Ezra Vancil learned three chords because of a girl.
His father was a songwriter.
Ezra wasn’t particularly interested in following him into the family business.
He liked the idea of being a musician.
Actually learning an instrument?
Not so much.
Then he met a girl who was out of his league.
Suddenly musical education became urgent.
Ezra went to his father with a request.
Teach me how to write a song.
His father showed him three chords and offered the kind of wisdom fathers have been giving aspiring songwriters forever.
You can write a hundred songs with that, son.
Ezra wrote one.
The girl loved it.
They dated for three days.
So technically, the song worked.
Everything after that was apparently a personality problem.
But something else happened.
Ezra had written a song.
And once that door opened, it never completely closed again.
Not through record deals.
Not through failed bands.
Not through Japan or Germany.
Not through addiction.
Not through legal trouble.
Not through the years when music became almost irrelevant compared to simply surviving his own life.
The dream changed.
Ezra changed.
The reason he made music changed.
But the songs stayed.
And sometimes all it took was somebody telling him two words.
Keep going.
Trying to classify Ezra’s music is slightly more complicated than the standard genre dropdown menu would prefer.
Folk rock works.
He likes that one.
Americana gets used frequently.
That works too.
There are older country influences.
Folk.
Rock.
And a rhythmic undercurrent that prevents the music from settling into the image of a lone singer-songwriter quietly strumming an acoustic guitar.
Ezra traces some of that groove back to his earliest bands.
One of them was, somehow, an acoustic funk band.
That’s not a typo.
Ezra was the folk guy.
Another member was heavily influenced by players like Victor Wooten and brought aggressive slap bass into the equation.
They added a drummer.
The Frankenstein experiment gradually became something resembling funky folk music and eventually moved even further toward funk.
It shouldn’t necessarily have worked.
Apparently, nobody told them that.
More importantly, the rhythmic education stuck with Ezra.
His music would change repeatedly over the years, but the groove never completely left.
The band’s origin story gets stranger.
Ezra met some of those musicians at college.
Except Ezra wasn’t enrolled.
He just hung out there.
Specifically, Cedar Valley Community College in Lancaster, Texas.
Friends attended the school, so Ezra would hang around the hallways playing guitar with other musicians.
Eventually they met an instructor involved with recording technology.
The instructor heard the band and invited them into the program’s studio.
Suddenly Ezra and his friends became something resembling the student house band.
Actual students could practice recording them.
The band got studio time.
Everybody won.
Part of their first album was made there.
Ezra technically audited a few classes along the way, including ceramics.
But mostly he was just the guy wandering the halls with a guitar who somehow ended up making a record.
Music careers have started in less believable ways.
The unbelievable part was only getting started.
The band had been together perhaps three or four months when they began playing shows in Dallas’ Deep Ellum scene.
A friend offered to finance an album.
They booked time at a large Dallas studio called Planet Dallas.
A week earlier, an Los Angeles management team had apparently told the studio to call if anything interesting came through.
The studio called.
The management team flew to Texas.
Contracts followed.
The company also had a label arrangement, and the young band landed what amounted to a development deal.
Money.
A tour van.
A house.
A studio.
Equipment.
The basic idea was to develop the band and eventually place them with a major label.
For a poor small-town kid who was about 19 years old, it looked like the dream had arrived.
There was one problem.
Ezra and the band were 19-year-old musicians who had suddenly been handed money, a house and very little adult supervision.
You can probably see where this is going.
The company wanted an album.
The band wanted more gear.
At least that’s what they kept telling the company.
Money would arrive.
Equipment would be purchased.
So would drugs and alcohol.
People joined them on tour and somehow ended up living at the house for weeks.
The studio existed.
The money existed.
The opportunity absolutely existed.
The album did not.
Things became increasingly chaotic.
At one point, the band’s bass player was shot during a drug deal.
He survived and later played on some of Ezra’s records, which is a reassuring detail after someone casually drops “the bass player got shot” into an interview.
Eventually, the management team had enough.
The band was dropped.
Ezra wasn’t.
They decided to continue developing him as a solo artist.
For another year, he recorded demos.
Spent time in Los Angeles.
Sat in label offices.
Talked to people at Sony.
Made more recordings.
And waited for the deal that would turn all of this development into an actual career.
It never happened.
By around 21, Ezra was dropped too.
Two years.
Plenty of recording.
Plenty of industry attention.
Plenty of money spent.
No album.
The dream had arrived remarkably fast.
Then it disappeared just as quickly.
The fall was difficult.
Ezra hadn’t built a backup plan.
He had dropped out of school because he was going to become a rock star.
That’s a wonderfully simple career plan right up until someone stops paying for the rock-star part.
Now he was married.
A baby was on the way.
And he didn’t know what else he was supposed to do.
So he did what musicians often do.
He tried again.
And again.
And again.
Ezra spent much of his twenties moving through bands, trying to recreate the opportunity that had appeared so easily the first time.
Eventually he found a musical partner who understood what he was trying to do.
By his late twenties, things began moving again.
South by Southwest showcases.
Publishing deals.
An exclusive Japanese deal.
After nearly a decade of failed bands and false starts, Ezra had made something people were paying attention to again.
He was back in the game.
The Japanese deal arrived around 2006 or 2007, during a period when Ezra was told folk and folk-rock music had a strong market there.
The relationship lasted roughly a year.
The label didn’t pick up the next album.
But Ezra still sees Japanese listeners showing up in his streaming data years later.
That’s one of the strange things about music.
A record can travel somewhere you’ve never lived and remain there long after the business relationship that delivered it disappears.
Germany provided an even better example.
Ezra traveled to Germany in the mid-’90s as part of a church group helping with an old church restoration project.
He was there to provide music for a fundraising event.
That was supposed to be the gig.
Instead, one show became another.
Then another.
Ezra eventually spent roughly a month playing around the area.
One invitation took him to a Western bar in Dresden.
He expected the German interpretation of a Texas bar.
Maybe some Western decorations.
A cow skull.
Something tasteful.
Instead, he discovered people who had apparently studied cowboy culture with the intensity of graduate students.
Ten-gallon hats.
Enormous belt buckles.
The complete package.
Ezra didn’t really play country music, but he adapted.
Bob Dylan songs suddenly developed a considerably stronger country accent.
Think less Greenwich Village.
More Garth Brooks.
The German cowboys loved it.
Then things got weirder.
A few men from the Western bar invited Ezra and his wife to what he understood to be a performance at their ranch.
The language barrier was significant.
Directions became increasingly remote.
Eventually the taxi driver refused to continue.
That should probably have been the first clue.
Another ride had to be arranged.
The journey continued farther into the countryside until Ezra and his wife finally reached the ranch.
Ezra entered a tack barn expecting an audience.
There were three guys.
That was the audience.
They didn’t want a concert exactly.
They wanted Ezra to play John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
So he did.
Then they wanted it again.
And again.
Ezra estimates they sang the song around 20 times.
He’d perform one of his originals.
They’d listen.
Then:
“Country Roads.”
Again.
Beer came out.
Everybody sang at the top of their lungs.
They rode horses.
Communication remained limited.
Eventually the men drove Ezra and his wife back to town.
That was the show.
Honestly, I’ve played stranger gigs.
Not many.
But stranger.
The ranch wasn’t an isolated experience.
That’s what Ezra remembers most about Germany.
Each performance created another.
A bar led to a ranch.
Another connection led to a wine cellar.
Then an art event.
Then another small room.
He could have kept going.
There was no grand tour strategy.
No complicated marketing campaign.
People heard him.
They liked what they heard.
They invited him somewhere else.
Eventually he had to go home.
Sometimes that’s the purest version of touring.
One guitar.
One connection.
One room leading to another.
Ezra is remarkably open about what happened next.
Substance abuse had already become part of his life.
He had started performing in bars around 16.
Alcohol was always nearby.
Eventually it stopped being something surrounding the music and became something controlling his life.
Ezra describes much of his thirties as a lost decade.
He doesn’t remember large portions of it.
He played in bands.
Performed shows.
Sometimes fell off stages.
Eventually musicians stopped wanting to work with him.
He became unreliable.
Embarrassing.
The guy nobody wanted in the band.
Legal trouble followed.
Felony charges.
The possibility of prison.
Seven years of probation.
A portable alcohol-monitoring device he had to blow into on a schedule, regardless of where he happened to be.
Doctor’s office?
Hold on.
School meeting with the kids?
Give me a second.
The machine is beeping.
The person who had once been flown to Los Angeles and developed for a major-label career had reached 40 with music barely registering among the larger problems in his life.
And still, some part of him thought he might become a rock star.
Maybe they’d let him have a guitar in prison.
The dream hadn’t disappeared.
It had become almost absurd.
Then one night Ezra woke up on the kitchen floor.
He was done.
Not because the consequences had suddenly become worse.
There had already been plenty of consequences.
His family had suffered.
His career had collapsed.
The legal system was involved.
People had stopped wanting to play music with him.
None of it had been enough.
That’s something Ezra understands now about addiction.
External consequences can pile up forever.
The decision still has to happen internally.
That night, something did.
Ezra wasn’t particularly religious.
He considered himself an atheist.
But lying there, he made what he calls a foxhole prayer.
Whoever or whatever is out there:
I’ll do anything.
The next morning didn’t magically repair everything.
Recovery isn’t that tidy.
But Ezra made a decision.
He joined a recovery group.
He stopped drinking.
When we spoke, it had been more than 13 years since his last drink.
There’s a version of recovery stories where the person gets sober, the music swells and everyone who loves them comes running back.
Ezra’s story didn’t work that way.
About a year after he got sober, his second wife divorced him.
He was improving.
She simply didn’t know who this new person was.
She had known the drunk.
Now he was changing.
She had her own things to work through.
They separated.
Then something remarkable happened.
She came back.
She got sober too.
They rebuilt the relationship.
Ezra got his family back.
Today they live a considerably different life than the one that nearly destroyed both of them.
His wife is an artist herself, a metalsmith working in chase and repoussé, a painstaking process involving metal, hammers, torches and an amount of repetitive tapping that turned out to be less than ideal beside a recording studio.
They eventually established separate workspaces.
Marriage preserved.
Recordings improved.
Everybody wins.
Ezra didn’t immediately return to music.
It took roughly a year.
Before getting sober, he hadn’t written seriously in quite some time.
Then an idea arrived.
A song.
Ezra recorded it.
Called a friend with a camera.
Went into downtown Dallas.
Within roughly 24 hours, they had made a video.
The song was called “Song Before I Go.”
It changed everything.
Again.
Ezra describes “Song Before I Go” as the kind of song that might play at the end of a musician’s biopic.
The camera pulls back.
The story is almost over.
Everything that happened—the mistakes, loves, losses, children, successes and disasters—gets compressed into one final reflection.
And somehow the conclusion is:
It’s okay.
Ezra was around 40.
Life had not turned out remotely the way he’d expected.
The teenager who received the development deal hadn’t become the rock star he’d imagined.
He had wasted opportunities.
Lost years.
Damaged relationships.
But he could look around and still find things worth loving.
Family.
Children.
Parents.
Music.
Enough.
“Song Before I Go” became a song about contentment.
Not surrender.
There’s a difference.
He wasn’t saying the dream didn’t matter.
He was saying his life still had value even though the dream hadn’t happened the way he’d planned.
That realization may have been exactly what allowed music back into his life.
Then the video found Ezra’s wife.
She saw it online after their separation.
She watched the man on the screen and had a strange realization.
That’s the kind of man I want to be with.
Then another.
Wait.
That’s my husband.
Music had helped get Ezra into trouble.
Now a song was helping introduce his wife to the person he’d become after getting sober.
The video traveled farther than their relationship.
A manager in New York saw it.
He flew to Texas.
Within roughly a year, Ezra had a band again.
He was gigging.
An album followed.
The career that Ezra had spent years desperately trying to force back into existence began returning almost naturally once he wasn’t chasing it the same way.
That’s one of the great ironies in his story.
Opportunities continued arriving.
Managers.
Publishing interests.
Industry people from New York and Los Angeles.
Ezra admits he’s probably sabotaged more than a few.
Earlier in life, the sabotage came through alcohol and chaos.
Later, some of it became intentional.
He no longer wanted the machinery badly enough to surrender control to it.
That doesn’t mean outside validation stopped mattering.
Ezra will occasionally submit songs to competitions.
He doesn’t necessarily need to win.
He wants confirmation.
Did I place?
Am I still operating at a professional level?
Am I still in the game?
That matters.
Because artists can become delusional.
We’ve all met someone who has invested everything into a record that everybody around him insists is brilliant.
Then you hear it.
It isn’t.
Ezra is in his fifties.
He’s still making records.
Still touring.
Still writing.
Every once in a while, he wants some external evidence that this isn’t simply a guy sitting in a cabin convincing himself he’s making great music.
The industry attention provides that.
But he no longer needs the industry to tell him what to do next.
He’s part of the business now on his own terms.
The clearest evidence of that change may be sitting beside him.
Ezra makes music with his daughter.
They’ve been in a band together since she was 12.
She’s 19 now.
They write.
Record.
Perform.
Tour.
The younger Ezra approached music as something to conquer.
Get the deal.
Make the record.
Climb back to the top.
Prove something.
The older Ezra approaches it differently.
He makes music because he loves making music.
And strangely enough, that version of his career has produced some of the most satisfying touring and performances he’s experienced.
I understand that.
I spent years working in Nashville, and I loved much of that life.
But music was also my job.
You chase the next session.
The next project.
The next opportunity.
There’s a pressure attached to something when it has to pay the bills.
When I eventually stepped away from that environment, music became fun in a different way.
You start choosing things because you actually want to do them again.
Ezra found something similar.
The ambition didn’t disappear.
The desperation did.
His songwriting process remains wonderfully unromantic.
Ezra usually starts with acoustic guitar.
Chords.
Melody.
Syllables.
Gibberish.
Eventually a word appears.
Then another.
Slowly the song reveals what it wants to be about.
For years, Ezra refused to record ideas.
His philosophy was simple.
If it’s good enough, I’ll remember it.
If I forget it, apparently it wasn’t worth keeping.
Then he started forgetting good songs.
Philosophy revised.
Cassette tapes came first.
Nearly a decade of them.
Eventually the phone took over.
Today, Ezra describes his iPhone recorder as a scrapyard.
Not everything is a song.
Some recordings are fragments.
A line.
A melody.
A small idea.
A complete song might be sitting beside something barely recognizable.
Then Ezra decides to make an album.
That’s when he goes digging through the scrapyard.
That part matters.
Ezra still thinks in albums.
Not simply a collection of singles.
A story.
He’ll go through the phone and look for pieces that belong together.
Some songs are complete.
Others need work.
He begins selecting the material that feels like it belongs to the larger project.
Then he polishes.
Edits.
Rewrites.
The album starts revealing itself.
I’m always glad to hear someone say they still think this way.
The economics of streaming encourage songs to live individually.
That’s fine.
But an album can do something a single can’t.
Context changes songs.
Track five means something different because track four happened first.
A closing song can answer a question introduced 35 minutes earlier.
Ezra still enjoys building that larger world.
Then the songs move into the cabin.
Ezra’s East Texas recording space isn’t exactly a conventional commercial studio.
It’s better.
A large central room with a high ceiling stretching somewhere above 20 feet.
A loft.
Smaller spaces.
Amps in one area.
Drums in another.
Vocals can happen in the kitchen.
It has the feel of a church.
For years, the recording setup itself was relatively compact.
Laptop.
Universal Audio interface.
Plugins.
Lots of plugins.
Thousands of dollars worth of plugins.
Then, because Ezra’s career apparently has a recurring subplot where expensive opportunities materialize from nowhere, somebody gave him a recording studio.
Not studio time.
A studio.
The equipment had belonged to a man from Oklahoma who had worked with ZZ Top and had passed away.
The man’s son knew Ezra.
He wanted the equipment to go to someone who would actually use it.
Ezra was the person he thought of.
So an enormous collection of analog equipment found its way to Ezra’s cabin.
Outboard gear.
Compressors.
Channel strips.
Neve circuitry.
Enough equipment that Ezra still isn’t completely sure what some of it does.
He estimated the collection could represent an extraordinary amount of money and said he’s only using a fraction of it.
Naturally, moving everything into the studio nearly destroyed his back.
There is apparently no such thing as completely free analog gear.
As someone who has spent more years than I care to count around studios, I had only one reasonable response.
Nobody has ever donated me a studio.
Ezra needs to start sharing whatever karmic rewards program he’s enrolled in.
For all the technology surrounding him, Ezra’s preferred recording process reaches backward.
He likes musicians playing together.
Especially the rhythm section.
He’s made records locked tightly to a click.
He isn’t anti-click.
But he likes capturing drums and bass with the band interacting in real time.
Isolate what needs to be isolated.
Get the rhythm section down.
Let the musicians react to one another.
Then build from there.
The difference can be subtle.
Tiny fluctuations.
Push.
Pull.
A rhythm section breathing together instead of everybody independently obeying a grid.
Once the basic track exists, Ezra can spend an almost unreasonable amount of time adding layers.
The band goes home.
Ezra remains.
Guitars.
Vocals.
Textures.
Changes.
Rewrites.
Questions.
More changes.
He calls himself neurotic.
Perfectionist might be the kinder studio term.
He has spent enormous amounts of time refining records and is actively trying to become better about stopping.
Because eventually an album has to leave the cabin.
One way Ezra protects himself from disappearing completely into the record is by letting other people mix.
He’s mixed some of his own projects.
But often he’ll turn to mixers in Nashville.
He has worked with Marc Frigo, whose credits and musical connections appealed to Ezra’s love for artists and producers in the Daniel Lanois world.
More recently, he’s been working with JP Ruggieri, a Nashville musician and mixer whose own records caught Ezra’s ear.
That’s a smart way to choose collaborators.
Not because somebody has the longest credit list.
Because you like what comes out of their speakers.
The process can stretch over weeks or months.
Mix arrives.
Ezra listens.
Notes go back.
Another version arrives.
Eventually everybody agrees to stop touching it.
Or at least somebody takes the controls away from Ezra.
At the time of our conversation, Ezra was preparing a double album he’d been releasing gradually through singles.
The final project was analog mastered in Nashville with vinyl specifically in mind.
That feels appropriate.
A songwriter who still thinks in albums.
A cabin filled with analog equipment.
A recording philosophy built around musicians playing together.
Put the thing on vinyl.
Not because vinyl magically makes music more authentic.
But because format can reinforce intention.
An album asks you to stay for a while.
Ezra has spent enough of his life learning the value of staying.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Ezra about his unsung hero.
He didn’t choose a famous producer.
Manager.
Label executive.
Or one of the people who had flown across the country after hearing his music.
He chose Peter Silico.
Peter was a guitarist in Ezra’s father’s band.
He was younger than Ezra’s father, which made him cool enough for young Ezra to admire without suffering the unfortunate handicap of actually being his dad.
Peter remained somewhere in Ezra’s life as the years passed.
They weren’t constantly talking.
They didn’t need to.
Because Peter had an unusual habit.
At moments when Ezra was questioning everything, Peter would call.
Or send a text.
Or email.
The message was often incredibly short.
Keep going.
That’s it.
Keep going.
Ezra might be wondering whether the music made sense anymore.
Whether he should give it up.
Whether it was time to get a normal job.
Then Peter’s message would arrive.
Keep going.
Peter has since passed away.
Ezra still has some of those messages.
And he believes there were times he continued simply because Peter told him to.
There are plenty of ways to tell Ezra Vancil’s story.
The teenager who received the development deal most musicians spend their lives chasing.
The band that blew through the opportunity.
The Texas folk-rock artist who found audiences in Japan.
The guy who traveled to Germany for one show and accidentally stayed for a month.
The musician who sang “Country Roads” 20 times for three German cowboys in a tack barn.
The addict.
The felon.
The husband.
The father.
The sober man.
The songwriter.
The producer sitting in an East Texas cabin surrounded by somebody else’s lifetime of analog equipment.
They’re all the same person.
That’s what makes the story matter.
Ezra spent his younger life trying desperately to become the person he thought a successful musician was supposed to be.
He got close enough to see it.
Then he lost it.
Spent years trying to claw his way back.
Lost himself instead.
When music finally returned, it didn’t ask him to become a rock star.
It gave him something considerably more useful.
A song.
“Song Before I Go.”
A song that looked backward at the wreckage and said:
It’s okay.
That’s where the career started again.
Not when he got another manager.
Not when another industry person showed interest.
Not when he made another album.
When he became content enough with the life he already had that music could simply become music again.
Maybe that’s why the opportunities feel different now.
He’s no longer asking them to prove his life worked out.
He already knows it did.
His daughter is making music beside him.
His wife came back.
The cabin is full of songs.
The phone is full of scraps waiting to become albums.
The studio is full of gear he hasn’t figured out yet.
There are still records to make.
Still shows to play.
Still things to discover.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, there’s probably a message from Peter Silico.
Two words.
The same ones that carried Ezra through more than one version of himself.
Keep going.
There is a version of the music business that exists mostly in movies.
You start a band. Write a few songs. Play some shows. Somebody important walks into a club, hears you, and suddenly you're on a tour bus wondering where to put the platinum records.
Then there's the version most musicians actually know.
You work a job.
You raise a family.
You rehearse after work. You buy gear when you can afford it. You load into clubs, play the show, load everything back out, go home, sleep for a few hours and return to real life the next morning.
Somewhere in between, you try to make something meaningful.
Asayda frontman and guitarist Mark Frye knows that version.
He's been playing music around Cincinnati for years, through different bands, different lineups and different stages of life. These days, he has a career in IT, a wife, two young kids and all the responsibilities that come with them.
Yet when I asked whether he still had aspirations beyond the local scene, there wasn't much hesitation.
“The dream doesn't ever die,” he said. “It can't ever die.”
That probably tells you more about Asayda than a genre label ever could.
Mark grew up in Cincinnati, which means his musical education includes a collection of venues that have helped define the city's rock scene.
Bogart's occupies a particularly important spot.
He remembers being 16 years old in 1997 and heading there to see Deftones. One of the opening bands was a group most people in the room apparently knew very little about.
Limp Bizkit.
This was before “Faith” and before the band became impossible to avoid.
Mark remembers the lights going down and Limp Bizkit launching into “Pollution.” The floor erupted.
He was standing roughly halfway back in a sold-out room and looked behind him.
Everybody was moving.
“I thought the floor was gonna collapse,” he recalled.
For Mark, that night was bigger than discovering a band before it became famous.
“I think that's actually probably the moment that I fell in love with heavy music.”
That's the thing about local venues.
We tend to measure their importance by the artists who eventually become famous enough to have played there.
But that's only half the story.
Their real value is what happens to the people in the audience.
Some kid walks into a room, sees a band and leaves wanting to make music.
Years later, he's the one onstage.
Since moving to the Cincinnati area, I've been working my way through many of the venues Mark grew up attending.
That made our conversation partly an interview and partly my personal orientation to Cincinnati rock and roll.
Bogart's.
Annie's.
Ludlow Garage.
Taft Theatre.
Southgate House Revival.
Riverbend.
Each has a different personality.
Mark describes Cincinnati as a “big, small town,” and its music scene seems to operate the same way. There isn't one neighborhood or genre that completely defines it. Music stretches from downtown into Clifton, across the river into Covington and Newport, and into clubs and breweries scattered throughout the region.
For rock and metal, though, those smaller rooms matter.
Mark remembers seeing Godsmack at Annie's when they were still relatively unknown, opening for Down. He saw Royal Blood in a tiny room beneath the Taft Theatre with perhaps 60 people in attendance.
Then there's one of my new favorite pieces of Cincinnati music history: Sudsy Malone's.
Mark played there with an earlier band, One Finger Grip.
It was a laundromat.
With a bar.
And live music.
People could literally sit on washers and dryers watching the band while doing laundry.
Coming from Boston, I thought my Ohio laundromat experience was strange enough. Years ago, while attending the Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, I encountered one advertising laundry, milk, guns and ammo.
Apparently Ohio has been trying to revolutionize the laundromat industry for decades.
Mark's version just had a better soundtrack.
Asayda wasn't Mark's first band.
He started playing guitar at 15 and later joined One Finger Grip, initially as a guitarist with no intention of becoming the singer.
Then the band needed vocals.
Mark figured he could sing a little.
One song became another, and eventually he found his voice.
After One Finger Grip ended, he and bassist Brian Smith moved into acoustic music with Two-Bit Acoustic. Mark continued searching for another heavier project, answering six or seven Craigslist ads and auditioning for different bands.
The problem wasn't necessarily musicianship.
There were plenty of talented players.
He simply didn't connect with the people.
That's something musicians sometimes learn later than they should.
Being great at your instrument isn't enough.
In Nashville, I've heard the phrase for years: you have to be a good hang.
There are too many people who can play.
If two musicians can both handle the gig, I'm hiring the person I can stand being around for the next twelve hours.
Mark sees bands as “dysfunctional families.”
He's right.
You need to be able to tell someone his idea doesn't work.
Someone needs to be able to tell you that your vocal sounds terrible.
Then everybody has to remain friends long enough to order dinner.
The important word isn't dysfunctional.
It's family.
When Mark answered the Craigslist ad that eventually led him to Asayda, he found that connection.
The lineup has changed over the years, as lineups do. Mark and guitarist/backing vocalist Brian Trester have remained the constants. Brian Smith eventually joined on bass, bringing a friendship with Mark that stretched back more than a decade. Drummer Shawn later completed the current lineup.
Life has dictated some of those changes.
Children.
Careers.
Responsibilities.
Mark doesn't resent that.
Family comes first.
The trick is finding the people whose lives, personalities and ambitions can fit together long enough to keep creating.
He believes Asayda has found that group.
That stability is arriving at an important time.
Asayda is working on a new album, and Mark believes the band may be in its strongest creative position yet.
The reason isn't that they've discovered some formula guaranteed to produce a hit.
It's almost the opposite.
They're increasingly comfortable ignoring the formula.
“We're gonna write stuff that we like,” Mark said. “We hope everybody loves it. I mean, that's fantastic that everybody loves it. But more than anything, we have to love it.”
That philosophy is pushing the new material in different directions.
Mark doesn't want to write eight versions of the same song.
We've all seen that concert.
The first three songs hit you like a truck.
By song eight, you start wondering whether the band has been playing one 45-minute song with unusually long pauses.
Asayda wants variety.
Heavy music can still be melodic.
Aggressive music can still leave room for dynamics.
A record can move without losing its identity.
Mark pointed to Australia's 12 Foot Ninja as an extreme example of a band willing to jump between heavy music, acoustic passages, jazz, Latin influences and seemingly whatever else interested them.
Asayda may not take those changes quite that far.
But Mark likes the philosophy.
Keep people guessing.
The new album is also allowing Mark to indulge another side of his personality.
He's producing much of it himself.
His formal audio-production education?
Curiosity.
Mark works in IT, and when something technological interests him, his instinct is apparently to disappear down the rabbit hole until he understands it.
He began seriously teaching himself recording while working with Two-Bit Acoustic, eventually mixing, mastering and producing an entire album.
His first software of choice wasn't exactly designed for rock bands.
FL Studio.
Primarily known at the time as beat-making software.
He made it work.
Since then, he's used Pro Tools, Studio One and other tools, gradually building what he jokingly calls a “pseudo studio” at home.
For this Asayda record, that setup is becoming part of the creative process.
Mark compared producing to being an alchemist surrounded by beakers.
Add some of this.
A little of that.
And occasionally discover that the entire experiment was a terrible idea.
That's part of the appeal.
Brian Trester might bring in the framework of a song. Mark works with it. Shawn and Brian Smith add their ideas. The band records something and collectively decides they've nailed it.
Then everybody listens away from the studio.
Nope.
Back downstairs.
There is, however, a danger in recording yourself.
There is no clock.
I've spent enough of my life in studios to know that a ticking clock isn't always the enemy.
A traditional studio forces decisions.
You arrive prepared because you're paying for the room, the engineer and everyone involved.
Mark remembers recording an earlier EP at Refraze Recording Studios in Dayton. He walked in to cut vocals and found himself standing in front of an impressive microphone.
Then the producer helpfully told him that the singer from Goo Goo Dolls had used it the previous week.
No pressure.
At home, nobody is standing behind the glass watching the budget.
That's liberating.
It's also dangerous.
You can always redo the guitar.
Add another vocal.
Change the drums.
Try one more part.
Remix everything.
Finish the mix.
Then decide it needs one tiny addition that requires changing half the mix.
Eventually somebody has to say the record is done.
Asayda is still early enough in the process that experimentation is welcome.
But Mark knows the band will eventually have to stop being alchemists and start being finishers.
Technology is also changing what Asayda can put on the record—and eventually reproduce onstage.
For the album, Shawn is recording with an electronic drum kit rather than a traditionally miked acoustic kit.
That decision opens another world of possibilities.
Electronic sounds.
Samples.
An 808-style hit.
A specific sound created for a particular moment.
Those options can then become part of the live performance without turning the show into musicians playing along to prerecorded backing tracks.
Mark knows some musicians still resist modelers, electronic drums and similar technology.
His response is practical.
He's still playing.
Shawn is still playing.
The instrument is being performed.
The technology simply gives them access to sounds that would otherwise require a warehouse full of equipment.
Mark remembers when his rig involved a Peavey half-stack and a rack-mounted EQ.
Today, if he wants a particular sound, chances are somebody has figured out how to put it in a box.
“It’s a crazy time to be a musician,” he said.
The challenge now isn't access.
It's restraint.
Just because you can use a completely different guitar tone, drum kit and production style on every song doesn't mean you should.
Asayda wants experimentation while maintaining enough sonic consistency for the project to feel like an album.
That word, album, is intentional.
Like many independent artists, Asayda has spent recent years releasing singles.
Mark understands why.
A single creates another opportunity to get people's attention.
Release one song.
Six weeks later, give them another.
Two months later, remind them again.
Drop an entire album at once and, within a few months, you're promoting something the internet has already decided is old.
Still, the band wants to make an album.
The likely compromise is a staggered release: singles arriving over time while the unreleased tracks remain part of the larger project waiting behind them.
Mark doesn't expect the complete record in 2026.
Early 2027 is more realistic.
Part of that timeline comes from the reality behind the music. Mark dealt with medical issues that slowed the band's progress, and Asayda has also been balancing recording with live performances.
The goal after their upcoming shows is simple.
Put their heads down.
Finish the work.
Then get back in front of people.
When Asayda returns with the new material, not everything audiences hear will necessarily be original.
Mark likes the idea of including a few surprises.
One example already exists in the band's live show: Billy Idol's “White Wedding.”
The important part is that Asayda doesn't simply play “White Wedding.”
They play their “White Wedding.”
That's an important distinction.
There is nothing wrong with performing a song faithfully, and tribute bands have built entire careers around doing exactly that.
But Mark prefers taking something familiar and filtering it through Asayda.
The audience already knows the words.
Now give them a reason to hear the song differently.
And yes, Mark is still waiting for Billy Idol to join them onstage.
Billy, apparently you've been called out.
Near the end of our conversation, Mark finally delivered the Royal Blood story he'd promised earlier.
Years ago, a friend brought him to the small ballroom beneath the Taft Theatre.
There might have been 60 people there.
Royal Blood walked onstage.
Two guys.
Bass and drums.
Mark initially wondered whether half the band had failed to show up.
Then they played.
They destroyed the room.
Mark had never seen anything quite like it.
Later, he saw Royal Blood again at a festival.
This time there were thousands of people in front of them.
The audience had changed.
The band hadn't.
Same energy.
Same commitment.
Same determination to play the show like it mattered.
That's what stayed with Mark.
And maybe that's the clearest picture of what he wants for Asayda.
Not necessarily fame for fame's sake.
Not some fantasy about abandoning every responsibility and pretending everyone is still 22.
He wants the music to reach people.
He wants the band to grow beyond Cincinnati.
He wants more people standing in front of the stage.
But whether it's 60 or 10,000, the responsibility is the same.
Play like it matters.
When I asked Mark to name an unsung hero, he didn't choose another musician.
He chose the families.
His wife.
His children.
The families behind the other members of Asayda.
Because every rehearsal has a cost.
Every show means time away.
Every recording session occupies hours that could have gone somewhere else.
For musicians with families and careers, pursuing music isn't an individual decision.
Everyone around them participates in some way.
Mark also extended that gratitude to the independent venues that continue putting local bands onstage.
Those places could often make their lives easier.
Hire a DJ.
Run a college night.
Pack the room.
Instead, many keep taking chances on musicians.
They give local bands somewhere to fail.
Somewhere to improve.
Somewhere to become good.
And occasionally, somewhere to become great.
Mark knows what those rooms mean because he grew up in them.
He was the 16-year-old kid standing inside Bogart's while an unknown Limp Bizkit shook the floor.
He watched an unknown Godsmack walk onto the stage at Annie's.
He stood with roughly 60 people watching two unknown guys called Royal Blood tear apart a tiny room.
Now he's on the other side of the barricade.
Maybe there's another 16-year-old standing somewhere in the crowd watching Asayda.
Maybe that kid goes home and picks up a guitar.
That's the cycle.
Careers change.
Families grow.
Priorities shift.
The music business changes almost daily.
The dream changes with it.
But for the people who truly love doing this, Mark is right.
It doesn't die.
It just gets smarter.
And maybe a little louder.
There is something misleading about the phrase debut single.
It sounds like a beginning.
For Ivey Leighton, “Good Girl” is anything but.
It's the first song the public gets to hear, but behind those three or four minutes are roughly ten years of writing, learning guitar, filling a phone with lyrical fragments, figuring out who she wants to be as an artist, and quietly waiting for the moment when the music in her head finally sounded the way she believed it should.
Now it does.
On September 1, 2026, Ivey officially released “Good Girl,” introducing herself as a pop-rock artist with one foot planted in sharp, melodic pop and the other firmly in the world of angsty alternative rock.
For the first time, when somebody asks the question nearly every developing artist hears, Can I find you on Spotify?, she doesn't have to explain that something is coming.
She can simply say yes.
After ten years, Ivey Leighton is finally ready to be heard.
Like many artists, Ivey can trace her relationship with music back to childhood.
But she's more specific about the moment when music stopped being something she loved and became something she could imagine herself doing.
She was 14.
She had finished writing her first complete song and played it for her family.
They liked it.
At the time, she thought it was pretty good too.
Today?
She doesn't even remember what it sounded like.
That's probably for the best.
Every songwriter deserves the right to bury a few early compositions where nobody can find them.
What mattered wasn't the song.
It was finishing it.
For the first time, Ivey had taken an idea that existed only in her head and turned it into something other people could hear.
“Maybe I should keep writing,” she remembers thinking.
She did.
The music Ivey grew up listening to helps explain where she's landed today.
Taylor Swift was there early and remains an influence.
So was Coldplay, courtesy of her parents.
Her mother introduced her to Rilo Kiley. Radiohead found its way into the mix. As Ivey began leaning further into rock, Hayley Williams and Paramore became particularly important influences. More recently, Wet Leg has joined the list.
Put all of that together and Ivey's description of her own music makes sense.
She wants it somewhere in the middle of classic pop, angsty alternative rock and songs that are simply devastating.
That's a fairly wide target.
Which is exactly why it works.
Ivey isn't interested in sanding down all of her influences until they fit neatly inside a genre box. She's more interested in finding the place where they collide.
She wants enough familiarity for a listener to follow along, but she also likes taking what she calls a “brave step” outside the box.
Not so far that someone wonders whether the wrong song accidentally started playing.
Just far enough to make you think:
I didn't expect that.
Then:
I like it.
That's a good instinct for a songwriter to have.
There is another constant in Ivey's writing.
She doesn't exactly specialize in sunshine.
Her earliest songs frequently centered on breakups, and even now she admits that writing happy songs doesn't come naturally.
Why?
Because being angry is fun.
Being sad is fun.
Being dramatic is definitely fun.
At least when you're writing songs.
There is something wonderfully freeing about songwriting that allows a person to turn a terrible emotion into three minutes they actually enjoy revisiting.
But listeners shouldn't assume every lyric is an entry from Ivey's diary.
The emotional root may be real.
The story often isn't.
She likes creating characters.
She exaggerates.
She borrows a feeling and invents circumstances around it.
Sometimes she'll take inspiration from people she knows and change enough details to protect the innocent.
Or guilty.
Depending on the song.
That approach gives Ivey permission to make the story better rather than remaining loyal to whatever literally happened.
Songwriting isn't journalism.
Sometimes the truth of an emotion matters more than the accuracy of the plot.
Ivey's writing process today remains relatively simple.
Usually it begins with an instrument.
Guitar.
Piano.
She searches for chords that match whatever she's feeling in the moment.
Then she starts singing.
Sometimes actual words arrive.
Sometimes gibberish does.
And occasionally, buried somewhere inside the gibberish, a real word falls out.
That's enough.
One accidental word can suggest a line.
The line suggests a character.
The character suggests a story.
When that doesn't happen, there's always the Notes app.
Like many songwriters, Ivey has accumulated a collection of one-liners waiting for homes.
Some are new.
Some have been sitting there for months.
She'll scroll through them, pull pieces together and see whether two unrelated thoughts suddenly make sense next to each other.
Once the foundation appears, the creative work begins.
For now, she does all of it alone.
Every song she's written has been written by herself.
She's interested in eventually co-writing, although she admits the idea makes her nervous.
What happens if the scheduled writing session happens to land on the exact day she has absolutely nothing?
What if the other writer sits there thinking, This person sucks at writing songs?
It's a reasonable fear.
It's also one nearly every songwriter who has walked into a co-writing room has probably experienced.
Fortunately, songs have a habit of showing up anyway.
For all the years I spent working in studios, I still appreciate how many songs begin with the least glamorous recording system imaginable.
A phone.
That's where Ivey starts too.
Voice memos capture the idea.
But once she believes a song is ready, her process takes a significant jump.
She goes into the studio.
For her first four recordings, that meant heading to a studio in Dunlap, Tennessee.
The process started with a basic demo, Ivey and her guitar, so everyone involved could understand the song before the full band began building around it.
And the musicians helping build these songs aren't simply random players pulled together for a session.
They're family and friends.
Just unusually talented family and friends.
Ivey credits her uncle, Spencer Lyman, with being one of the major reasons this project came together.
He plays keys on the recordings and helped assemble the musicians.
Trevor, a Chattanooga-area bassist, handles bass.
Emily, a drummer around Ivey's age, brings the songs to life from behind the kit.
Then there's Ivey's father.
He plays lead guitar.
More importantly, he's been part of her musical education since before she realized she was receiving one.
Ivey grew up watching him play guitar. As a teenager, she began picking up the instrument herself, teaching herself through tabs and chord charts until the shapes became muscle memory.
Eventually she stopped simply learning which chords worked.
She started learning how weird she could get with them.
Now father and daughter are on the same record.
There's something fitting about that.
The person she watched play guitar as a child is now playing guitar behind songs she wrote herself.
The basic tracks were recorded largely as a band.
Ivey was isolated in another room, singing while the musicians played together.
Her mother captured a video from one of those sessions.
In the room with the musicians, everything appears almost silent.
People are playing.
Heads are moving.
The band is locked into something the camera can't hear.
Meanwhile, Ivey's voice can be heard coming from the other room.
It's an odd visual, but one anyone who has spent time around recording studios understands.
That's the magic trick.
A room full of isolated sounds eventually becomes one performance.
Once the foundation was there, the details followed.
Punch-ins.
Additional parts.
Vocals.
Harmonies.
And Ivey came prepared.
During the long gaps created by everyone's schedules, the four-song project took roughly a year and a half to complete, she used GarageBand on her phone to experiment with harmony parts and ad-libs.
No elaborate setup.
No expensive microphone.
Just preparation.
By the time she entered the studio to record the final vocals, she already knew what she wanted.
Ivey also records lead vocals in a way I've always preferred.
She sings the song.
Beginning to end.
Then fixes what needs fixing.
There are plenty of ways to build a vocal in a studio, and modern recording technology can create a technically perfect performance one line, or even one word, at a time.
But technical perfection isn't always the same thing as a performance.
I've always preferred having a vocalist sing through the entire song several times.
Let them settle into it.
Let the verses lead naturally into the chorus.
Let the emotion build where it should.
Then go back and repair the details.
Ivey approaches her vocals similarly.
The performance comes first.
The microscope comes later.
Once the recordings were ready to mix, Ivey's project took another significant step.
Bob Bullock agreed to mix the songs.
I've had the privilege of working with Bob myself, so I can say with some confidence that this isn't exactly a minor addition to the credits.
He's a nine-time Grammy-winning engineer with decades of experience and the kind of ears that can make the rest of us reconsider several life choices.
Again, Spencer helped make the connection.
Initially, Bob didn't respond.
Then he heard “Good Girl.”
That changed things.
According to Ivey, once he heard the song, he wanted to be involved.
Not a bad early review.
Ivey and her team spent a few hours with Bob establishing the direction before he continued working on the mixes afterward.
What came back was the sound she'd been trying to reach.
Heavier.
Punchier.
Bigger.
The band suddenly carried more weight without losing the song underneath it.
Ivey still requested changes.
Tiny ones.
Milliseconds.
Things she freely admits almost nobody else would ever notice.
Welcome to making records.
Creative people can spend an astonishing amount of time fixing things the audience will never consciously hear.
The audience may never identify the difference.
But they'll feel it.
When the finished mix arrived, Ivey didn't listen casually.
She went to her car.
No headphones.
Just the speakers and the song.
Then she played it again.
And again.
She wanted to hear it the way someone else might hear it for the first time.
That's nearly impossible when you've lived with a song for as long as she had.
By that point, she knew every word.
Every breath.
Every harmony.
Every tiny millisecond she'd asked Bob to change.
Still, something was different.
For the first time, the song no longer sounded like an idea.
It sounded like a record.
“My music had actually become something for once,” she told me.
That may have been the real debut.
Of all the songs Ivey could have used to introduce herself, “Good Girl” feels appropriate.
The song began differently than it ended.
Originally, Ivey imagined a girl obsessed with how one particular person perceived her.
She's so focused on meeting his expectations that she isn't paying enough attention to the way he's treating her.
Then Ivey stepped back from the idea.
It felt too passive.
Her solution was sarcasm.
Instead of allowing the character to remain trapped underneath someone else's expectations, the chorus begins mocking them.
The song transforms.
What started as insecurity becomes confrontation.
Ivey calls it a bit of an “FU song.”
That's when it became fun.
She first played it quietly for her father.
Then the band got hold of it.
Suddenly the song had teeth.
The arrangement became heavier, and the attitude Ivey had written into the chorus finally had a band capable of pushing back with her.
That combination, sharp pop songwriting underneath rock instrumentation, may be the clearest early indication of where Ivey Leighton is headed.
The unusual thing about a first release is that the audience experiences it instantly.
The artist doesn't.
For listeners, “Good Girl” appeared on September 1.
For Ivey, it took a decade.
Ten years of writing.
Ten years of getting better.
Ten years of figuring out what she likes.
Ten years of learning what she doesn't.
Then roughly a year and a half of coordinating musicians, recording songs, building harmonies, mixing and preparing everything surrounding the release.
Photos.
Artwork.
A website.
The pieces that turn someone who writes songs into someone building a career around them.
Ivey described the feeling as both relief and impatience.
That combination makes sense.
After waiting this long, even tomorrow probably feels unnecessarily far away.
When I asked Ivey who deserved recognition for helping her reach this point, she returned to the person who had been there from the beginning.
Her dad.
He's her guitarist.
But that's not the role she emphasized.
He's the person she sends a new song to after she's listened to it so many times that she no longer knows whether it's any good.
And he'll tell her.
Not everything is great.
Recently she sent him two songs.
He liked one.
The other?
It was all right.
That's valuable.
Support isn't telling an artist everything she creates is brilliant.
Sometimes support is caring enough to tell her when it isn't.
He's also protective.
He understands enough about the music business to remind her not to agree to everything simply because somebody presents an opportunity.
For a young artist entering an industry filled with people eager to offer advice, deals and promises, that's a useful person to have nearby.
There was one piece of our conversation that couldn't be shared during the live portion of the interview.
After the show, we finally announced it.
I am now managing Ivey Leighton.
That obviously changes my perspective on this particular story.
I'm no longer simply watching what happens next.
I'm part of it.
And I don't take that responsibility lightly.
Ivey has spent ten years preparing to reach the starting line.
My job isn't to rush her from it.
It's to help build something that lasts.
The website, photography, artwork and “Good Girl” are the visible pieces right now.
Behind them, we're already working on what comes next.
Another song.
Then another.
More opportunities.
More performances.
More people discovering the music.
This isn't supposed to be one big moment followed by silence.
It's a marathon.
Ivey has a wonderfully simple way of describing this next stage.
She's ready for the “big girl things.”
The website makes the career feel official.
Management means she has someone working beside her to pursue opportunities, make connections and help navigate decisions.
But when I asked what she's most excited about, she didn't say streams.
She didn't say press.
She didn't say social-media numbers.
She said performing.
She wants to get onstage.
She wants it to be fun.
Then she wants the stages to get bigger.
That's the part I like.
Because careers can become complicated very quickly.
Analytics.
Algorithms.
Marketing plans.
Content calendars.
Distribution.
Branding.
Contracts.
All of those things matter.
But somewhere underneath them needs to remain the person who started doing this because she loved music.
Ivey still sounds like that person.
Before we finished, I asked Ivey to give me a goal.
Not ten years from now.
One.
Where does she want to be?
Opening for a stadium artist.
Apparently we're easing into this.
No pressure on management whatsoever.
But I like the answer.
Goals should be uncomfortable.
They should require work.
And sometimes they should sound slightly ridiculous when you first say them aloud.
Ten years ago, Ivey was 14 years old, teaching herself guitar and finishing a song her family happened to like.
Today, she's releasing music mixed by a nine-time Grammy winner, building a professional team, launching her artist identity and preparing the next releases.
The stadium isn't here yet.
That's okay.
This isn't the end of the story.
It's barely the first chapter the rest of us are allowed to read.
For years, people asked Ivey Leighton where they could hear her music.
She kept giving them the same answer.
I'm working on it.
She doesn't have to say that anymore.
“Good Girl” is out.
Ivey Leighton has officially arrived.
Now we get to find out where she goes next.
