By Anelia K. Dimitrova
Ain’t no shame in nabbing a trophy.
Ain’t no shame either in being the underdog when recognition finally comes unexpected.
Ain’t no shame in loving writing and performing traditional country music even though this may not be the most popular genre in Iowa.
So when, on Nov. 9, Katie and the Honky Tonks, the hot Cedar Valley country band, heard their name read on stage among the nominees for the Country Artist of the Year, they waited, but not with bated breath, as they were up against bands with “huge” followings, not to mention last year’s winner.
In that brief moment when the audience went quiet right before the award claimed its owner, the band members locked eyes.
“And the winner is … Katie and the Honky Tonks,” the announcer said.
It was a stunner, for real.
“We all sat there for a second with our mouths open, like, did they seriously just say our name?” Katie Sires, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, told me afterwards.
As cheers erupted, Katie headed to the stage, along with her husband Luke, the drummer, Jesse Cotton, the guitarist, and Johnny Love, the bass player.
They had been nominated for Best Country Artist and Best Traditional Album, but the the jury had decided otherwise.
“Totally unexpected,” Katie says in a video she posted, addressing the audience at the Burlington Memorial Auditorium, where the 2025 Iowa Music Awards ceremony took place. “I feel we’re always the underdog, we’re traditional country music, we’re not popular country. You won’t hear us on the radio, unless it’s public radio and that’s awesome that we are still recognized.”
The award comes on the heels of the band’s first album, “Ain’t No Shame,” a 39-minute body-and-soul moving collection of 11 songs, which was released in June, right before the Cedar Basin Music Festival in town.
The album maps the band’s musical journey and the name nails it down to a tongue-in-cheek phrase, which is the band’s motto — ain’t no shame in working hard, playing hard, staying true to who you are and now winning the state-wide award.
That’s not a fluke of fate.
Play the last song in the album, “Honky Tonk in Iowa,” to understand the group’s artistic predicament.
“I-o-w-a, you know I’m here to stay,” Katie sings, before making this pledge: “But pray you’ll have a honky tonk some day.”
The chorus lyrics tell you all you need to know about making music in a genre that is not as popular in your home state, but staying with it for the love of it, hence the band’s name.
“I wanted to have a band name that just describes a band right when you say the band name,” Katie says. “We’re going to honky tonk all night and introduce people, especially around Iowa, to this. We have to educate people on this.”
How the partnership works
Chatting with Katie and Luke at Sidecar on College Hill in Cedar Falls on a recent Friday afternoon, right before the awards and after they had each finished their day jobs, convinced me that the band is here to stay and keep growing.
If you just saw them sitting at the high tables at the popular coffee house, you’d never know how they light up a stage with their vibe.
Music is their mission – making it, playing it, advocating for others who play it, all this with one purpose in mind — help keep live music alive, no matter the genre, no matter the size of the following. The two intentionally carve out time to cultivate a collaborative community of area music-lovers whose presence sets the cultural scene everywhere they perform.
Supporting live music as artists and advocates
Katie and Luke are committed to supporting live music of any genre and they make it a point of frequenting local venues as they understand the value of its community-strengthening power.
“It was actually my New Year’s resolution to support more local bands and get out more often,” Katie says. “So if we’re not playing, we try to get out and support them. Even if it’s not a genre we specifically like, we just want to support people and make sure that live music stays alive.”
They have now taken their commitment to a new level when they opened the doors to their two-bedroom house to fellow artists Eliza Thorn, a Nashville musician who released her first album, “Somebody New,” in September of 2024, and Ty Toomsen and the Twang City Smokers from Columbia, Missouri. The musicians came to Cedar Falls for the College Hill-Billy Country Fest at the Octopus, on Nov. 15, which was organized by Luke and hosted by the Octopus on the Hill. Marques Morel, Madison Kolbet, Fred Love, as well as Katie and the Honky Tonks also performed that evening.
“We’re just getting to know everybody and we’re just supporting everybody, no matter what,” Luke says. “When we’re not playing, we’re going to go support music. People don’t show up to shows to support artists, so they’re skipping Iowa. I want that to change.”
How Katie and the Honky Tonks came to be
When it comes to their story, Katie and Luke, conjointly known as KAKE, tell it in synchrony, anecdotes and all.
You’d expect this from a couple that has shared life’s twists and turns for almost two decades, but then there’s more.
The two aren’t just a married couple who happen to be musicians. And neither are they musicians who happen to be married.
Since they first met 18 years ago, they’ve been connected through music in ways that go much deeper than wedding vows. Music binds them in a partnership of equals, even though it is clear that in the band, as the name suggests, Katie is the music boss as well as the social media creator.
She writes the songs and later, the band later comes up with the instrumentation.
Luke is the drummer, but his equally important job is to be the operations manager and agent, responsible for scheduling gigs, driving the van to locations and managing everything from moments to moods. He is especially focused on making sure the band impresses the venue managers with its dependability, punctuality and stage presence, an effort that pays off in invitations for the next special event.
“Within the community of other musicians, we usually call ourselves lifers, because we’re doing this no matter what,” he says of his dedication to music. “You know, we’re always doing it. It might not be a career. But we just consider ourselves lifers because this is just what we have to do.”
Technically, they are creative millennials who straddle two worlds — the poetic and the practical ones.
The former is the space where their seemingly inexhaustible passion for music making and performing oxygenates their existence. That passion has won the band a loyal following, a packed gig schedule locally and in the neighboring states, most recently in Chicago where they earned new fans and an invite for next year’s show.
The more practical side of their worlds is the one where their bread and butter comes from in the form of monthly paychecks. Katie works for SciPlay, a social casino gaming company in Cedar Falls, and Luke has worked at UNI since 1999, most recently in facilities management.
Like generations of local musicians before them and many around them, Katie and Luke have had to wrestle with how to balance making music and making money, an imperative that sometimes pushes musicians to pick one or the other or dooms them to live with the guilt of doing neither.
But the pair is quite fulfilled having both. In fact, they wouldn’t have it any other way — that balance between the mundane and the creative is the right measure for them as performers and exactly the reason why they crave music after handling the daily duties of regular jobs.
“I don’t know how I feel about making music my career full time because I don’t want to lose the love and passion for it, and I feel like if it became a day-to-day job, I might,” Katie says.
Luke, who first heard his dad playing music “while in the womb,” says in live performances, when the audience viscerally responds to their music, they feel alive.
“When we’re out there swinging, and people are dancing or buying records, and we’re sitting there playing, we just watch people go line up at the merch table and then just everyone’s holding our vinyl, and I was like, yeah, that’s why you play music,” Luke says. “That’s why you’re a lifer.”
How the two met
Music connected Katie and Luke serendipitously when she auditioned for a band Luke and his twin brother, John, called “The Diz Diz.” The name was twin brothers’ speak for “Done Deal.”
Katie, then 21, had just finished hair school, a profession she thought would pay the bills and still let her sing to her heart’s content. A Gladbrook native, she also worked as a cocktail waitress at the popular Cedar Falls live music venue called the Hub, at Fourth and Main streets, now Whiskey Road.
There, she met a lot of the local musicians and eventually, a friend told her the “Diz Diz” was looking for a lead singer. She was confident in her vocals, as in high school, she took every opportunity to perform, and eventually, taught herself to play guitar, just good enough to be able to accompany herself.
“It was terrifying ‘cause I’d never been in a band before,” Katie says, recalling the moment right before her life was about to change. “I’d only sang with the high school swing choir and stuff like that. So I was really, really scared.”
But it worked out and they ended up having their first show at the Hub.
The rest is history, as they say, but not in a straightforward way.
Behind the scenes, bands, like passionate lovers, are often a microcosm of creative sensibilities and tornadic tumult. Sometimes, they stick together through thick and thin, but more often than not, they thrive or die depending on the bond within.
Quitting and moving on are as existential as starting a new band hoping this one would make it big.
The “Diz Diz” was no exception, and it eventually dissolved when Katie moved briefly to California for work.
She returned to the Cedar Valley and in September of 2014, while on a pontoon ride with Luke, he dropped on one knee right in the middle of Union Grove Lake and proposed.
They married on May 30, 2015, just outside of Gladbrook.
A decade into their marriage and a shared music journey, they are thriving.
They laughingly describe themselves as “hippies or hipsters or something in between” and as being accepting and not being in the “majority of how we think.”
“I love vintage things, vintage clothes, our house is all mid century,” says Katie. “I have a different taste, but other than that, I’d say we’re pretty normal.”
How Ain’t No Shame came to be
Ain’t No Shame came out on June 27 and the band celebrated the album with a party at the Cedar Falls Basin Festival, which runs concurrently with Sturgis Falls, the town’s annual celebration, which marked its 49th year in 2025.
I bought the album on iTunes (it is available on all platforms) and found it fresh and danceable.
The songs, which are an homage to “strong women,” as Katie puts it, came from a residency at the historic Dance-Mor Ballroom in Swisher, Iowa, where, at the invitation of the owners, Nick and Rebekah Neuendorf, Katie and the Honky Tonks performed every other Thursday from February to July in 2024. “We loved doing it,” Katie says. It was a dream to play in a 100-year-old ballroom.”
In the winter months, the Texas-style dance hall was packed with line dancers, but in the summer, the audience thinned out, so Katie used the time to write songs.
That’s how Ain’t No Shame came to be.
“The record is made for a dance floor because we wrote it in a dance hall,” Luke says. “So every single song is made to dance to it.”
How a song comes to life
In writing songs, Katie usually first comes up with the words, and it may happen anywhere, sometimes, even at work, a line would zoom through her head.
But it takes time for a song to take shape. It takes her a while to “dwell” on the line and then, strumming her guitar, she comes up with a melody. Then comes a verse, and then the hardest part for her – the chorus.
“But every now and then, it just flows really natural,” she says. “And once I start singing and putting it to music, it just kind of comes out.”
They recorded the album at Catamount Studios, in Cedar Falls, and just when they thought they were done with the album, Katie came up with a last-minute song she felt was important to include. So they hauled the equipment back in place, which took two hours, and in three runs, which was about 10 minutes, recorded the song. It is a hymn of empowerment where the character says, “I don’t need you but I want you.”
The idea for it came out of a fight the two had and Katie’s intention was to write an “angry song.” In the process of searching for the words, she realized that what she was really doing was writing a love song about a strong woman who knows her power and desires.
“So the lyrics are, I don’t need you, but I want you,” she says. “Now we just joke about it, and it’s kind of fun.”
What it’s like to make music with a band
The band’s extended family, Katie and Luke say.
“When you’re in a band, you’re ‘married’ to everybody in the band, it’s all a big-time relationship, and then you’re also married to their spouses, too. We’re lucky because we all get along.”
Managing the band, as Luke does, and being the boss, as Katie is, happens to be an ongoing learning curve.
“If anyone’s gonna be upset about a decision that was being made, I want them to be upset with me,” Katie says. “I don’t want it to be a group argument.”
Luke says his focus is on managing day-to-day logistics and all the future planning and bookings.
“I’ve always been a big fan of the personal touch,” he says. “I want to have lasting friendships at the end of it. Sometimes it gets a little too big, sometimes it can’t be that personal, but especially with the venues and stuff, I want to be the one with a personal relationship with the talent buyers, the agents. We want to be the most reliable group of people you’ve ever worked with in your life.”
The band’s success and her own level-headedness notwithstanding, Katie admits that as a song writer, she opens up her vulnerabilities to the audience. It wasn’t until she overcame her insecurities of sharing her work with others and the affirmation of close friends that she plucked the courage to explore her song-writing talent.
“I’m slowly building up that confidence, but it’s still, it’s very vulnerable to do and yeah, it’s kind of hard knowing how people are going to take things or if they’re going to assume what you’re saying is about a certain situation.”
Who are the band’s biggest fans & why
Katie and the Honky Tonks has a loyal following in the area and everywhere they perform. But their most avid fans are Katie’s parents, Maynard and Pam Wedmore and Luke’s dad, Dean Sires, and his mom, Rosie Lang, who occasionally offers management or music advice for good measure.
“I love how honest my mom is and how critical she is because if she sees a show and there’s something she didn’t like, she lets me know,” Luke says.
When they return from gigs, Katie and Luke are greeted by their two pups, Bernadette, a poodle Jack Russell mix, and Bonnie, a standard poodle.
B&B are often the first to hear a new song as it comes together from an idea, as they sit at Katie’s feet during practice, and occasionally, as Luke plays the drums, Bonnie sneaks in a kiss or two.
Seven years into the band, Katie still has stage fright before a gig, “as you never know what it is going to be like.”
But they are as hungry to perform today as they were when they started and here’s why:
“I heard an awesome quote once – amateurs need motivation. Pros just do. That’s how I feel,” Luke says, speaking for both. “We just keep doing it because that’s what we do. And your hard work pays off. We just do, because we’re lifers.”