Zac Young: Still in the Signal

From dive-bar childhood to Nashville road miles, Zac Young is still making music with the people and places that raised him.

By Monica Jones

Zac did not know he was being interviewed.

We had been meaning to do this for years. Columbus is like that. Everybody knows everybody, everybody means to catch up, and then suddenly eight years have passed, three venues have changed names, six bands have evolved, and somebody’s phone is full.

So when we finally got on the phone, Zac thought we were just catching up. I thought we were catching up too, sort of. Interviews are sometimes better when they sneak in the side door before anybody has time to start sounding like a press release.

A few minutes in, after I had already asked him how long he had been in Nashville and when he first picked up a guitar, he stopped me.

“Wait,” he said, laughing. “Are we doing an interview right now?”

And there he was. Just Zac, running on sleep debt, Nashville time, Columbus roots, and whatever strange little current keeps musicians alive long after reasonable people have gone to bed.

Zac has been in Nashville for eight years now, long enough to learn that Music City is not impressed by the fact that you play music. Everybody plays music. The bartender plays. The person parking your car plays. The ghost in the corner probably has a publishing deal.

But for all the Nashville gravity in his story, Zac is still wired to Columbus in the ways that count.

“I live here,” he said of Nashville, “and I still go record in Columbus and play with my musicians from Columbus. That’s important to me.” 

There are a hundred studios in Nashville. He said that himself. Probably more. But Zac still comes home to record at Spinnaker Studios with Jason Ezzell. When he plays road shows, he still calls his “Columbus cats.”

Before the road miles, before the songs found their way onto streaming platforms, there was a kid running loose through Columbus bars while his father, Terry Young, played guitar and the grownups accidentally funded his arcade habit one dollar at a time.

Zac may live in Nashville now, but there is still Columbus dust in the amp.

Born Into the Noise

Zac did not wander into music. He was born into the backbeat of a local scene. 

Terry has long been part of that scene, remembered around here by room, by song, by night, by story. For Zac, that was not legend. That was childhood.

He remembers Al Who’s Place and Scooters from the ’90s era, the kind of Columbus nightlife ecosystem people still talk about with suspiciously specific nostalgia. Scooters had the deck, the volleyball court and, depending on who you ask, the best chicken fingers in town. Terry would be playing, and Zac would be under the deck, roaming, smashing beer bottles, absorbing the whole beautiful mess through osmosis.

By his early to mid-teens, Zac picked up the guitar. His first stage moment came with his uncle’s band, playing the solo on “Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones.

Not the whole song. Just the solo.

“I just stood there like a dork and waited for the solo,” he said. “That was it.”

Years later, that family thread looped back around in a very Columbus way. The Loft had started a Legend Series, where local musicians built one-night tribute shows around artists they loved. Zac took on David Bowie, and around that same time, Terry did a Tom Petty show, an idea that eventually helped spark Terry Young and The Heartbreakers, his Tom Petty tribute band.

In Columbus, half the best things seem to start as one-night ideas, accidental traditions or somebody saying, “What if we just did this?” Then suddenly there is a band, a poster, a crowd, a memory, and years later somebody is holding the flyer going, “Oh my God, I remember this.”

Stereomonster and the Downtown Ghosts

Before Zac became a solo artist, there was Stereomonster.

The band included Brandon “B.E.Z.” Evans, Jordan “Snare Jordan” Manley and Casey Grystar, and for close to a decade, they became part of the Columbus music bloodstream.

Zac describes them as “pretty solid in the Southeast,” which is musician language for “we did more than I’m going to brag about out loud.”

Stereomonster came up in that strange bridge era between MySpace and Facebook, before every show became content and every crowd turned into a sea of tiny glowing rectangles.

“Stream our music,” Zac said. “You can still find it. It’s on all those streaming platforms. But everything else, like videos and pictures, there is not that much unless you like to dig on YouTube.”

One of their early haunts was Mario’s, a downtown room where, according to Zac, the underage kids could get in because “they didn’t give a shit.”

Mario’s is gone now. The building has changed names and lives since then, the way downtown rooms do. But recently, someone standing inside what is now Whiskey Rail sent Zac a photo: a Stereomonster sticker was still there, stuck to one of the rails.

That is the kind of detail you cannot manufacture. A sticker outlasting eras. A little adhesive ghost from a band that once made noise in the room and left proof behind.

And the Stereomonster guys are still out there doing their thing. Jordan Manley is on tour with Brother Wallace. Brandon Evans has Revival Season, with new music coming. Zac is writing, recording and planning what comes next. Everybody scattered, but nobody disappeared.

Sweet Sweet Psycho Music

Zac calls his sound “lyrically driven alternative,” but there is stranger weather in it than that.

His music sits somewhere in that lane, but with Southern static in the wires, barroom voltage under the floorboards and a little cosmic Americana sneaking in through the back window.

It has bruises. It has humor. It has a little bite. The songs feel lived-in, like they came out of late nights, long drives, old rooms, half-lit memories and whatever part of the brain keeps writing after the rest of the body has given up.

Call it sweet sweet psycho music.

His solo work includes “Twilight,” “Permanent Echo,” “Cinderella’s Drunk” and “Blacked Out on a White Christmas.”

“Twilight” almost did not make his first solo album, released during COVID in 2020. The record was basically done when Zac brought in one more idea.

“I know we’re done recording,” he remembered telling them, “but let me show you this real quick.”

They heard it. “Twilight” made the record. It became his favorite song on the album.

His last full album, Play It Loud So the Stars Can Hear, came out in 2022. In 2023, he released “Blacked Out on a White Christmas,” which he says is, from a production standpoint, the best recording they have done so far.

Still in the Signal

What comes next for Zac started backwards.

A couple of years ago, he came back to Columbus for a photo shoot with Neilson Hubbard, a Nashville-based photographer and videographer who has worked with artists including Jason Isbell, The Killers and Lucinda Williams. This time, they found it at an old church in the Columbus area, a place called Olde Whiteville.

“I already have my album cover,” he said. “I’ve been writing to it.”

A photograph first. Then the songs. A whole album growing out of one image like some haunted vine.

He is nearly finished writing it now and plans to record soon. That is part of why he has not stacked up a bunch of tour dates yet. He wants something new to bring with him when he hits the road again.

And when he does, Columbus will still be in the room.

Most recently, when Zac went on the road, he brought Marty Ortiz, Jason Ezzell, Martel Andre, Ryan Johnson, Dakota Allen and Brittany Allen. Not because he couldn’t find players in Nashville, but because those are his people. 

That is loyalty, and it is also sound, chemistry, and trust. 

These musicians know the rooms. They know the stories. They know the losses. They know the humor. They know the weird little Columbus frequency that hums underneath everything if you have been here long enough to hear it.

And Zac still hears it.

Columbus is the place people leave, the place people come back to, the place people complain about, the place people underestimate while standing directly beside someone talented enough to prove them wrong.

Every city that is not Nashville has people who say there is nothing to do, Zac said.

“If there’s nothing to do,” he said, “then create something to do.”

Play a show in a parking lot. Start a band. Book a room. Make a flyer. Call your friends. Drag the amp out. Write the song. Build the thing you keep wishing existed.

That is how scenes happen. Not because a city magically becomes cool one day while everybody is sitting around waiting for permission. Scenes happen because somebody gets tired of saying there is nothing to do and decides to become the thing to do.

Zac’s story is not just about a Columbus musician moving to Nashville. It is about what he took with him and what he keeps choosing: the rooms, the players, the old stickers, the family thread, the weird little frequency that raised him.

He may be writing from somewhere else now, but Columbus is still in the signal.

Follow Zac Young on Instagram at @zacyoungofficial for music, updates and upcoming show announcements.