it and just wanting to be up there, committing the same amount of time and energy to it,” said Moon in a recent interview. “It’s been an intention for a little while now to get back into doing it full time, and this spring and summer is the introduction back into that.”
Turns out he is not the only musician kicking around the firefighting and paramedic world. That’s a profession with a lot of downtime, and when you’re waiting for something to happen during your day job, you’ve got time to write new tunes and practice your art, which was a shared pursuit among some of his co-workers.
“I worked with three different agencies last summer, and I brought this little guitar. I stuffed it into my go bag because you have to be ready to go at all times when you get the call,” Moon said. “On all three different agencies and crews I worked with, at least two people I worked with played some kind of instrument. We loved it. When supervisors weren’t walking around checking on our training, we would have the guitars out, singing and learning harmonies. And I wrote a couple of songs on the fire line as well, so it’s been kind of cool how much those two worlds intersect. I didn’t expect it, but its turned out to be very much the case. I’m stoked on it, so I can keep both of those worlds going.”
One such Moon-penned tune inspired by his on-duty time as a paramedic is “Diesel Therapy.” Heard on local, left of the dial FM radio along with streaming services, the title refers to when you’ve got someone in an ambulance where treatment can’t happen on scene but in a hospital: Getting them to the hospital via an ambulance on the quick is administering “Diesel Therapy.” It’s a riff-heavy tune that lives in the fringe, indie-jam world, a cut that fits perfectly into Moon’s sound that is part Southern rock, part heavy roots and soul, and all rock ’n’ roll.
As summer approaches, Moon will look to book more shows, one of which is a solo show in April at an Animas High School student-produced concert at Tico Time. He’ll also finish recording his next project at Scooter’s Place with The Swappers, a band that features the rhythm section of bass player Chuck Hank, drummer Cord Drake, and other local musicians who swap in and out of the band.
For Moon, music is a pursuit that remains unavoidable.
“It’s not because I have to. It’s because I can’t not,” he said. “I can’t.”
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at [email protected].