Waylon Tripp

Waylon Tripp comes from Ogden, Utah, an old railroad town with a long memory. Once a stopping place for drifters headed across the country, its infamous 25th Street was built on trains, hotels, jazz clubs, brothels, working people and whatever else followed the railroad west. Tripp cut his teeth playing solo acoustic shows there as a teenager at the old Mojo’s off Washington Boulevard.

He has spent much of the years since leaving and finding his way back.

Along the way, he pushed steers and announced small-town rodeos, roofed houses, drilled concrete, worked plumbing, sold suits, flipped burgers, lived in the Dakotas and Nashville, and spent a while living out of a car. Music followed him through most of it. He had been writing songs since childhood, and he recorded them into an old stereo tape recorder.

In 2023, he wrote and recorded Old Feathers in a small house across from the Cumberland River in Nashville. After a job turned south, he and his little family headed back west, leaving his stories and songs far behind. 

Then, in 2026, Tripp and his wife lost one of their unborn twin sons. He returned to songwriting that June under the name they had saved for their baby boy: Waylon Tripp.

Today, Tripp travels light: an acoustic guitar, a harmonica and a collection of songs, stories, jokes and characters gathered along the way. His shows move between laughter and harder things without making much distinction between the two. After one performance, a man approached him at the bar and told him that, somehow, listening to those songs that night had felt like being in a kind of church.

That might be as good a description as any.

Tripp is still collecting stories. Small towns, working people, strange characters, hard years, good jokes, faith, doubt, things overheard and things half remembered all finding their way into the gumbo pot eventually.

For now, the road continues.

And sooner or later, it seems, all roads lead back to Ogden.