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.

Whatever You Want to Call It

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 College Student Who Wasn’t a Student

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.

Then Hollywood Called

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.

How Not to Spend a Development Deal

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.

When You’re Supposed to Be a Rock Star

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.

Apparently Japan Likes Texas Folk Rock

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.

The German Cowboys

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.

“Country Roads.” Again.

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.

One Gig Became a Month

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.

Then Came the Dark Years

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.

The Kitchen Floor

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.

Getting Sober Didn’t Immediately Fix Everything

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.

Music Came Back Quietly

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.

The Song at the End of the Movie

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.

The Song Brought His Wife Back Too

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.

In the Game, But on His Terms

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.

Making Music With His Daughter

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.

The iPhone Scrapyard

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.

He Still Thinks in Albums

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.

The Cabin

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.

Of Course Someone Gave Him 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.

Put the Band in the Room

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.

Let Someone Else Hear It

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.

Back to Vinyl

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.

Peter Silico

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.

Keep Going

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.