JASON MOON: MUSICIAN
SONGWRITER, PERFORMER, AND STORYTELLER
Jason Moon is an award-winning singer-songwriter whose music brings acoustic folk, Americana, roots traditions, and lived experience into the same room. Based in Payson, Arizona, he performs with a gravelly, expressive voice, a flat-picking guitar style, candid lyrics, and an instinct for the story behind every song.
His work is personal without being closed off. A Jason Moon performance invites listeners into the particular details of one life—family, friendship, military service, love, loss, humor, recovery, and the long search for home—while leaving space for audiences to recognize experiences of their own.
Jason is also an Iraq War veteran, keynote speaker, PTSD educator, and founder of Warrior Songs. Those roles have shaped his work, but they have never replaced the musician at its center. Music is the thread that connects his earliest campfire songs to his albums, veteran programs, public speaking, nonprofit work, and the story-and-song performances he presents today.
BEGINNINGS IN WISCONSIN
Jason began playing music around campfires in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. He later became part of the Fox Valley music scene, performing alone and with a range of groups and collaborators. The photographs and names preserved farther down this page—Frogwater, the North Country Ramblers, the Great Garbonzos, Moon & Lipsky, the Paste Eating Elmers, Moon & Thacia, and others—reflect a long musical life built through friendships, informal gatherings, working bands, experiments, and stages of every size.
Those experiences helped shape a performer who is comfortable both entertaining a room and speaking plainly to it. Jason’s style has drawn comparisons to John Prine, Jim Croce, and Greg Brown: songwriters known for close observation, memorable characters, emotional honesty, and the ability to place humor beside heartbreak.
Jason’s own voice is unmistakably his. He writes about serious subjects without treating solemnity as the only form of truth. Humor, contradiction, tenderness, anger, wonder, and ordinary human absurdity all belong in the songs.
FIVE ALBUMS OF ORIGINAL MUSIC
Across decades of songwriting and recording, Jason has released five albums of original music:
Naked Under All These Clothes
Poverty
Trying to Find My Way Home
Love & Life
The Wolf I Fed
Together, the albums form a broad catalog rather than a single-issue body of work. They include songs about relationships, work, identity, community, war, homecoming, survival, spiritual questions, social conscience, and the small moments that reveal who people are.
The catalog also documents an artist changing across time. Early material preserves Jason’s developing voice and musical communities. Later work carries the weight of military service and its aftermath while continuing to make room for affection, playfulness, and hope. The songs do not present life as a clean progression toward resolution. They remain interested in the unfinished parts.
TRYING TO FIND MY WAY HOME
Jason served in Iraq in 2003–2004. After returning home, PTSD made songwriting difficult for several years. During the making of the documentary On the Bridge, he was asked to record an original song for the film. That request reopened the door to songwriting.
The result grew into Trying to Find My Way Home, an autobiographical song cycle about war, homecoming, survival, and recovery. Its songs address experiences that are often difficult to discuss directly: leaving family, carrying responsibility, returning to a changed life, feeling isolated among familiar people, and trying to recover a sense of belonging.
The title song became one of Jason’s defining works. It received the 2016 Global Peace Song Award and has connected with veterans, family members, clinicians, caregivers, and civilian listeners. The album’s importance lies not only in its subject matter, but in its willingness to let a veteran’s experience remain complicated, specific, and human.
A LIVE PROGRAM BUILT AROUND CONNECTION
Jason’s concerts are rooted in original songs, but the stories surrounding them are an essential part of the experience. He explains where a song came from, what changed while he was writing it, and why it still matters. A program may move from a Northwoods memory to an Iraq story, from a difficult homecoming to a joke, or from one veteran’s testimony to a song created so that testimony can be heard.
This makes his work well suited to listening rooms, theaters, house concerts, festivals, veteran events, conferences, schools, colleges, retreats, faith communities, libraries, nonprofits, and community programs.
Jason can present a traditional concert, a focused story-and-song program, a keynote with original music, a workshop, or a facilitated conversation. Programs can be adapted to the needs of veterans and military families, clinicians, educators, students, caregivers, nonprofit teams, and general audiences.
The purpose is not simply to place songs between spoken remarks. Music and narrative work together. The story gives the audience a way into the song; the song carries emotional meaning beyond the explanation.
WARRIOR SONGS AND STORY TO SONG
In 2010, Jason founded Warrior Songs, a nonprofit organization that helps veterans express and integrate military experience through music and the creative arts.
Warrior Songs’ Story to Song process begins with firsthand testimony. Veterans share experiences they choose to tell, and songwriters, musicians, and producers help transform those accounts into professionally recorded songs. The veteran’s story remains at the center.
The organization’s compilation projects include If You Have to Ask: Warrior Songs, Vol. 1; Women at War: Warrior Songs, Vol. 2; and The Last Thing We Ever Do: Warrior Songs, Vol. 3. Its BIPOC Veterans project continues that effort to bring a wider range of military experiences into the public record through music.
Women at War received the 2019 Wisconsin Area Music Industry Album of the Year award. Jason’s work as a producer and facilitator on these projects demonstrates another side of his musicianship: listening closely to someone else’s life, identifying the emotional center of a story, and helping a group of artists carry it responsibly.
RECOGNITION AND MEDIA
Jason’s music and veteran-focused work have been featured by CNN, Fox News, the Associated Press, NPR, Public Radio International, Fuse, American Songwriter, and other national and regional outlets.
His honors include a gold medal in the National Veterans Creative Arts Competition, the 2016 Wisconsin Area Music Industry Singer/Songwriter award, the 2016 Global Peace Song Award for “Trying to Find My Way Home,” and the 2019 WAMI Album of the Year award as producer of Women at War.
Recognition matters because it helps the songs travel, but the center of Jason’s work remains the encounter between a story and a listener.
MUSIC LICENSING
Jason’s existing catalog is available for appropriate use in film, television, documentaries, podcasts, public media, educational projects, and nonprofit storytelling.
The catalog offers authentic acoustic and Americana recordings with themes including military service, homecoming, moral and emotional injury, resilience, family, relationships, loss, hope, redemption, social conscience, and human connection. Because many songs emerge from specific lived experiences, licensing conversations should match the recording carefully to the scene, audience, and purpose.
Inquiries are welcome for master and composition licensing, documentary use, educational programs, interviews, and projects that need an artist able to provide both the song and the story behind it.
BOOK JASON MOON
Jason is available for paid concerts, house concerts, story-and-song programs, keynote presentations, workshops, veteran and mental-health events, nonprofit and educational programs, panels, retreats, media interviews, and selected collaborations.
Programs may be presented in person or virtually and can be shaped around the audience and event.
For performance, speaking, workshop, interview, or music-placement inquiries, visit Booking or Contact. Jason’s recordings are available through Apple Music, Amazon Music, and the JasonMoon.org Store.
Young Jason Moon
Jason Moon & Frogwater
The North Country Ramblers
The Great Garbonzos
