EDITOR’S NOTE:
Call & Response pairs two Curious Goldfish conversations, recorded months or years apart, with artists who may or may not know one another. Different paths with the same question running underneath. “Call and Response” is one of the oldest structures in music: Carried from West Africa into American spirituals, gospel, blues, and jazz, where a leader sings a phrase and the community answers. The form survived because music has always been a way for people to talk to each other across distance and time. It's a reminder that music connects people who don't know they're already in a conversation.
I talked with both of them during the past 12 months.
Jon Muq most recently at the 30A Songwriters Festival in Florida. He's a Ugandan-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who grew up in Kampala and is now based in Austin, Texas. His debut album, Flying Away, was produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, and his sound pulls from Afro-pop, folk, and classic soul. He had a second album already written and waiting when we sat down. It was one of my favorite conversations of the more than 130 I’ve had with musicians all over the world.
Trenton Wagler from his place in Harrisonburg, Virginia, just after his Americana band the Steel Wheels hosted Red Wing Roots in 2025, the festival they put on every summer at Natural Chimneys in Mount Solon. Wagler is the band's frontman, guitarist, and primary songwriter, going on 20 years. He's also a co-founder of the festival, which has become its own anchor in the Shenandoah Valley. I’ve listened to the Steel Wheels for years and fun fact, their song “Ghost of Myself” is the first song I added to my Liked Playlist when I joined Spotify.
Muq's version came late in our conversation, after he'd already explained how he taught himself English by singing to homeless kids on the streets of Uganda, and how he ended up at South by Southwest in a heavy rain jacket because nobody told him Texas was hot. He said it plainly:
"I can have an idea, but an idea doesn't call you to write. When it calls you to write, it becomes an obligation to write."
Wagler started somewhere similar. He was 14, a girlfriend had just broken up with him, and he was writing heartbreak poems on tardy slips swiped from his English teacher's desk. He went home, picked up a guitar, and sang them to himself. That was the first time it dawned on him.
But over the next 20-plus years and a dozen records with the Steel Wheels, he stopped relying on the lightning bolt.
"Waiting for lightning to strike isn't gonna be a good way to keep building furniture,”
He showed up at the desk with a pencil and wrote a lot of bad songs and a lot of good ones, and stopped being precious about either.
Both methods work.
Muq had 60 songs sitting on a shelf by the time he recorded his first album. The second one came out of him in one push because, as he put it, "it wanted me to write the moment." Wagler hits the desk 365 days a year if he can. Hundreds of songs in. He released a solo record in 2025 called This Might Be My Prime, made out of songs that felt too personal to bring to the band.
Muq is the more exposed of the two. If the moment never shows up, the songs don't either. He told me the pandemic almost erased him as a musician. "By the time it ended, it's like I'd never learned anything. It's like I was starting." When the experience stops, the writing stops.
Wagler's cost is different. He can produce on demand, but he still wrote a song on the solo album called "Imposter," about feeling like a fraud despite the hundreds of songs already in the catalog. The discipline doesn't deliver the certainty you'd think it would. "Maybe I wrote a couple good songs," he told me, "and I don't know if I have any more in me."
Wait for the trigger and the trigger might stop coming. Show up daily and the doubt is still there waiting at the desk.
When I asked Wagler what he was most curious about, he said athletes. People who put their body to the test in a sport where there's a finite window when you're at your best. "Some musicians, I think, just keep getting better the older they get. With sports, there's usually a pretty finite timeframe where your prime is and then isn't."
His album is called This Might Be My Prime. What he's actually arguing for is that you don't get to know which moment is the peak. You write like any one of them could be.
Muq said something close to the same idea in a different shape. "I like to write the moment. I don't think and write about something that's not in the moment."
Whether you're at the desk daily or waiting for the call, the song still comes from the same place.
The conversations with Jon Muq and Trenton Wagler were a pleasure for me to have. Both with incredible journeys, funny stories and useful insights whether you listen, write or produce music. Here they are:
The 2026 State of Music in the Age of AI & Streaming Report is out. Get your free summary here.