Issue link: http://maconmagazine.uberflip.com/i/1536125
62 maconmagazine.com | June/July 2025 Sound Studios, and bandmates make it a point to visit the Ocmulgee Mounds when they're here. "It's such a place of healing and creative energy," Osborne says. "We try to do everything we can to soak up the magic." Both bands – progressive in their politickin' and nostalgic in their kudzu-and-magnolia imagery – say Macon's character as a miasmically Southern place that is overcoming segregation to forge new genres of music suits their particular sensibility just fine. "There's the Old South and the New South," says BJ Barham, founder of American Aquarium. "There are a lot of people fighting to keep the South the way it was, but the progress is there. There's a lot broke that we need to fix. We need to identify problems, acknowledge them, atone for them. Does it make me love the region any less? Absolutely not. There is also much to take pride in. You can be proud of a place and ashamed of it at the same time." Barham is a seventh-generation North Carolinian from the small town of Reidsville (as he puts it, "Listen to me talk – no one ever mistakes me for someone from Boston or Long Island"). On track to become a lawyer, he was a scholarship student majoring in history and political science at North ABOVE The Buckleys, Brax Bragg's band, performs at Grant's Lounge during the concert crawl. Carolina State when music intervened, and he got a record deal. With his rock band that occasionally weeps pedal steel, he has emerged as one of the more outspoken voices in the indie scene, tackling subjects as controversial as abortion ("Babies Having Babies") while extolling the Proustian pleasures of a tomato sandwich made with Duke's mayonnaise ("Cherokee Purples"). "Music has given me the means to travel the world and live anywhere I'd like, and I choose to live within 90 minutes of where I was born," says Barham, who is based in Raleigh. "People can complain all they want about how backwards the South is, but the only way we'll see any change is to take it upon ourselves. For me, that means raising my daughter so that she'll never witness the closed-mindedness and blatant disrespect for certain people that I often saw at her age. Because if you really love something, then you want to see it grow, and that's how I feel about the South." Don't rely on easy assumptions, though, he cautions. "I love having conversations with someone in Boston or Chicago who assumes I'm inbred and full of hate," Barham says. "I like to let them know that we're not all homophobic, that some of us have