From Church in Heavener, Oklahoma, to Shows with Blake Shelton and Back
For more than twenty years, a cardboard box held dozens of demos that Shon Aguero had written and recorded in the years from 1999 to 2004. He was in his early 20s when he made them. Then life went another way, and the box stayed shut. Five of those songs now make up most of 'Old Haunts', a six song EP out now (it came out on 6 November 2026), finished properly at last with one new song alongside them.
The story starts a long way back, in church, in Heavener, Oklahoma. That is where Aguero first played music as a kid, in the eastern part of the state, and it is easy to picture what that kind of beginning gives a young musician. You learn to play for a room of people who know you, week after week, and you learn that a song has a job to do. Plenty of country writers came up the same way, and the habit of writing something that will be useful to whoever is listening tends to stay with them.
From there came the bands. He played in them during high school and again in college, and after that the work took him out around the southwestern United States for years. Somewhere in that stretch he played shows with Blake Shelton. It is the kind of detail that tells you how far the road had already carried him, and how seriously he was going at it.
By 2003 and 2004 things were going well. He was opening on the road for bigger acts. Press coverage was coming his way, and so were award nominations. For a working songwriter, those are the years when the thing you have been chasing starts to chase you back a little, and the songs from that period carry some of that sense of a life opening up.
Then he stepped away. It was for family reasons, and there is no more to be said about it than that, other than that it must have been a hard choice to make at the moment he made it. He built a career in business in the years that followed. The music went into the box, and the box went wherever boxes go in a house that has moved on to other things.
More than twenty years later, he opened it. What he found were songs written the way a working songwriter wrote them back then, with no idea whether anyone would ever hear them. There is something affecting in that. These were not demos made with an audience in mind, or a deal, or a plan for how they might land. They were made because writing them was how a young man got through what he was thinking about. Aguero has said it took him "25 years to realize" that everything he was writing then was about loss, and that is the thread you follow once you know to look for it.
'Old Haunts' is an EP about things that end. The questions behind it are ones most people carry in their twenties without quite naming them: whether you are worth much, who you are turning into, and whether that will be enough. What strikes me, listening to how the songs sit together, is how outward facing they are for a record built on that kind of private worry. These are songs about other people, and about the places where he stood in relation to them.
'Then Again' opens it, a song about leaving, and Aguero's own line on it is that leaving "is easy to start and hard to finish." It makes a fitting way in, given everything that came after those years. 'Maria' looks back at someone loved and hopes for a magic from the past to come round again. 'Hwy 59 Walking Man' follows a stranger walking a hard road that the whole town has judged, and the song does not let its writer off; his own part in that judgment is written into it. I find that the most generous thing on the record, a young man owning up to having been one of the people looking on.
'Words You Say' is the focus track, sitting fourth of the six. It is about advice from those you leave behind, and the way it stays with you after you have gone. Coming from a songwriter who left one life for another and then came back to the first, that subject carries a weight he probably could not have known it would when he wrote it. Some things people tell you only make sense later, and this is a song about exactly that.
'How I Need You' comes next. It sounds like a love song, but Aguero describes it as "really about self reflection", and it sets out need as a kind of confession: how much a person needs to be accepted and loved, and how hard that is to say plainly. Placed after a song about the voices of others, it turns the record inward for a moment before the close.
That close is 'Boneyard', the only new song here and the only one he did not write alone. He wrote it with Marcus Blair, his best friend since childhood. It is a cowboy song about how small our lives are in the grand scheme of things, and about using the time we have to find joy. After five songs written by a young man coming to terms with endings, it lands like an answer written by an older one, and it matters that he wrote it with someone who has known him the whole way through.
Aguero did almost all of the work on the EP himself, from the writing right through to the mastering, and the songs were finished at Whisper Court Studio in the spring of 2026. That suits a record that began as one person's private archive.
He is based in Columbia, Missouri, these days, and the rest of the box is still being worked through, the songs finished one at a time and shared as they are ready. It is an unusual way to bring music into the world, slower than most and more personal, and it seems right for songs that waited this long. He has not stopped writing either. New ideas are going down on paper every day, so the box is not the only place the songs are coming from. For a country songwriter who spent two decades away, that may be the best news on 'Old Haunts': the young man in those demos was worth hearing, and the man who opened the box still has plenty to say.
