Wildfire Reviews: Langhorne Slim wilds up the crowd and Shelby Means proves she's meant to be solo at the Surf Hotel, A+

Above: Shelby Means Band performs live on Tuesday, July 15, 2025, in BV, CO at Surf Hotel

This past Tuesday, country western singer and guitar player Langhorne Slim performed a unique show at Buena Vista's The Surf Hotel, with supporting help from Shelby Means and her new band. It was one of the better events of 2025. Shelby did a great job performing songs from her first solo record with her new three-piece band.

There may be some comparisons to a modern version of Bob Dylan for Langhorne Slim, and for good reason. Langhorne is an incredible acoustic guitar player and even better singer when he performs live. He has an incredible amount of energy that transfers to the crowd, and he got the few hundred folks at the Surf Hotel in BV up and going and dancing during his entire set. The BV crowd was mostly younger folk, and more females than males who came out to dance to Langhorne.

It was one of the better shows of the year for many reasons, and the first being how compassionate and crowd responsive Langhorne was. He performed half of the show in the middle of the crowd, with just him and his acoustic guitar, and without a mic. It was truly an acoustic experience, and the small ballroom of the Surf Hotel is known for this. 'I really like this venue,' Langhorne commented several times throughout the show. Langhorne himself is a talker, which in this case benefited the performance.

However, the highlight of the show was opening act the Shelby Means Band. A grammy award winning artist, this is her first tour touring solo. For the past few years, Shelby was part of the iconic bluegrass group Molly Tuttle & The Golden Highway. Now, Shelby has a three-piece band, herself, her husband Joele and extremely talented fiddler player Maya De Vitry.

Although it's only a three-piece band, they sounded incredible live, bringing songs from Shelby's self-titled solo album she released earlier this year to life. She did a great job on every song, but some of the best ones included 'Farm Girl' and 'Streets of Boulder', which is of course a Colorado Song.

Shelby has a bright and promising future, and perhaps it's meant to be that she's now doing her own solo thing and can do what she'd like. Her bass playing is amazing, and she's equally as good as Molly, Kyle or Bronwyn live on her own.

Shelby will be performing several shows in Colorado this summer, including reuniting with Molly and the Golden Highway at the sold out 2025 Rockygrass Festival. Langhorne played at both BV and Basalt and will continue his tour in California in August.

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