Grayson County Burn Ban’s New Album Is On Fire
by Adam Perry for Denver Westword, 1/10/2018
“Are you an idiot, or just an asshole?”
That’s certainly a brazen lyric to open a debut album. But Austen Grafa, singer and rhythm guitarist for local campfire-country band Grayson County Burn Ban, might be the only songwriter fun-loving and sincere enough to spin something so immediately antagonistic into a folky PSA about common courtesy during Denver’s population-growth avalanche.
The album Better Neighbor, says the thirty-year-old Grafa, is about two things: “the general camaraderie that already exists, but also how much Denver has changed in the five and a half years since I moved here.” The band will release the new record with a show at the hi-dive on January 12.
Grafa grew up in Sherman, Texas, before attending the University of Colorado Boulder, where he graduated with degrees in economics and humanities. The scruffy, smiley, long-haired Texan also plays bass in Denver’s Bud Bronson and the Good Timers, a brotherly punk-rock band equally influenced by Thin Lizzy and Titus Andronicus. Grayson County and Bud Bronson share not only Grafa and the lovable Brian Beer (who fronts Bud Bronson and plays lead guitar in Grayson County), but also a tangible and infectious sense of solidarity and I-don’t-wanna-grow-up liberty.
Read the rest here at Westword.com
Adam Perry 