Nashville-based singer-songwriter Kate Hasting – who now performs under the name
Hasting – is on the phone a few days ahead of the release of her new single, “
Truck Talk.”
“It’s just a fun, good, you know, end-of-summer song that is about trucks – because you could never have too many truck songs in country music,” the New Carlisle native says.
Yes, perhaps just one more was needed, we joke during a recent phone interview.
“She plans to deliver way more truck songs,” says her mother, Libbee Maxson, who’s also on the call from her home in Springfield.
They’re on the line to talk about the upcoming
Hasting Farm Fest 2025, which begins with the MEET MUSIC ROW Nashville Hit Songwriters’ Night on Sept. 26 at
Mother Stewart’s Brewing in Springfield, with the main, daylong affair following on Sept. 27 at the
Clark County Fairgrounds.
Billed as a “music and community festival,” the day promises
performances by Hasting and other musical artists, including The Wilder Blue, Trey Lewis and Allison Road, as well as food, adult beverages, games, vendors, Ohio State Buckeye football players signing autographs, farm equipment and demonstrations, representatives of community organizations, and more.
Proceeds will benefit Ohio Tri-County Food Alliance/
Second Harvest Food Bank, which works to alleviate hunger in Clark, Champaign, and Logan counties.
According to a news release about the event, the Hasting family had been kicking around the idea for such a festival for years before deciding in 2017 to move forward with Hasting Farm Fest. Inspired in part by country star Luke Bryan’s Farm Tour, Libbee envisioned a big to-do on the family’s property, but her father, the late Dan Hasting, didn’t think that was quite possible.
“The infrastructure was not there,” Maxson says, “but we talked about starting small with (what) we knew we could do then.”
Unfortunately, a car accident the following year led to Dan’s death, putting plans for the event on hold and bringing Kate back home from Nashville periodically to help out her mother on the farm before the former settled permanently in the country music capital about five years ago.
Hasting Farm Fest finally was set to debut last year – after Hasting and Maxson had landed on the fairgrounds as the ideal venue and gotten Executive Director Dean Blair on board – but
Hurricane Helene had other ideas.
After what Hasting recalls as a harrowing trek of the caravan of Nashville musicians up from Tennessee, the VIP night at Mother Stewart’s went on as planned. That is despite, as Maxson remembers, incredibly high winds and a power outage for much of the area.
“We ended up having to get ready with baby wipes and candlelight to go to the event,” Hasting says, “but it did not stop.”
Adding, “That is so Clark County to me.”
However, citing “The safety of our attendees, vendors, and volunteers,”
they pulled the plug on the festival itself. Still, thanks to the VIP night and that tickets for the event were, as they are this year, nonrefundable, they were able to raise thousands for the charity. Declining to provide an exact figure, Maxson says the goal is to double it this year.
Hasting has been working to help fight hunger for years, having co-founded the Nashville-based nonprofit
Meet Music Row, which benefits
Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee.
“I thought, ‘There are people in Nashville hungry right now and (in) my hometown,’” she says. “That is just so disturbing to me.”
Also having performed with
Hasting & Co., Hasting has been writing songs since she was 3, her mother says.
“I don’t know that they were songs,” Hasting interjects.
“Well, that’s what you called them,” her mother counters. “She was able to read and write very early on, so at 3 she was writing – phonetically – words on the giant chalkboard that we had in the children’s playroom, and she would sit in a laundry basket writing songs, and we laugh about that to this day.
“We were like, ‘Of course, she was,’” she adds with a laugh. “That’s the perfect definition of Kate.”
Maxson says the support from the community has been outstanding when it comes to Hasting Farm Fest.
“(We) have never felt more embraced, more seen, more inspired by how phenomenally our community came together,” she says. “When I tell you neither Kate nor I called a single person that said ‘no’ when we asked them for whatever we asked them for, that is no lie. Not one person said no to anything.”
The mother-daughter team worked together on what they say is a music lineup offering variety, but, again, that’s only part of the draw.
“This is not a music festival like anyone else’s,” Maxson says. “We don’t want it to be like anyone else’s. This is a family-friendly, fun event where you’re going to see top-tier artists, but you can also have a beer and get into an adult bouncy house, or your kids can do all these cool, fun things.
“It’s a little quirky and a little weird – like Kate,” she adds. “And I think that’s the way we want to keep it.”
Nonrefundable general-admission tickets to Hastings Farm Fest 2025 on Sept. 27 at the Clark County Fairgrounds are $25, plus fees. VIP-A Experience tickets, which include the event on Sept. 26 at Mother Stewart’s Brewing and first-come-first-served close-to-the-stage seating on Sept. 27, are $125. A second-tier VIP ticket is available for $50. Get more information
here and buy tickets
here.