Music of the Mountains: Ravin' Wolf (Jamey and Heather Bilyeu)

In this week's Music of the Mountains, Jamey and Heather Bilyeu take time out of their breaks performing at Very Nice Brewing Company in Nederland to talk about their history as a duo before their follow-up performance at the Gilpin location on July 11th.

Our theme song is courtesy of singer-songwriter Brittney Wagner. Stream her record Better off Dead here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

Hello there, everybody. My name is Jamie Lammers, and welcome to Music of the Mountains: Where to Be and What to See, a weekly series brought to you by the Mountain Eater Podcast. This week, I'm bringing you Jamie and Heather Ballou of the duo Ravenwolf. I recently sat down with them during their performance at the very nice brewing company Netherland location at the vault. I talked with them before the show began and during intermission. And I barely even had to ask any questions because they ended up telling me a whole ton of background that didn't even make it into the final version of the Music of the Mountains column. We talked about a lot of backstory before we started recording, but there are so many awesome anecdotes in this particular interview as well. So be sure to stay tuned for this episode, which is split in those two parts before the show starts and during intermission. So, without further ado, this is Ravenwolf. Uh, do you guys just mind introducing yourselves real quick?

SPEAKER_01 1:05

I'm Heather Ballou, aka Faye Raven of Raven Wolf, rhythm guitar player, former keyboardist from Portland, Oregon.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

James Ballou. Just recently had to change my name back from all kinds of other misnomers. James Bulloo. Jamie Bellew is my name. Lead guitar player, vocalist for Raven Wolf for 32 years. Born in Boulder, Colorado. Played music in fifth and sixth grade at Macy Elementary School. Had a band called Evolution 5. Won second place at the Boulder High School talent show. It was called uh Stars of Tomorrow. We won second place and I was in fifth grade. I was very happy about that. So we ended up uh moving to Washington State, and then that's when uh I did uh high school football and that kind of thing. As soon as I got done with high school there, I came back to Boulder Colloral and ended up carrying Joe Walsh's Amplifier and hanging out with bands like Woody and the Two High Band, Firefall, and uh Vogelberg, uh RAO Speedwagon, um, so many bands, Dusty Drapes and the Dusters, uh, so many great bands back then. So uh then about after four years I moved back to Seattle and I started my long climb up into that rock world. Ended up working with um many, many different bands, and I opened for just about every 70s band that ever came through uh Seattle. So the list is very long there, but I had many, many a good night opening into an original the original songs that I wrote with a band called the Yard Dogs. That broke up in about '92 with the advent of uh grunge rock in Seattle, which was a seismic shakeup for the entire world. Everybody was uh lost all their hair because of too much hairspray, and the LA band sucked. So um I moved to my uh high school town again to hang out with some friends and met Heather there in Ellensburg, Washington, and then the the pooped on the pillowcase uh story will be emailed to you so you can get that word for word.

SPEAKER_03 2:57

Okay, cool. To clarify what Jamie is talking about here, this is a story that he told me before we started recording of when he first discovered that he and Heather were both musicians. This was a night where a dog just so happened to poop on Jamie's pillowcase before the evening was over. But that's not the point of the story in the end. We'll come back to that story during the break before the intermission part of the interview.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Then we formed Raven Wolf. So then the pooped on the pillowcase happens, and I realize she's very talented. So I uh put her, we went straight to work. That Thursday night we played a place called the TAF, Ellensburg, Washington, Central Washington State, with no amplifiers or anything. John Prine, some Joan Baez, Dylan, uh, some Neil Young, some stuff that I had scraped together, and she had already written a couple of really good originals, and we did some of my originals, and then it wasn't long before we were off and rolling. And we were basically formed that night uh in Ellensburg, but we actually uh moved right away to Rosalind, Washington, where they filmed uh Northern Exposure. That's kind of a cult TV show. Are you familiar with it? I love Northern Exposure. Oh, well that's that's Roslyn. Yeah, and all those people, the the actors involved, we became tight with most of them, and uh we've got a chance to play a lot of lot of shows at the famous Brick Tavern. That's in the show. That's a that's a real place. We did 33 weeks every Sunday afternoon in that joint, uh playing with some great musicians in a Sunday afternoon at the back door there. It was it was just it was like those were the days. It was incredibly beautiful. Rosalind still is. The Brick Tavern existed, so Delicious Bar happened. Many, many different uh bars came and went. Um, so Rosalind was basically the starting place, and then we ended up playing with some hotshots in Seattle and climbed back up that ladder, and Heather got a chance to open up for uh Elvin Bishop, and she opened for The Romantics and some other tailings of the 70s acts that we were invited to. Lots of Alice Stewart was a big one that we did. Lots of those acts, and so moving forward, we uh came here to Boulder, Colorado about 14 years ago after taking care of my parents. When they passed, we came back down here and found the Boulder, Colorado music scene to be quite different than it used to be. So we had spoken about bluegrass, we're just thrilled that many musicians that crawled out of the woods here and became such stalwart staunchons, if you will, of the bluegrass scene nationwide, even worldwide. And so we're uh very pleased to be back and we play our own brand of Acoustic Mountain Sagebrush Blues. We're Raven Wolf. We gotta go to work right now.

SPEAKER_03 5:33

Yeah, because you guys are about to perform upstairs here. We're at the very nice brewing location. We're at the vault, and we're about to perform you guys are about to perform at the very nice brewing location in night.

SPEAKER_02 5:41

Thank you, Jamie, and we'll continue this on break then. We'll continue this on break.

SPEAKER_03 5:45

This is where Jamie and Heather went upstairs to perform the first half of their show. I'm gonna take a minute here and read what Jamie sent me about the story of when he discovered Heather was a musician. It began in late summer 1994. Heather and I had been seeing each other for about three months. At the time, I was playing with my talented late brother Bill in local bands in central Washington State after the demise of a Seattle band called the Yard Dogs. The first time I stayed at her place in Ellensburg, Washington, I woke the next morning to the sound of Anne Wilson singing the song Dog and Butterfly, accompanied by a 12-string guitar in the next room, on what I assumed was a boombox or a stereo. Since I had just come from Seattle working with Anne and Nancy Wilson on the concert for peace at the Paramount in Seattle, I was very familiar with Anne's catalog, and did not recall her doing a solo version of Dog and Butterfly with just a 12-string accompaniment. So I crawled into the next room to find that it was not Anne Wilson on a recording. It was Heather, singing and playing the song on her dad's 1963 Gibson 12-string. Her voice was strong, powerful, with its own unique, incredible sound, similar to Anne's voice. The ever-humble Heather had never mentioned that she was a very gifted musician when we first started dating, so I was extremely surprised, and the wheels began to turn. This summer, don't go alone. Take simple steps for better air. Carpool or take transit where you need to go. Relax on the bus down to Boulder for your community. Road trips and errands are also more fun with company. And hardpooling saves on gas too. Know when it matters most by signing up for ozone alerts from the Regional Air Quality Council. Learn more at SimpleStepsbetterAir.org. Alright, let's get back to letting Jamie and Heather tell their story. Okay, and we're back.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

Uh we bought a school bus uh from a church. Well that was the first one from a church. The second one was from school district. Yeah, but it was at a church too. But it was oh, was it? Yeah. So that's not the first time I the author of all being has led me astray. Um hats off to the author of All Being, by the way. This is quite the universe you made here. Hey, uh, so we had a bus and we changed it um a little bit and then we parked at a friend's house in Rosalind and we toured a little bit on that bus. We put in some frame stuff inside anyway. We parked it at a friend's house and went to Alaska. We took a two-week gig in Alaska that uh was supposed to pay us a couple thousand dollars. We were just gonna be up there for two weeks, but we took the inside passage on a ferry and a black cat and a wire-teared fox retriever. Fox terrier. Fox terrier. It took five days to get up there on the boat, got up there into Girdwood, Alaska, outside of uh Anchorage, to find out they had fired the talent buyer they'd hired us and they never heard of us. So we're up there pretty much broke and cold. It was a little chilly in Alaska. We started, and that was in November. So I had a family up in uh Northpart in Fairbanks, so we went up there and started a two-year tour because we had to put some keyboards in to hawk. And when you hawk something in Alaska, plan on sticking around for a couple years till you can pay off the interest. So we did, and uh, but that caused two years of another long, long, long, beautiful story in Alaska where we wrote several uh songs that are still that made it onto albums. As a matter of fact, one of our songs, Arc Tourist, came from there, Dancing Tree came from there, many, many others. And we also toured hard with uh drummer and bass player. We've we've been through 50 drummers in this band in 32 years, mainly because we travel quite a bit and we also work as a duo. It's just more expedient and more efficient as a duo. And quite frankly, um after 32 years, it's really difficult to find musicians that can step right in and meld in like a liquid stone because that's what rainwolf is. It's liquid stone, it's like like a magma, it's like we just kind of flow into a form, and though each gig each night is a different flow and a different form. We've never played this club tonight, for example, and so I'm like relying kind of on you and some of the other faces I see in the audience to see if it is mixed okay, because we're just winging it. And every every club we've ever played, and I've lost track of how many thousands of clubs I played, is different, so that becomes part of your job, and you have to go through many levels of not worrying about the tax of it, like the brutal sound man type stuff. You have to get brilliance and perform. And that's after hauling your gear wherever you had to haul it, setting it up and making sure you sound okay. Then let's talk about the art of performing, you know, singing and playing your guitar, catching her, me on the same magma flow so that we solidify the rock that is Raven Wolf. We usually do it about once a song. Sometimes we'll miss a song, but for the most part, we really enjoy playing, and we uh sometimes because of the the difficulties of the road, because the road is famous for just chewing people up and spitting them out. We sometimes enjoy playing just at home, and it's too bad no one's listening because we're relaxed and we're performing, and oh my gosh, is it good? We didn't have to haul our gear and have to all so we have three different PA systems. That bus got stolen. So years later, I'm so I'm back from Alaska, right? And I'm traveling out in the snow, and uh out in the eastern the wilds of eastern Washington, I see my bus out there in the snow, and he put a big stovepipe up and put a big wood stove in there, and I'd gone in and I marched out through the snow and knocked on the guy's door. He goes, What took you so long? And he knew it was me, and we sat and talked, and and he had bought the bus, he didn't steal it, he bought the bus from the person who did steal it, person that we parked it on the on the shores of her property. So the second bus was a diesel pusher, way different. We painted that one green, and we did it with uh some primer and some uh house paint, the really nice metallic house paint, and we had to leave for Oregon from Washington State in a driving rainstorm, which pelted the paint job on the bus into this beautiful tortoiseshell paint job that lasted on the bus forever. And it was our big giant green bus, and we did we toured heavily with that with a diesel pusher. We slept in it, and it was really nice until you break down. Going up the gorge out of Portland, Oregon, getting back into Washington State, and you break down at a gas station that sucked. So we sold the bus right before we came here to Boulder about 14 years ago. And we have been through uh different uh gig rigs, we've been through trailers, many different trailers. We've just getting the equipment to the show is always uh can be a challenge. So, therefore, we have a smaller PA, we have medium-sized PA and a really big PA. Sometimes there's a house PA. We were the house band at uh the peanut farm in in Anchorage when they asked us to perform there. The Hills Angels came and hired us for three nights, made us play for seven in a row. And the mosquitoes were the ms. The sun never sets in Alaska. They were shooting their guns off. Black powder, we dug a bunch of a giant dog out of it.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Oh, it was four ones you see.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

Oh my god. And I looked down and I had mosquitoes upon mosquitoes upon mosquitoes. She challenged Janice Joplin, buried abroad at an RV park, and she didn't sleep for 10 days because the sun, everybody thought we were doing drugs. You don't need drugs up in Alaska.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Oh, and there was the one other time when our gear got stolen, we had to buy it back from the local from the local. Yeah, that was the guy.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

So we woke up one night and the neighbor goes, Hey man, you left your trailer open, and I'm like, No, I didn't. It's two feet snow, and they busted off, stole the guitars, and a bunch of meth heads, and they charged us $100 to get our guitars back. But we'd already ordered, but we'd already ordered new guitars. They sent us new guitars, but with two pickups in them, and that's where the new Sound of Ravenwheel started. Two pickups and an acoustic guitar. Whoa. So we own four of those, and every single one of them busted. So I wish the company would call me back. Who am I talking to? So if the company called me back to get those guitars relevant, but we're still playing those guitars with different electronics in them. Yeah, so we have different piezios and pickups in them now. So that happened. Um so yeah, we've been ridden hard and put away wet. Uh we're a Grateful Dead cover band, as it were. A lot of times we'll play a lot of Grateful Dead. Uh, we do, you know, the Almond Brothers, and we do a lot of the 70s bands that I ended ended up opening for.

SPEAKER_03 14:38

Why why Raven Wolf, actually, now that it's a good idea. Okay, so the name is a good question.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

You prepared this one.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

So the symbiotic relationship, evident, obviously, we are she's a raven, I'm the wolf. The Alaska experience was just on top of we named it that because of an over-the-shoulder nod and a thumbs up to the blue uh early blues musicians, uh, specifically Howlin' Wolf, because we do pre-war blues quite a bit of pre-war blues, and we were focused on that when we named the band. So we were gonna be the bird and the wolf, but there was another band or two named Raven Wolf already, but that we didn't even really think about that. I wanted to change it. So we were Raven Wolf like that because of the blues. But here's where it really came from. In the old scriptures from the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believed, and it turned out it was in the book of Benjamin in the Torah or in the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, um, it says, in the book of Benjamin, it says, You shall raven with the wolves. And I somebody said that, guys, you guys are gonna starve to death if you think Raven Wolf's gonna get you a living and all that kind of thing. So I said, Yeah, we shall raven with the wolves. And so Raven Wolf, so the word raven is different than Raven, and Raven, I put an umlaut on it to make it even worse in the early years. So not only do we have to freaking spell it to everybody, but they had to get an umlaut or they couldn't get online to find us. So we just made a nightmare move. But we stuck with it, and Raven Wolf is Ravenwolf now.

SPEAKER_03 16:02

What do you hope people take away from Raven Wolf shows in whatever form you guys take? Is there anything you hope people just take away when they come to see you guys?

SPEAKER_01 16:10

A psychedelic musical experience that makes them feel better and uplifts them, takes them out of their everyday grind.

SPEAKER_02 16:17

If you've ever been into a uh outside setting a lot of times when the weather's perfect and the music is nice and beautiful, and maybe you're having a glass of wine, maybe just quite done exercising, it's just your endorphins are up. So, my my answer is we want people to have a really, really beautiful, warm experience when they're here with us, but it lingers afterwards. So that the sound is amazing, the song selection is amazing, the quality of the talent that they're listening to is amazing. And it's never the same twice. It's never the same. The molten lava that forms the rock is different every time, and they're a part of it. So, what I'd like for them to take away is that they were part of the big show.

SPEAKER_03 16:57

I love that. That's a good idea. Yeah, I think I think those are the big things that I have. So thank you. Thank you guys for taking your time. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you so much to Jamie and Heather for taking time out of their very nice brewing performance night to talk to me about their history as a duo. You can see them performing as Ravenwolf at the Very Nice Brewing Company location in Gilpin, located at 180 Jankowski Drive in Blackhawk on Saturday, July 11th, 2026, starting at 5 p.m. To learn more about them as a group, be sure to head to their website at RavenWolf.com. Thank you so much, everybody, for tuning in to this week's Music of the Mountains, Where to Be and What to See, brought to you by the Mountaineer Podcast. We'll be back next week with another episode, and we'll be back very soon with another episode of the Mountain Ear Podcast. Be sure to share this episode around with whoever you see fit, and subscribe to the Mountaineer Podcast today, wherever you get your podcasts. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Podchaser, and more. If you want to support the Mountaineer's efforts in journalism, be sure to subscribe to the Mountain Ear Today. There on our website, you can make a digital or physical subscription and find our full archive of Mountain Ear Podcast episodes by heading to the Mountaineer Media section on our homepage. There you'll also find our Facebook, our YouTube page, and our Instagram at mtn.ear. And finally, if you have any queries regarding the newspaper or the podcast, be sure to reach out to myself at media themountaineer.com, my co-host, Tyler Hickman, at T Y L E R at the Mountaineer.com, our editor in chief, Barbara Hart at infothemountaineer.com, and generally in queries at frontdesk at the mountaineear.com. We'll see you guys very soon. Have a great rest of your day. Performed here by Jamie and Heather Balloon of Raven Wolf. This is a live acoustic performance which you can find on their YouTube channel. You can also learn more about their music at their website, RavenWolf.com. They'll be performing at the Gilpin location of Very Nice Brewing Company, located at 180 Jinkowski Drive in Black Hawk on Saturday, July eleventh, 2026, starting at five PM.