Hello! I'm Ryan from Valley Sessions and I need your help!

Putting on events and especially live music can get expensive, and rightfully so. A lot of people need to get paid for their work, deserve to get paid.

So, in very transparent terms, I'm looking to my community for help to put on another great festival.

Last year, we had 7 touring artists/bands come all the way down to Las Cruces from AZ, TN, NY, NJ, and so on. We had a great turnout, 200+ plus ticket paying attendants, a collection of local sponsors, we raised nearly $4,000 to pay staff and the artists. I personally took no money home from this event, and all Valley Session merch sales went to pay the artists. I took a big financial investment into my community to hopefully start an annual music festival.

I'm hoping this can turn into a great community event that features some great touring acts in Contemporary Country, Blues, Folk, Jazz, Rock, Punk, Metal and eclectic genres, while also using the platform to promote the local artists as well - so this year we want to do it again!

We have some great artists lined up for this year - Era Snow, Bar Jay Bar, Pete Posie, Darien Lane, Papayas Con Chile, Velvet Penny, and headlining - The McCharmlys!!! We think it's gonna be a great night of food, drinks, some incredible live music, and a larger sense of community.

So what is the fundraiser gonna do?

Very simply, it's going to pay these incredible musicians upfront so that we don't have to charge tickets at the door to cover costs. I don't want to charge tickets so that you and your family can come and hang out with us in celebration of a lot of hard work from the Valley Sessions crew, as well as keeping to the integrity of the founding of Valley Sessions - in that we are a community project. We are in this together. We created some beautiful music videos this year and the two years prior, I feel that deserves some celebration.

I'm really trying to be as honest as possible, money inherently makes me uncomfortable, but I think this is really special, and it feels like the right thing to try and do. I hope you can help us/me out so we can keep doing special things in our city, and with the people we need to care about the most, just all of us, together.

Thank you.

Additionally, if any business entity, or any larger persons of interest would like to sponsor the event, message me directly, we have a separate fundraising goal for that - it covers venue costs, food/drinks/snacks, festival merch and logistic costs, really so that I don't go broke