Downtown Madison, WI is an isthmus sandwiched between Lakes Mendota and Menona. Because they are lakes, they smell like lakes. Culver's corporate headquarters is not far away, and there are more than a dozen Culver's in Madison, so the city also kind of smells like butterburgers. ®

I moved to Madison to take a position at the University of Wisconsin as the Ethnic American Music Curator and have since become the Audio-Visual Preservation Archivist for the UW-Madison General Library System. In this role, I divide my time between public programming and outreach [largely focused on the Nordic Folklife project for which I was a Co-PI], audio engineering [building and running the audio preservation studio for the Mills Music Library and Wisconsin Music Archives], as well as music curation [building connections with local musicians and organizations, acquiring Wisconsin-based recordings and music collections, and conducting oral histories and fieldwork with donors]. I am also a lecturer in the Mead Witter School of Music and an affiliate of the GNS+ Folklore department. In addition to my archival and teaching work at the University, I am still recording [See: Nate Gibson & the Stars of Starday] and performing [see: Nate Gibson & the Stardazers] a lot of music and also co-hosting Wednesday morning Back to the Country radio programs on WORT 89.9 FM. I'm still a Red Sox and Hoosiers baseball fan, but Bob Uecker made it pretty easy to transition to listening to the Milwaukee Brewers. I've become an ardent Brewers fan and even wrote and recorded an entire album of songs dedicated to the Milwaukee Brewers and their epic 2025 season.