Taylor Sims is your 2023 Outstanding Secret Ingredient – Colorado Sound Music Awards

You voted Taylor Sims as your Outstanding Secret Ingredient in the 2023 Colorado Sound Music Awards

By Adam Perry

Longmont-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Taylor Sims grew up in Texas but found a home in Colorado when the now-defunct bluegrass band Spring Creek made waves in the early 2000s. He joined his wife, Bonnie Sims, as a member of her band Bonnie and the Clydes in 2013.

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed down the notoriously busy band, but not the talented, hard-working couple, whose recording of the sultry outlaw-country ballad “I See Red” became a sudden international sensation (under the moniker Everybody Loves an Outlaw) just before Bonnie found sudden success with the all-female bluegrass badasses Big Richard (who won the On the Rise category in last year’s Colorado Sound Music Awards).

Taylor, for his part, supports Bonnie as she tours widely with Big Richard just as Bonnie supported Taylor when he was traversing the United States with Spring Creek. However, he’s a busy, coveted musician as well, playing countless gigs as a sideman and even frontman, playing guitar on tour with Madeline Hawthorne, and—in partnership with Bonnie—building Everybody Loves an Outlaw into a living, breathing, touring band rather than a mysterious one-hit wonder.

“We want [Bonnie and Taylor Sims] and Everybody Loves an Outlaw to be synonymous,” he says. “We do want it to be firmly like that. It’s us.”

Honorably someone who supports frontpeople rather than worry whether he’s in the spotlight at center stage, Sims says he’s touched that Colorado Sound voters chose him as this year’s Outstanding Secret Ingredient.

“It feels great. The nomination was a bit of a surprise but I’m definitely stoked that I won. The more that I think about it, the more I’m glad to be nominated for that type of award; it feels like I’ve really been embraced by my music community with all my friends and bandmates and all that, but also the people who voted for me. It feels really good to get that kind of recognition.”

Sims knows what it’s like to make a song sound great, whether on stage or on a hit song, and not necessarily get the bulk of the credit.

“Part of that speaks to how I’ve always tried to make the best out of any situation that I can. From a philosophical standpoint, I try to make everyone else around me when I’m playing music sound better and feel good, and try to be as supportive as possible. Musically, that’s when I feel like my purpose is being fulfilled. I really do love that supportive role. I love being in the spotlight, too, but I love being part of a team that has a larger goal in mind, and trying to serve the song as best we can. It helps me detach from my own ego; it has to be about ‘we’ or ‘us’ or whatever’s happening.”

Meet all of the 2023 Colorado Sound Music Award winners

On the Rise – Pink Fuzz

Colorado Spirit – The Mishawaka

Outstanding Stage Presence – Alysia Kraft

Outstanding ‘Secret Ingredient’ – Taylor Sims

Musician or Band You’d Drive 105.5. Miles to See – Volores

Lifetime Achievement Award – Chris K.

Meet all our incredible 2023 Colorado Sound Music Award nominees

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