In this episode of Maxwell’s Iowa CoffeeCast, Maxwell sits down with two Iowa musical powerhouses — Brandon Findlay and Tina Haase Findlay — to talk about their bold new collaborative project, The Babel Kind, a genre-bending original musical that weaves together love, loss, mystery, and music. What began as an MFA thesis at Lindenwood University has evolved into a fully realized stage work, and now, a live soundtrack recording event that will bring together some of Iowa’s finest musicians and actors on October 19th at Tallgrass Theatre Company in West Des Moines.
As Brandon shares, The Babel Kind began as a collection of vignettes and short stories — until Tina suggested shaping it into a jukebox-style musical using the couple’s extensive song catalog. That spark set everything in motion. The resulting story — set in the fictional Iowa town of Bright Chapel — unfolds as what Brandon describes as “a murder mystery wrapped around a love story in the form of a jukebox musical.” Yet at its heart, it’s a deeply human reflection on love, grief, and the choices that define us.
Tina and Brandon, celebrating 21 years of music and marriage, open up about how their shared songwriting history became the emotional backbone of this new piece. Many of the songs featured in The Babel Kind were written across decades of life together — tunes of hope, heartbreak, and healing that now find fresh meaning within the play’s dramatic arc. “It’s yours, mine, and ours,” Tina says, describing how the songs seemed destined to live again inside this story.
Listeners also get an inside look at the live soundtrack event at Tallgrass Theatre, which blends concert, theatre, and storytelling. The evening will feature live performances of the songs alongside monologues from the play, read by surprise guests from the Des Moines theatre community. Attendees will even become part of the official recording — their presence woven into the album’s live soundscape.
The conversation also touches on deeper creative questions: the enduring power of theatre in an age of artificial intelligence, the intersection between Iowa’s music and theatre scenes, and the importance of human expression in storytelling. Brandon reflects on art’s ability to spark self-discovery: “Art should make us better human beings,” he says. “The only way to do that is to ask ourselves: do we like who we are?”
It’s a soulful and inspiring conversation about creativity, collaboration, and the Iowa artists daring to bring something wholly original to life. Don’t miss the chance to witness it firsthand — or to hear how a love story, a community, and a collection of songs have become something far greater: The Babel Kind.
