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From The New Pine Plains Herald, July 17, 2025
On any given weekend in the Hudson Valley, you might stumble into a barn or backyard where the lights are low, the crowd is two-stepping, and the music feels more psychedelic than country. The song is unfamiliar, but it hits like an old favorite. Chances are, you’ve found yourself at a Neon Moons show.
“We run a loose ship,” said frontman Brett Miller. “It doesn’t have to be right. It just has to sound good.”
The Neon Moons are not your grandfather’s country band. Since forming loosely in 2018, they’ve helped ignite a honky tonk dance scene across the region. Their sound fuses ’90s country songwriting with jam-band improvisation and groove-forward arrangements — think Hank Williams meets Phish. Their shows are sweaty, celebratory, and built for movement.
Miller, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, grew up outside San Diego in a town “twenty minutes inland where it’s full-on cowboy country.” Rodeos, two-stepping, and his mother’s shared birthday with Willie Nelson were early influences. After moving to New York to work on a farm, Miller stumbled into music almost by accident.
“I started doing honky tonk nights just because nobody else was doing it, and I really wanted to dance,” he said.
Dance remains the heart of the band’s ethos. From the beginning, the Neon Moons brought in instructors to teach two-stepping and line dancing to East Coast audiences unfamiliar with country’s social rhythms.
“Coming from the West Coast, it was weird to me that people didn’t dance to country music here,” Miller said. “We wanted to change that.”
They did. Today, crowds come dressed in boots and fringe — not as costume, but in earnest joy. Some are seasoned dancers; others just move to the rhythm.
“There’s no wrong way to move to a song,” Miller said. “Just do it.”
The band’s current lineup — solidified around 2020 — includes Miller on vocals and rhythm guitar, Dan Stern on drums, Donny Dinero on lead guitar, Quinn Murphy on bass, Kramer Sanguinetti on pedal steel, Lee Godleski on keys, Lukas Schwartz on fiddle, and Alex Wernquest on guitar.
“Most people in the band aren’t strictly country musicians,” Miller said. “That gives it this funky kind of feel. We’re not reenactment-style country. We’re not cosplaying. We’re just doing our thing.”
The result is a genre-blurring, rhythm-driven sound rooted in Southern traditions but open to improvisation — and they play it live almost exclusively.
“We never play the same set twice,” said Stern. “Sometimes we stumble into a totally different feel by accident and just roll with it.”
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