Kashus Culpepper: 2025

This  FUV Live session is also available as a podcast, "FUV Live Sessions." We're elevating WFUV's long history of live sessions and interviews via a podcast that you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

While many music stars’ origin stories seem to begin with a guitar gifted at infancy or a drum kit first attacked back in kindergarten, 27-year-old country artist Kashus Culpepper is, by comparison, a bit of a late bloomer.

While the Alabama-born artist grew up surrounded by music, it wasn’t until 2020 and the onset of Covid when he first tried his hand at making it. A Navy veteran, Culpepper was stationed in Spain when the pandemic hit and the world shut down. Suddenly, he found himself with a whole lot of time on his hands. And while scores of less musically inclined Americans turned their attention to sourdough, he instead opted to pick up the guitar, initiating himself to the art by learning to play Ben E. King's "Stand By Me.”

Fast-forward to 2025, and Culpepper isn’t just playing others’ music, but writing and performing his own songs on renowned stages across the world (even opening for one of his musical idols, Leon Bridges). His voice—both smooth and textured, like gargling honey-soaked gravel—has twice echoed through the legendary room of the Grand Ole Opry, and he’s brought the sound of the South to festivals in California, London and Montréal.

Culpepper and his band — Diego Urias on keys and Bridger Fruth on the pedal steel guitar —recently came by FUV's Studio A to play a few songs, which this artist-on-the-rise only started releasing last year. Culpepper also sat down for an interview, where he discussed finding his calling, music as his first best friend, and the process of translating life experiences, past and present, into song.

[Recorded: 2/13/25; Engineered by Jim O'Hara with Nadia Garriga, Thomas Lapus, and Sofia Levytsky; produced by Meghan Suma. Videographers: Olivia Iannaccone, Jim O'Hara, and Lily Crean.]