Drew Simmons: Foundations Partner, Manager for Noah Kahan and Chappell Roan

(This interview originally appeared in Pollstar’s 2026 Management Directory in March and is being published here for the first time online. Pick-up your copy here )

Drew Simmons, a partner at Foundations, should be freaking out. He’s on the cusp of announcing a major campaign for one of the megastars he manages, Noah Kahan, whose full-length song will be featured in a Grammys commercial teasing his upcoming baseball stadium tour (which will sell 1 million tickets and employ three different anti-scalping measures). Not long after we speak, he’ll be at the Grammys with another of his clients, Chappell Roan whose song “The Subway” received two nominations. Then her envelope-smashing “Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things Tour” hits Oceania and South America. There’s also a new mental health hotline for the music industry he’s working on with Backline; a Kahan Netflix documentary in the works, not to mention the week before, he was in Mexico for Kahan’s “Out Of The Blue Festival.” Somewhere in between, Simmons himself was named as a nominee for the prestigious peer-nominated Pollstar Award for Personal Manager of the Year.

Over the course of an hour-plus conversation, it becomes clear that the 44-year-old Buffalo native is nothing if not calm, collected, down-to-earth, pragmatic and candid — essential traits for any successful manager. It makes sense. Simmons has worked across nearly every corner of the business and absorbed management best practices from some of the industry’s legends. His résumé includes an internship at Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records; stints in security and as a runner for regional promoter Don Law’s Tea Party Presents; a college artist management class taught by Howie Day’s manager; time working with James Brown; and later, a formative run at Coran Capshaw’s Red Light Management. After signing Young the Giant, he made his way to Foundations, where he now oversees two of today’s most dynamic and successful artists in Kahan and Roan.

Simmons discovered Kahan on SoundCloud when the singer-songwriter was still attending high school in Vermont; Roan was already something of a supernova when he became her manager last year. Yet, his approach to both artists is strikingly similar. “It’s a delicate dance of commerce and art, schedules and timelines and human energy and emotion,” he says. “One of the unsaid aspects of the manager’s role is to bring calm to the chaos and shield the artist from day-to-day stress and concerns.”

That Simmons does in spades — but there’s far more to being a manager in today’s rapidly evolving management world. He also helps oversee two philanthropic initiatives: Kahan’s Busyhead Project, which supports mental health causes, and The Midwest Princess Project, which benefits queer and trans communities — work he takes immense pride in. Here, Simmons discusses how he came up in the industry, his management philosophy, and the bright future he sees ahead for his clients and Foundations.

Pollstar What’s your to-do list like, does it ever end? Drew Simmons: The most challenging part of the job is the constant barrage of needs within the business, but also having the necessary time to research, evaluate and form thoughts and opinions and talk to people and gather insight. All that results in being able to provide sound advice and look at things from multiple perspectives. And juggling it is a challenge.

I just met Jalen on your team and she had a Noah Kahan bobblehead behind her desk. How does that get done? I have an amazing team. Management is a team sport. An artist’s career is a team sport. One of the constant needs is communicating throughout a global team and when we’re making bobbleheads in Boston or doing some promo in Germany, it all requires coordination. Having a team is critical and people who can delegate, stay on top of things and be in it with their artists are the best managers.

I tried to manage someone once, it didn’t go well. Management may be the most difficult job in the music ecosystem. Making sure an artist is healthy, creative, has a business plan, has time for themselves, etc. is intense. Their list is your list. They’re humans, and humans contain infinite multitudes. It’s very difficult. I agree. It’s more complicated than most jobs. It’s a delicate dance of commerce and art, schedules and timelines and human energy and emotion. One of the unsaid aspects of the manager’s role is to bring calm to the chaos and shield the artist from day-to-day stress and concerns. The artists will have their own stress, their own evaluation, their own perception of everything as they should, and they should be fully informed. But there’s an aspect of the job that’s making sure that when time is needed, they can focus on being an artist and expressing themselves and letting everything else be handled by the team. It’s about asking, “Is this fulfilling? Are you happy? Let’s talk about what we don’t want to do.” And that tailors our ability to act on their behalf. As long as we can keep an artist happy and healthy and avoiding the majority of the stress of this business, then we’re doing our jobs.

So you’re originally from Buffalo? It’s an awesome community. I fell in love with music early, grew up in a household where my dad loved collecting records, was an audiophile and had great speaker systems. So a lot of listening happening in the house. I never played instruments. I got a general curiosity by going to shows as to “how does this all work? Who does what? This is an operation.”

What were your passion points for music that made you love it? I grew up on blues, jazz, pop, classic rock, had a hip-hop phase and got into alternative rock. The first artist I really fell in love with was Ani DiFranco. She was a staunchly independent feminist poet. I loved the movement and her unwavering independence. She was from Buffalo and ran a small label there called Righteous Babe Records. I was influenced by the region and grew up with the Tragically Hip from across the river in Toronto who were massive.

After seeing a number of Ani’s shows, I went to my best friend’s father who owned the building in Buffalo she rented for her office. My only in in the music industry was begging my friend’s dad to put a word in for me to get an internship.

Was that high school or college? This was high school.

She embraced the independent spirit early. There’s something about her artist-run independent label that really made an impact. What did you see and touch in your internship? I asked a million questions and poked around everyone’s office and tried to figure out what they did. It turned me on to artist management because her label was under the same roof as her manager Scot Fisher who ran her label. I was really curious about the idea of him being the manager. That tipped me off to being an interesting job that existed. She also had a radio plugging team, people working retail, there were maybe 12 people in total.

What did you do? Most of my days were spent in her e-commerce store in the same building. I was stuffing envelopes with merch and mailing them. That was the main function of the internship until I started to ask enough questions where people started to take me up on offering my help. I met Ani’s tour manager who introduced me to her dad when I was going to college in Boston. He ran a security company in Boston. That got me into working five shows a week throughout New England for Don Law’s company, which I did all through college.

Don Law? He’s a legend. Which venues? I worked the majority of the Orpheum shows, The Avalon, now House of Blues, Boston Garden, venues in Portland, Maine and Providence. I drove all over New England.

I would think security would give you great insight into the business? It’s funny. I don’t fit any quintessential security person. But I had to diffuse a lot of situations. More than anything, I had to manage a lot of people. Pretty quickly, I was managing staff. It opened my eyes to what concert production is and who was working at the time. It was for Tea Party Presents that became SFX, Clear Channel and then Live Nation.

That was the major inflection point for this industry. I came into the business when it all changed and the bottom fell out. I graduated college in 2004 when Napster was running rampant. File sharing was this uncontrolled Wild West destroying the industry. The recording music industry literally fell off a cliff. Navigating that was very interesting. But all the collaboration, whether on the management side or the promoter side, was happening since I got involved in the music industry.

Doing concert security, I met folks working on the production side, started picking up shifts as a runner and production assistant. My introduction was on the live side. I ended up getting a job working at Don Law’s as the office runner, running errands and whenever they needed me. I would assist in the marketing department. I got a sense of promoters and the jobs there.

I was at Northeastern University for the music industry program and had an artist management class run by Shawn Radley. At the time, he managed Howie Day. I got a chance to learn what Shawn was going through as a manager in real time with Howie Day who was literally growing while I was in class. That helped me with managing a band. I came across one in Boston who were open to me helping them out. I started managing them. They played 30 or 40 college shows a year and would sell 1,000 tickets in five or six markets around the northeast. They were called Parker House And Theory. They were a post-Dave Matthews-era college jam band with a harmonica soloist, much like John Popper. They sold tickets, didn’t sell records. They let me cut my teeth managing them and getting in a van and selling merch and getting out on the road.

Were you booking their shows? We had a college agent, but besides that, I was booking their shows.

So you’re basically an agent and tour manager. And a merch person. I would walk around Boston putting stickers on light posts and be the street team. I would nudge Don Law’s office whenever they had a national act that needed an opener and try to get my band on the bill. It happened once or twice. Then I graduated college and the band took a hiatus. I got a job working for Mark Kates at Fenway Recordings. He had moved back to Boston from L.A. after being at Grand Royal and prior to that, Geffen. He was going to start a label and it was a bad time to start a label independently. He quickly pivoted after signing a few artists to becoming a management shop and label.

How did you segue to NYC? I had met Steve Bursky, who is now my current partner at Foundations. There’s four partners in total, Brian Winton, Max Gredinger, Steve Bursky, and myself. Steve started Foundations out of his dorm room at Penn, and I started my own management company out of my dorm room at Northeastern. We had a lot in common and I worked all of Dispatch’s shows when they came through Boston. He and I were the same age and became friends. When it came time for me to look beyond Boston, I called him up. He was renting office space — a desk in the corner of James Brown’s management team’s office.

What?! On the west side of New York, 11th and 26th. I was like, “Steve, we should work together.” At the time, I didn’t have any clients because the band I worked with had broken up. And he’s like, “I can’t hire you, you don’t have a client. But I just heard that James Brown’s team were hiring a day-to-day.”

I applied, got the job, moved to New York, and got a crash course on global superstardom with the James Brown team. After about a year, I finally was integrated into the team. I got a call, and James Brown passed away. That was 2006.

Did you work with him? I was there about a year and a half. I also did day-to-day for a rock band called Voicst based in Amsterdam. So I had my indie rock side and learned by proximity what that world

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/09/11/executive-profile-drew-simmons-manager-for-noah-kahan-chappell-roan-partner-foundations/)._