Ben Lomond's Own: How Taylor Rae Carried the Valley to Austin and Back

Ask most touring Americana artists where they're from and you'll get a city, a scene, a label town. Ask Taylor Rae and you get a two-lane road through the redwoods. "I grew up in Ben Lomond, started music from an early age. I was involved in local theater," she told KAZU — and if you've ever spent a foggy morning in the San Lorenzo Valley, you can hear all of it in her songs.

Rae is one of ours: a Santa Cruz County kid who came up through community theater and local stages before decamping to Austin, Texas, where the Americana world takes its songwriters seriously and its road warriors even more so. The proof arrived in 2025, when NPR Music named her one of the best performers at South by Southwest — the kind of national nod that tends to reorganize a career overnight.

The record that earned it is The Void, released in 2025 and produced by Grammy winner Eric Krasno, a blend of roots-rock, folk, blues, and Americana that Moe's Alley — where she played a hometown album-release show — described as a celebration of "the contradictory and complementary parts of the human experience." It's a big-swing follow-up to her debut, Mad Twenties, the album she spent years touring into significant Americana-radio airplay. Standout track "Telluride," a collaboration with mandolin phenom Sierra Hull, reportedly wrestles with an ex and with Rae's own complicated feelings about coming home to the Santa Cruz coast — which is about the most Santa Cruz sentence a song can carry.

Here's why she matters to this archive even in a week when she isn't on a local stage: Rae is Exhibit A for the ecosystem this region quietly runs. In January 2026, Event Santa Cruz's New Music January project featured her among roughly 30 local artists releasing new work — a homegrown machine for turning valley kids into recording artists. Rae came up in exactly that world of school theater programs, all-ages rooms, and supportive scenes, and she's been generous about crediting the community that fostered her.

The larger point is about talent retention, or the lovely failure of it. Santa Cruz is small and expensive; its most ambitious musicians often have to leave to make the leap, the way Rae left for Austin. But the good ones keep the umbilical cord attached — booking the hometown release show, name-checking Ben Lomond in interviews, writing songs that are secretly about Highway 9. The scene doesn't lose them so much as loan them out.

So consider this a standing invitation. When Rae rolls back through — and road warriors always roll back through — the valley should turn out in force. She carried our fog all the way to Austin. The least we can do is sing along when she brings it home.

Sources: Americana Musician Taylor Rae's Santa Cruz Roots Run Deep — 90.3 KAZU; Moe's Alley Presents: Taylor Rae; New Year, New Music — Lookout Santa Cruz