THE Long VERSION.

Hi, I’m Luke Brawner. I’m just going to write this in first person because it would feel pretentious not to. Here’s how we got here:

In 2008, after seven years of fronting an independent folk rock band based out of Fort Worth, TX, the band’s drummer, Andy Brannon and I decided to start an artist development, booking, and management company whose efforts would be focused entirely on independent artists. We named the company Milieu Artist Cooperative despite the fact that few people could pronounce it, even fewer could spell it, and fewer still knew what it meant. We had some branding designed, printed some business cards, signed a few bands, and got to work.

About a year in, however, I was offered a job that required me to move 4 hours south, to Houston, TX. That move resulted in the fizzling out of Milieu Media Group by mid-2010.

Fast forward a few years to early 2015… while commuting to work in Houston traffic day in and day out, like so many others at the time, I became somewhat obsessed with the true crime podcast Serial. This obsession expanded quickly into the whole of the podcasting medium. With 15+ years of audio production experience and a decent collection of recording gear, I decided to try my hand at podcasting.

I had a couple of different ideas for what I believed to be musical projects at the time. When the podcast idea came to mind though, it was evident that each of those concepts was better suited for that medium.

The first idea was for a show called Sons & Doubters, a series in which my dear friend and co-host Aaron Hale would get really honest about the things we still believed (theologically speaking) and the things we’d let go of. We’d do this in conversation with one another and typically one guest who existed in some form or fashion on the fringes (just inside or just outside) of faith.

The second idea, as I was working as a worship pastor at the time, was for a show called Hymnistry (pronounced like ‘chemistry’, silent N), in which another dear friend and co-host, John Hatfield and I would explore the movement that had been going on for several years in the church/liturgical music space to take old hymn lyrics and put them to new/modern music.

We recorded the first episode of each of those shows on the very same day, back to back, in May of 2015. John going Aaron and I as the first guest on Sons & Doubters, while Aaron joined John and I as the first guest on Hymnistry. It was a very, very fun day and I remember it fondly.

I spent the next couple months learning how to edit and assemble a podcast episode, set up an RSS feed, etc., and recording more episodes of each series. Then we launched them a month apart in September and October of 2015.

Because of the unique way the series were recorded, the tremendous fun we had producing those early episodes, and the mere fact of both shows being connected to the same hosting account, (combined with my lifelong inability to do things in moderation), it felt like a podcast network from the beginning. Much like indie bands who create a record label to make themselves look and feel more established, we decided (pretty flippantly) to form a podcast network. And because I had the branding from the already long-defunct Milieu Artist Cooperative just sitting around unused, we made a slight tweak to the Photoshop file for the logo and branded ourselves Milieu Media Group. Just like that.

Over the course of producing the first couple seasons of those two shows, my obsession with the medium continued to grow stronger, and more concepts kept taking shape in my mind. Practically every conversation I was a part of seemed to spark a new idea.

One such conversation was with my Sons & Doubters co-host, Aaron Hale, at the end of Summer 2016. That summer was filled with news report after news report of unjustified police violence on black bodies. With a deep desire to participate in disrupting the silence in our own communities, we placed Sons & Doubters on indefinite hiatus and began producing the first iteration of The Relay, a series originally intended to model the sort of empathy necessary for healthy engagement in often complicated, nuanced conversations.

It became evident quickly that ours weren’t the voices needed in that conversation, no matter how pure our intentions may have been. So that show, too, was put on hiatus until a more fitting team could be assembled to lead the way.

2017 saw the launch of 5 new series on the network, including The H, The Ish, Yay! Go, Sports!, and Ryan Hamilton’s Lost the Plotcast. In 2018, Moda Spira Podcast was added to that list, and in 2019, Thirty Pop, the much-improved return of The Relay, and the first episode of Smokes. There was plenty of other excitement over the course of that time as well, with Milieu Media Group moving into it’s first dedicated studio space, a couple of different live event series beginning, and a two other series that made it quite a way through the development and production process, but ultimately didn’t pan out. I also began leading regular podcasting workshops at Rice University, and taking on a number of new contract production, editing, and mixing clients.

In 2020, Tommy Parker joined the company as Head of Integration, which proved to be a massive help. Even still, as it did with so many other businesses, Covid-19 forced us to close the studio down and move the entire operation back home. Nonetheless, that year we launched one of our most successful shows to date, Fun Parts, and we added our first show to the roster not produced by me, with Houston Made.

In 2021, we began to shift our focus away from producing all original shows. The workload was unmanageable, and we knew our very best ideas were sitting on the back burner because we didn’t have nearly enough time or money to make them on our own. We began focusing on developing ideas we could pitch to larger networks as possible co-productions.

That pretty much brings us to today. We produce our own content, we produce, edit, and mix shows for other folks, we host really engaging events from time to time, and we’re developing shows to potentially produce alongside larger networks And we do all of these things to one good end: deep human connection. That is the highest goal of our work. More than we want to build large audiences or make money, we want to create opportunities for people to connect with one another deeply.

Compelling stories, nuanced dialogue, inclusive community, and creative production.
All for the sake of deep human connection.