Show notes
Outside their Airbnb in Cheyenne, Wyoming, three Morehead-Cains shared about their adventures thus far in road tripping across the country with a U-Haul-turned-mobile-recording-unit.
Eric Lee ’18, Nicholas Byrne ’19, and Sam Lowe ’20 had spent the last six months or so with seven other Tar Heels on a historic farm in Colbert, Georgia. The unincorporated community called Smithonia is about 20 minutes outside of Athens. Following Nicholas’s graduation in December 2019, the musician moved to the farm belonging to his grandparents, converted a former commissary into his own production studio, and invited his friends and fellow creatives to stay indefinitely.
After collaborating throughout the spring and summer on music and other entrepreneurial and artistic pursuits to make the most of anxiety-ridden times in quarantine, the “Smithonia 10” have since scattered—all but the current trio, that is. Their mission for this trip is to get Eric back to his home base in San Francisco after taking the hiatus off work to recharge in rural Georgia.
As a student at Carolina, Eric co-founded a microfinance initiative for entrepreneurs in the Triangle area called Build The Hill. He earned a degree from UNC-Chapel Hill in economics and minors in entrepreneurship and philosophy, politics, and economics. Prior to Covid, the alumnus was working as a business operations analyst in the Bay Area. Eric worked remotely half-way through the summer before deciding to take full advantage of time with friends during extraordinary circumstances.
Sam will also be joining the West Coast community of Tar Heels to pursue a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University beginning in January 2021. The alumnus was a computer science major with minors in cognitive science and music. As a scholar, he applied for and was awarded a Morehead-Cain Discovery Fund grant to visit Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
As for Nicholas, he plans to continue focusing on his solo digital music project Arts + Crafts and on freelance video assignments. Throughout this year, he has worked on a number of digital advertising and social media campaigns for major Nashville-based artists including Luke Bryan, Sam Hunt, and Keith Urban. Nicholas and Sam also released an EP the day after recording this interview. Listen to “Slowe Byrne.”
U-Haul sponsorship
During Sam’s junior year, he applied for and was awarded another Discovery Fund grant to rent a 15-foot U-Haul to use as a mobile recording studio. The recent graduate and Cameron Champion ’20 collaborated with musicians throughout the trip, eventually arriving in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Before embarking on this fall’s road trip, Sam contacted U-Haul to pitch a partnership in documenting their journey to the West Coast. The company agreed to sponsor based on their previous success and content.
You can follow along their road trip to California on Instagram:
The music for this episode, entitled “The Softest ‘Yo’ Ever Spoken,” is by Nicholas Byrne (Arts + Crafts) and Sam Lowe (Sacra Monet).
On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed.
Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
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