BZ Music

I stopped writing about this music adventure right after the Sonic Ranch Trip.  I need to get this out of my system so I can move on with my life. Not even sure what my point is right now. Did I get wronged? Am I a fucked up person that cant deal with any other humans? Probably a bit of both. But why write this?  Mostly, therapy.  I feel bad at the outcome of all of this, and I'm trying to understand why. I believe I had a great deal to do with Colby's success.  And still think I did it for good reasons.  I don't think I did it for me.  No promises. If you're reading this, you should have already read the entirety of my  Musik Adventure story.  Please note that the latest entries show up at the top, so if you want to read it in chronological order, Anyhow,  it all started falling apart on the Sonic Ranch recording session trip (The third album). Colby started believing he was good, and destined to become a star.  On the trip to El Paso ...

I've been asked a few times to explain why Colby's song "If I Were the Devil" is getting more than 6 times more listens than his second best song "Dying Breed". Likewise, I've wondered why Colby's second album is getting so much more traction than his third or fourth albums, even though the third and fourth cost much more to make and have had the benefit of so much more media funding. The second album cost only $2k to produce and has probably made more than $500,000 in streaming income.  The third cost $20k and only "Honky Tonk Kevin" is in his top ten list of songs currently being listened to.  The fourth album cost around $150k and none of the songs have entered the top 3 on Colby's listens list, even though they have received enormous advertising benefit.   I've contemplated this question for almost two years.  At first, my vanity lead me to believe that it was my input in post production on the second album that made the differe...

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:  If I Were the Devil Oh. I forgot to talk about the biggest hit on the first album  Moscow Drinking Team : 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.” That first album got our numbers up enough that we could try to expand our audience with a second album (link above). I've

Here’s a link to the album:  Life of a Rolling Stone 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 (Coffee shop with music on Fri and Sat nights in Moscow, ID) 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 par...

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...

Electric Love Bucket After Simba I decided I should try leading a band once, just so I would stop being a whiny bitch about the lead not doing things perfectly for my satisfaction.  So I put this group together.  I found Byron, the guitar playing with a group that was supposedly developing young singing talent.  That group scared the daylights out of me.  An old guy (not me) shepherding a bunch of underage girls.  I'm out.  But I found Byron there.  This kid was a killer lead guitar player and could do both rhythm and leads, and could transition seamlessly.  And he could hear what I was doing across a loud band.  Just a joy to play with.  We were playing some ZZTop tune once and he and I began passing back and forth the theme from Close Encounters.  In the middle of the lead or a rhythm he'd play it, then in the middle of the bass line, I'd play it back.  Back and forth.  We had a good laugh at the end when we asked th...

By this time I'd been thumping along for a few years now and had played in a small variety of bands. Then along came Simba What can I say about Simba.  His name is actually Humphrey.  He called himself Simba because it suited him better.  He was raised in Kenya and schooled in English schools -- highly educated and spoke English far better than almost everyone in Idaho.  A genuinely beautiful man with his lanky, Jimmy Hendrix-ish frame, rich coffee colored skin, perfect ball-shaped afro and an impeccably trimmed beard after the Greek fashion that came to a flat point an inch below his chin.  When Simba first looked at you, you were sure you were the only human in the world that mattered to him at that moment.  Quite a presence. Paul introduced me to Simba, who was looking for a bassist.  At the time I only had the big blue acoustic, so that's what we went with.  Just me, Simba playing guitar, and Paul on the mandolin at first.  It took ...