Chad Stoner Brings Soulful Sounds to Music at Miller Park

Chad Stoner still remembers the moment he chose the saxophone. He was in sixth grade, standing in the band room. No one was choosing saxophone. It looked cool. So, he picked it.

“That’s my really deep, heavy story about saxophone,” he said with a chuckle.

He almost quit playing in the band almost as quickly as he made that decision, forging a note from his mother at the start of seventh grade. He handed it to his band director and headed to the cafeteria. A moment later, he felt a presence over his shoulder. 

“It was my band director,” Stoner recalled. “He said, ‘Get your stuff and get to the band room.’ And I said, well, my mom said I could, and he replied the same, ‘Get your stuff and get to the band room.'”

Stoner went. That choice became one of the most pivotal decisions of his life. 

After high school, he played football for the Huskers. From the outside, life looked promising. Inside, he was struggling. During his third year of college, he went “off the rails” with drinking and drug use, while mental health challenges that had been simmering since before college became impossible to ignore. 

He attempted suicide. Life took a sharp right turn, from football and college to nearly three weeks in the hospital, then back home, living in his parents’ basement. 

“The Etch-a-Sketch had been cleared,” he said. “Now it’s like, what is next?”

What came next was a return to music.

Stoner bought a bass from a pawn shop and sat in that basement strumming along to U2. The bass lines were easy enough to learn. 

“I would play and three, four hours would go by,” he said. “And in the midst of just a dumpster fire internally, it was an escape, but it also put me in a place of hopefulness again.”

Eventually, friends invited him to sing in their garage band — a rescue move, he says, on their part. When the group wanted to play Huey Lewis and the News’ “Workin’ for a Livin’,” someone remembered Stoner used to play saxophone. He borrowed back the horn he had sold years earlier, learned the song and found his way back to the instrument he had first picked up in sixth grade.

Music, he realized, wasn’t just a hobby. It was something that kept “pulling me out, not just out of the dumps, but giving me a vision of what could happen with my life.”

And it’s influenced everything for him since.

Stoner spent 20 years as a pastor. Today, he works in the in-school suspension program at Papillion La Vista South High School — the same district where he grew up and where his own children attended. 

His life has now become a clear line between the young man who once needed people to help him through a life implosion and the adult who now offers steadiness to others. 

He has been the person at the bottom. He has also been a leader willing to look someone in the eye and say, in different ways, “You are still here, and that matters.”

While he supports others, he has a well of support himself, much of it comes from the North Omaha community. 

“North Omaha has been the greatest source of support for me in every way, relationally and musically, in opportunities,” he said. “It just can’t be overemphasized, the impact and the support, love and embrace I’ve had. That is really who I am and why I’m doing what I’m doing now.”

He is eager to return to the community for Music at Miller Park on August 8. Stoner’s influences include Luther Vandross, Donny Hathaway, Anita Baker and D’Angelo. His band’s sound has been described by others as “elegant with an edge,” “stirringly soulful,” and “sophisticated swagger,” which are descriptors he is quick to note he did not come up with himself.

His goal for the concert experience always goes beyond playing songs people can vibe with. Stoner scans the crowd, makes eye contact and looks for ways to make the experience feel personal. He tells his band that the mission, in the broadest sense, is to make the audience ache. Not a painful ache, but for the music to reach the place where it touches something real.

“Whether that be in terms of a soulful uplift, or in ballads that draw out some kind of a longing, or something where it meets someone where they are in life, if you reach them there, that can be transformative,” he said. “To make them ache means to find that place where they have a need that can be soothed or satisfied or lifted by music.”

For Stoner, that is not theory. It is a lived experience. Music pulled him forward when he did not know what came next. Now, every performance is a chance to offer that same lift to someone else.

“When people come, they get lifted,” he said. “When they leave, I want them to feel like life is good.”