Though it’s been only a month, I feel like the JAMBALOO music festival — the second edition of the Mullen & Mullen Music Project’s hopefully annual, week-long, free-to-attend event held in February across venues in Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, and Dallas — is a somewhat distant memory, but that’s probably because I drank a lot more than usual that week. Sorry, I skipped the Sunday shows, JAMBALOO! Tuesday through Saturday really caught up with me!
But I started thinking about it again when I read an email about the Mullen & Mullen Music Project’s JAMBALOO Music Prize (more on that below), and what I remember most was how the bill at The Post on the Thursday of that week — a cross-genre lineup of Dev Lee Miller, LABELS, and Jenni Rose — had something for everyone and how I wished more shows were like that
Do lineups that jumble genres work best at the festival level, and do club shows have to hover around some central dynamic — for example, “acoustic guitar + middle-age person” or “electric guitar + mosh pit” — or sound? Let’s say a bill at a local venue (in a hypothetical 200-capacity room) is headlined by a local, popular, dance-oriented solo electronic artist who nearly sold the place out six months ago. With doors at 7 and music at 8, the openers are a singer-songwriter, then a rap duo, then the headliner’s direct support, which turns out to be a locally popular death-metal band that has been able to fill that venue a couple times over the past year. Assuming this spot is “full” and each act is “good,” which ones’ set sends the most people to the patio for a smoke?
The answer might seem obvious to you, but it isn’t to me. Don’t discount the number of people who will show up for a death-metal band nor for any of these other hypothetical performers, all of them mishmashed together in a flyer that probably reads like a refrigerator magnet poem hidden beneath a Final Battle of Fonts. I don’t know about your Spotify playlists, but most of mine have enough curveballs so that no gear-grinding genre pivot seems out of the ordinary. Sometimes you need to hear Slayer after Shania Twain or The Suffers after Black Sabbath. JAMBALOO’s lineups didn’t swing so hard as to have Dezi 5 playing in front of Frozen Soul, but overall, the lineups were very diverse and very cool, and leading up to and during that week (February 7-15), I became acquainted with the music of a lot of local artists I hadn’t heard before.
For me, the local artists are who matter the most, and the lineups during JAMBALOO week were heavy on people from North Texas area codes, including many from 817 and 682. It feels nice to be seen, and the Mullen & Mullen Music Project, which is the music-promotion side of the Dallas-based personal-injury law firm Mullen & Mullen, obviously values the contributions of Fort Worth musicians to DFW’s culture, such that it does helpful things like sponsor a week of free concerts. And added to that, in July 2025, the firm awarded their first $20,000 Venue Prize to South Main’s Cicada, and in October 2025, Mullen & Mullen announced their first ever JAMBALOO Music Prize, in which local industry notables, media, and fans vote on the Album of the Year, with the winner receiving a prize package that includes $20,000 in cash as well as a recording session with Grammy-winning producer Tre Nagella (Lady Gaga, Ed Sheeran, Blake Shelton). The winner will be announced on Tue, Jun 6, at a concert at Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas. Big D native and “Loop Daddy” Marc Rebillet will headline the show, with the three finalists — to be announced May 6 — in the opening slots. All proceeds from the concert’s ticket sales will go to Dallas’ Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, as well as Amplified Minds, a nonprofit that connects musicians and other creatives with free mental health services in Dallas and Fort Worth.
Like the JAMBALOO lineups, the 10 semifinalists’ albums are a nice sampling of what this market sounds like right now (and KXT listeners have undoubtedly heard a few of these on recent playlists): Fort Worth Americana artist Matthew McNeal’s very excellent HIGHLONESOME joins albums from Denton grunge band Smothered; Cleburne-raised modern-country singer-songwriter Angel White; indie-pop composer Luke Herbert, who claims “North Texas” as home; Dallas-based rock ’n’ soul trio J. Isaiah Evans & the Boss Tweed; R&B/soul singer Joel Wells Jr., also of Dallas; Los Gran Reyes, an 11-piece cumbia crew from Dallas; Dallas hip-hop MC/producer Roman the Writer; Dallas-by-way-of-Staten Island soul/Americana troubadour Paul Schalda; and Aaron’s Book Club, a solo artist who might actually be from Chicago but whom I assume lives in Dallas now. Or used to. I don’t know. His album, Doggies, is a collection of gorgeous bedroom pop that sort of reminds me of a more stripped-down, less lost-and-on-molly-at-the-State-Fair analog to Tame Impala. Aaron’s Book Club sounds really nice and a little strange, but you have to hear all of these records for yourself for comparison. Yes, I know this list is almost all Dallas, but a good record is a good record regardless of where it hails from. I highly recommend checking them out and voting for your favorite at the website by the May 3 deadline.
