BZ Music

Similar to the double dirty dog dare that cause the first album, I quickly agreed to go six months in advance, as if that month could never actually arrive on the calendar. We chose June, and around May I said:  “Gulp, I guess it’s about time to nut up.”  

The first time I heard of Sonic Ranch was last June in the middle of our Texas tour. The first time Colby heard of it was from Sebastian, a friend of ours from the Moscow Beta house. Sebastian had been listening to a band named Midland and had watched the video of their recording session at Sonic Ranch.  He told Colby about it, so Colby made contact with the ranch and was surprised to receive a call from none other than the owner of Sonic Ranch, Tony (I should know his last name, but I’ve obviously been avoiding using last names in this blog). The story goes that Tony called Colby while he was attending a wedding and had had a few drinks. Nonetheless, Tony came away with a very good impression of Colby and really wanted him to make his next album at the ranch.  We had been operating this “business” on a shoestring budget for the last two years, having spent only around $2k on each of the last two albums. I have yet to write the blogs about the making of the previous two albums...

Ever wonder how an album is recorded?  Prepare for a long description.  First, you know, you gotta write the album. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to describe how that happens. Just the sheer number of decisions on chords, progressions, rhythms, words, layers upon layers of meaning. Well leave that discussion for another time.  The huge conundrum of recording a song is the one versus many problem. If you play a song as a group (as god intended), and record all the parts simultaneously on one room, you have no ability to change the relative volume or influence of any one part (called mixing). So you have to have a perfect mix at recording (quite impossible), Or you have to record all of the parts individually so that pro level mixing can be done. But it is so hard to play a single part by oneself. The whole point of playing a song with a group is the unspoken communication that goes on all the time. Playing a song as a group allows the individual to use the group memory f...

The band.  The songs.  Getting popular

Link to the album:  https://open.spotify.com/album/6h3QqAyUznHmGJj90J3WZl?si=fAd6fgGRQZOFVby8TuzYLg Oh. I forgot to talk about the biggest hit on the first album Moscow Drinking Team:  https://open.spotify.com/track/17K7VbBOYQ7sp2kjtYgMW9?si=muBDsZWESEa0uxnZQNgIbg From a marketing standpoint, this was a brilliant strategy to grow our audience from essentially zero to roughly 30,000 monthly Spotify listeners (Not that we were thinking about that). It’s not a song with wide appeal to a national audience, but was guaranteed to capture the University of Idaho grad market in all of Idaho and just about anywhere else in the nation and world. It’s just a simple tune about out-drinking members of competing institutions, with specific reference to local landmarks. So if anyone from Idaho (the University) hears it, instant playlist addition. Hell, I was getting chain forwarded email from my classmates saying: “Have you heard this song!?” And I’m like: “Yeah, I play bass on it.”

Here’s a link to the album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1zvsrwVznYIHwDRah2G4RZ?si=x8aykK_GSB-6er74szpF-A I’m in the studio at Sonic Ranch right now and I sat Colby down and asked him his version of the decision to make that first album. Turns out it’s a lot like my version. We were at Bucer’s in the late summer of 2019, post gig. Not drunk but we drink a reasonable amount at every gig to stay loose. Combine that with the tired satisfaction of just sitting down after finishing, before breakdown. He says I was adamant about touring (I don’t remember being that adamant, but I am an engineer and terrible at gentle communication. With me it’s all blunt force trauma verbiage).  Me: “Let’s tour.” Colby: “Not without an album.” Me: “So let’s make an album.” Colby: “Ok.” It’s basically us sitting there double daring each other into an album.  Great. How, and where do we make an album? It’s really weird how providence works.  Colby was at his buddy Alex’s bachelor party (a Beta ...

The first time I met Colby Acuff was in the lobby of the Beta house in Moscow. It turns out that we both attended the same frat 34 years apart. At the time I was recently retired from my software career, and had been conscripted by the corporation that held the physical house as Treasurer.  It was fall 2018 and our memories seem to diverge on this story. Here’s mine: I was in the lobby overseeing some kind of plumbing thing in the house when this tall skinny kid walks up and says:  “I hear you play bass”.  And I said something flippant like:  “Yeah, who the hell are you?”  Then he holds out his hand and says:  “I’m Colby Acuff and I play country music.”   An auspicious beginning, but this has happened to me a number of times. Evidently bass players are hard to come by. So we agreed to meet up at my house to see if we could come up with a sound we liked together. Now this is funny. I’m 34 years older than this kid, and that doesn’t seem to bother him a...