By Gussie Fauntleroy
You might think that if someone
feels a true calling and passion for
something, they would naturally be
good at it. That’s what Lydia Sprouts
expected with music. All her life
she’d loved listening to it, beginning
with falling asleep to the radio
as a child and later finding herself
surrounded by
musician friends
and attending
concerts as often
as she could. But
when she became
aware that
she was serious
about being a
musician herself,
the realization struck home that she
was not, as she puts it, “a natural.”
Many times she found herself
putting down the guitar but always
picked it up again. “The desire to
learn and play wouldn’t go away,”
she said.
Over the years Lydia has indeed
become a good musician — on
guitar, mandolin and voice, writing
music, performing with her own
band, collaborating with others and
now even teaching music. But the
journey required discovering her
own approach to learning, including
“hacking” her brain’s habitual
way of functioning in order to do so.
“A lot of music is taught as if you’ll
learn immediately,” she said. Yet
for some people, herself included,
learning to execute multiple aspects
at once, like rhythm and fingering,
takes time and doesn’t come easily.
Gradually she found her own
best ways of learning, watching
instructional videos over and over,
practicing guitar in a closet so she
wouldn’t wake her young daughters,
Makena Soleil and Delilah Rose
Lasen, and working with various
teachers in person. She also immersed
herself in a sacred path involving
such elements as ceremonial
voice healing, which helped clear
out layers of old emotional trauma
and blockages, allowing her to find
her voice, both in music and life.
Now she sees that the overlapping of
music and spiritual growth has been
a lifelong journey of unfolding into
who she truly is. Or as she puts it,
“shaking off the dust and polishing
up the me inside.”
Growing up outside Scottsdale,
Lydia remembers herself as an
independent, highly energetic child.
Her father, a nonconformist with a
musical bent, left the family when
Lydia was in fourth grade. She never
saw him again — he died when she
was in her early 20s — but he left
her a guitar and what became her
own penchant for unconventional
living.
As it turned out, she didn’t pick
up that guitar until she was 19. By
then she’d earned a community
college liberal arts degree and
enrolled in the University of Hawaii
at Manoa to study marine biology.
Shortly after arriving, however, she
went to Maui to attend a Dalai Lama
talk. The experience rerouted her
life. She dropped out of school to
focus on her own “spirit-motivated
journey” and also met the man
who became the father of her first
two daughters.
With him she
moved briefly
back to Arizona,
but when
they got tickets
for a concert at
Red Rocks, they
packed up their
few belongings
with no intention of returning.
The couple separated in 2011,
and Lydia spent 12 years on the
Front Range, increasingly involved
in live music. She worked at Denver’s
Mercury Café, which hosted
musicians, and later at a coffee
shop where her co-workers trained
her ear to electronic music. When
she was 22, her partner at the time
informed her that if she wanted to
become a songwriter she had to
listen to Bob Dylan every day for
a year. She didn’t like Bob Dylan,
especially his voice. But she listened
every day anyway, in secret. The
result was an epiphany. Aside from
discovering that his writing is in a
class of its own, she realized that if
Bob Dylan could go out there and
sing in a voice she thought sucked,
so could she.
Because she relaxed into it, she
immediately got better.
Still, the hard work of learning to
be a musician continued.
In 2013 the coffee shop suddenly
closed. Shortly afterwards, open to
whatever would come next, Lydia
had what felt like a mystical experience
in which she “felt music in a
completely different way,” she said.
“I felt the heartbeat of the earth.” In
that mind frame she asked herself
what she really wanted to do with
her life. Music and gardening rose
to the top. She started working as an
event organizer for the ARISE Music
Festival and later for Tribal Visions
while continuing to learn and play
music, including touring with the
bluegrass band Pioneer Mother, for
which she wrote original songs.
In March 2020, Lydia was about
to return from Panama, where she’d
been staying with a friend and
teaching yoga, when the pandemic
was declared. Her belongings
were in storage and because she’d
been out of the country, her plan
to return to Boulder and stay with
friends was thwarted by the friends’
fear of COVID.
She contacted Michael Keefe, an
acquaintance she’d met at ARISE,
who owned a place outside Crestone
in the Grants. Her idea of staying a
couple of days kept morphing as the
lockdown dragged on. They fell in
love, and in September 2023 their
daughter Kiara was born.
Lydia and Michael are transforming
the 42-acre property, which
they call the Coyote Mountain Offgrid
Outpost. In the dojo adjacent to
their home they hope to host music,
yoga classes and other events.
They’ve fenced a full acre for an
orchard and hügelkultur gardens. In
May 2022 they held a Beltane festival
where they were handfasted in
the ancient Celtic tradition of joining
hands in mutual commitment.
Meanwhile, Lydia has become a
force in the local music scene. She
serves as executive director of the
nonprofit Crestone Performances,
Inc., which puts on the annual Crestone
Music Festival and supports
music among San Luis Valley youth
by bringing in performers, providing
instruments and lessons for middle
and high school students and hosting
the Youth Open Mic.
In addition, she recently started
as the Crestone Charter School’s K-8
music teacher. For three
years she also booked music and
presenters for the Crestone Energy
Fair, a role from which she stepped
back in 2023.
Sitting on the dojo’s beautiful
wooden floor, Lydia smiled as she
summed up her philosophy of life:
“If everyone had a few songs they
could play around a campfire,” she
said, “it would be a better world.”
