Colby Acuff Lost His Father the Night Before His Ryman Debut. His Songs Carried Him Through

If American Son, the record Colby Acuff released in late August, paints a broad picture of present-day America, that’s by design. But the record is also a portrait of a songwriter processing grief and healing after the most difficult time in his life.

“I came in the room for pre-production on this album like, ‘Here’s the deal,’” Acuff says, “’I feel like shit after this whole year, but I do not want this record to be about me. I want this record to be about the listener, and I want to mask my problems. I want to write those down on a piece of paper, but I want it all to be relatable.’”

Ironically, the 27-year-old Idaho native is having a breakout year too, with American Son dropping on the heels of opening sold-out shows for Flatland Cavalry and Wyatt Flores — with dates supporting Midland and Whiskey Myers on the books this fall — and his Ryman Auditorium debut in Nashville last February. But that only tells one side of Acuff’s story. The night before that Ryman debut, his father, Pat Acuff, died after a terminal illness. Acuff played through the grief, delivering a tearful tribute to his dad and demonstrating music’s role in processing sadness and depression, even as his popularity soars.

“When I was really depressed last year,” Acuff recalls, “my girlfriend said, ‘The one reason why I really love you is that you don’t have any quit in you, and it seems to me that this is really starting to get to you.’ And she was right. But the main thing is, if I feel this way, how many people feel like this every day?

“I knew this feeling, for me, was going to pass,” he continues. “But also, I’ve lost 10 or 11 friends to suicide, unfortunately. I wanted mental health to be a big pillar for this record. Not only did I lose my dad this past year, but I also lost, hopefully, my last friend to mental health.”

Following that friend’s death, Acuff sat down to write “Scared of the Dark,” the second of 16 tracks on American Son. On the painful refrain “I know this place, yes/ know where you are/And it made me scared of the dark,” Acuff makes clear that he’s reaching out to friends and fans alike who find themselves struggling. Like Flores, he’s part of a new trend of emo-country songwriters, unafraid to share their pain.

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The title track, meanwhile, is one Acuff wrote to address those he’s lost. He moved to Nashville two years ago, shortly after his father’s diagnosis. Leaving his home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was not something Acuff looked forward to, even if his family were in great health. It took the support of Pat Acuff — who told his son, “You gotta go” — for Acuff to make the journey to Nashville, where he eventually landed a record deal with Sony. His first album under the label, Western White Pines, came out in summer 2023, and Acuff estimates he spent 150 days on the road that year, only getting home to see his father in between tour dates.

“By the time I got back home in November, I just felt crazy hollow,” Acuff says. “So, I started writing. I feel like I ended up dealing with a lot of my demons in this record. Yeah, it’s super heavy, but it’s my best writing yet.”

Pat Acuff died Feb. 9, before he could ever hear the album in its entirety. “American Son,” however, was the last song Acuff sang for him. “I played it for him acoustic. He inspired that song. At home over Christmas, I was just kind of thinking about what I wanted to write about, and I ended up talking with my dad every day for six or eight hours,” he says. “He had a lot of wisdom, so I decided to write it down.”

The song has political undertones, with lyrics like “And the politicians’ laughter sounds like crying in the streets/We’re just their entertainment, they got the front row seats,” but Acuff turns it into parental advice in the chorus when he sings, “My American son, who will you become?”

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Acuff learned of his father’s passing early in the morning hours of Feb. 10 via a phone call from his mother. That night, he was set to open for Flatland at the Ryman. He kept his father’s death to himself, only letting his girlfriend and one of his bandmates know. The rest of his band, as well as the sold-out Ryman crowd, learned about it that night, when he played “American Son” live for the first time, tearfully dedicating it to his dad.

“My band didn’t even know,” Acuff says. “I didn’t tell anybody, until everybody knew at the Ryman. I just felt like I needed to tell somebody, and I absolutely broke down onstage.”

Acuff was raised hunting and fishing in Idaho and, during the pandemic, took a job as a fly-fishing guide on the Columbia River when he was unable to play shows. He gained his first large-scale traction in 2021 with the song “If I Were the Devil,” which amassed 6 million streams within months of its release. Acuff was a student at the University of Idaho, in the college town of Moscow, at the time.

“I was driving from my college town to my hometown, which is about an hour and a half,” Acuff says. “I pulled over to get gas, and I decided to check Spotify updates, and I saw that we had done very, very well. I just started crying, because I had just got done playing a show that night at a coffee house, and there were probably five people there, and nobody gave a shit.”

That juxtaposition committed Acuff to win over more fans and he set out on the hard-touring schedule that all but consumed him during the last year of his father’s life. Like his emo-country contemporaries, his songs caught on with a young, social-media-savvy demographic. Now, when Acuff plays mid-sized bars and clubs far from his home markets of Idaho or Nashville, he sees unfamiliar faces singing along, sharing their own grief and healing back at him.

It still shocks him.

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“I’ve got more than 60 songs out,” Acuff says, “and some nights I’d be impressed if anybody doesn’t know the words to every single song.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.