We recently connected with Zach Knell and have shared our conversation below.

Zach, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Learning to produce music is a process that’s not to be rushed. It will come in layers throughout your life. The important seed from which everything grew was just a genuine love and fascination of music, which led to hours of curiosity writing song lyrics on paper and singing the melodies before I even knew how to play instruments. Then, you sit at a guitar or piano long enough, you start being able to materialize things you’re hearing or wanting to do. I got really interested in multi-track recording on GarageBand from a really young age, around 10, and I just spent years recording lots of songs, finding my voice, picking up tricks along the way from trial and error, friends, YouTube videos, etc.

If I could tell my younger self to change something, doing it all again, I would say to take it all less seriously. Not focus so much on making stuff people will like, and instead just lean into your fascination and love and make things you think are cool, and spend as much time doing that as possible.

I think it’s a dangerous obstacle for any creative – to start putting too much focus on creating products to be consumed rather than stories to be told.

Zach, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Zach Knell, I’m a singer, songwriter and music producer best known for my work as the lead vocalist, and primary songwriter and producer for the band Roseburg.

Before Roseburg, I ran a local recording studio in my hometown in Utah from 16-18 years old. That’s where I cut my teeth learning audio engineering and production, while also writing a lot of my own original music, as well as music for other local artists.

Roseburg formed when I was in my late teens as I was living away from home for the first time as a missionary for my church in Oregon. I met a couple other missionaries my age, and we decided to start a band and name it after the little town where we met there.

The band found some quick success, toured around the country, collaborated with one of my musical influences growing up, Kellin Quinn from Sleeping with Sirens, and received extensive radio play and large editorial playlist coverage.

The main thing I would want fans of my music to know about me is that I’ve struggled deeply with challenges such as depression and anxiety disorders, faith crisis, close personal deaths, and really frustrating career set backs, and despite all of that, I’ve continued to be resilient, and explore themes of hope in my art. I hope this would help anybody who follows me and admires what I do, to continue going into the darkness with faith, trusting it’s worth it on the other side.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In 2020, Roseburg was at the height of our popularity. We had a quarter of a million monthly listeners across all platforms, had many powerful individuals and companies in the music industry offering us deals, were in the midst of releasing our debut full length album, and had crowd funded $13K to go on a headlining tour of the entire United States.

The week before the tour was set to begin, the COVID outbreak happened.

This began a chain of events that ultimately broke up the band for 2 years, and killed a lot of our momentum. You can imagine how difficult that was for all of us after all the work we had put in – not to mention time and limited resources in our early adult life. It felt like the dream was over, which is a very difficult thing to come to terms with.

Since then, despite the fact that it’s still difficult sometimes, and we wonder where we’d be if things had gone differently, we’ve released multiple records, been featured on some of the playlists in the world, and signed a publishing deal. I’m really proud of the resilience of all of us to keep going and continuing in ambition despite all odds.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Because algorithms have separated the artist and the consumer in many ways, I’m a strong believer in signing up for email and SMS lists for artists you really care about. When they release a record – buy a physical copy. Go see them live when they’re coming through town. Grab a shirt every once in a while. A $20 shirt is the financial equivalent of almost 6K streams on Spotify – more streams than the average listener will give any one artist in their entire lifetime.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://roseburgband.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roseburgband/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roseburgband/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxTSDsr91yImc4sv3LxCGiw

Image Credits

Nick Tate