The Book Nook: Rockstar Echoes by Zach Taylor

Bud Gambrell

May 21, 2026

Rockstar Echoes leaves us asking who the Rockstar is.

What are the odds that in a town as small as New Market, AL, two authors would live close to each other? To narrow that down a bit more, what are the odds that those two authors each wrote a book about music?

I have no idea what the odds are, and my new friend Zach Taylor is much more of an author than I am. I just used that reference to get this article started.

I first met Zach at the Rocket City Reading Festival, held at the Orion Amphitheater this spring. We were both set up as vendors, trying to convince people to buy our books. I’ll let you in on a little secret. He did way better than I did.

Alabama author Zach Taylor — Credit: Facebook

Once we met, it seemed a friendship was bound to happen. The conversation was easy. During that conversation, we agreed to trade books. I traded him a copy of Side Tracks Music Hall, and Zach traded me a copy of his new book, Rockstar Echoes.

Rockstar Echoes by Zach Taylor — *Rockstar Echoes* by Zach Taylor

I had seen Zach’s book advertised on Instagram and had also seen a copy for sale at his uncle Jeff’s mercantile shop. Sidenote: If you are in the New Market area, be sure to stop by Moonpie John’s Mercantile. It is a great little shop that serves an amazing sandwich! Back to the book. I saw it one day while getting a bite to eat. The title grabbed my attention, so I looked into it further. I received my copy from Zach and began reading it within days. It caught my attention because I love a good story, whether it's a book, movie, or TV series.

As I finished the book, I felt I needed to sit down with Zach and dig a little deeper into Rockstar Echoes. I wanted to ask questions about some of the characters, his thoughts while writing, and his general writing preferences.

It just so happened that I had a local photo shoot, and Zach asked if he could tag along. I said yes, of course—the more the merrier. After the shoot, Zach and I found a shady spot, and here is the conversation we had.

MaM: Zach, thanks for joining me. Let’s talk a little bit about your book. When did you first start writing?

Zach Taylor: Well, I started writing in second grade, probably. Since teachers needed a day off, they would tell us to write a story, think it'd be a page or two, and then I'd always end up with like 10 pages.

MaM: Is that when you first realized you wanted to write?

ZT: Yeah, I like the idea of expressing myself through words. But I didn't decide to become a published author until my youngest son did. Then the ideas in this book were so striking to me, especially given a lot of what's considered successful at the time, shows like The Bear and Daisy Jones & The Six. I felt like I had a story that would cross that bridge, too.

MaM: What was your process when you wrote Rockstar Echoes?

ZT: Well, I had the original idea for it, and I just sat down and started writing. I didn't know who the characters were. I didn't know who they would be or how many characters there would be. I just had the idea of a plot, and I just kind of made it up as I went.

MaM: What do you think makes a good story?

ZT: It certainly is one that conveys an idea with a lot of subtlety that you don't even realize that the book is telling you something about society, about yourself, about the people around you. I think that's what makes a great book: it entertains you, and then at the end of it, you realize it was actually telling you something.

MaM: What is your favorite part of the writing process, and what is your least favorite part?

ZT: The least favorite part probably has to be the editing, even though I don't really do the editing because you're turning over your work to somebody else. And editing is just not about grammar and structure. An editor is also going to be paring down your work a ton. They're going to be cutting what they think is fluff. And it's very stressful because you may make a reference to something, to a song, or maybe there's an inflection of your character that they make a very certain choice of words. It's stressful because when you get that finished work back, your ideas are often cut.

MaM: Did getting published change your process of writing?

ZT: It absolutely did. I think we live in a merit-based society when it comes to work, and one of the ideas that I had, wrongly, I'll add, is that if you author a good book and you throw it into the world, it's going to get picked up. It might be slow, but eventually it's going to become successful, and that's not right. One of the things that I learned very quickly was that you don't just author a book, publish it, and throw it into the world. There are six months of work where you're trying to get advanced readers, you get beta readers, alpha readers, so much stuff that leads to that success. That's one of them for sure.

MaM: Do you make plans to sit down and write, or do you just sit down and write as a thought comes to you?

ZT: I try to do a little bit of both. I typically don't work on Fridays, so especially during the winter, I sit at home and write. But I certainly do think that I have to be in a writing mood to be creative because if I ever feel like it's a chore and I've got to work through a scene, then obviously that scene probably is not that important.

MaM: We're going to dive into the book itself a little bit now. What was the hardest scene in the book for you to write?

ZT: I think it has to be the scene where The Painted Queens are playing at Harvard & Stone, and Rayne has a meltdown on stage. She's just written this song about an experience she had a couple of days ago. And just like I think with me and my writing style, her best work is when she's maybe emotionally moved. So, she writes this great song. She's really excited about sharing it with the world. But as she starts singing it, she has a mental breakdown. And it was really hard for me because what she was experiencing was not something I'd ever experienced in my life. I'm not a woman. I've never dealt with a lot of these troubles. I've never been poor. I've never faced eviction. And so, it was really hard for me to convey those ideas, knowing I couldn't align with them. And I wanted to make sure I got that right.

MaM: Each chapter begins with that date and time stamp. That alone had to take a lot of planning. Tell me about the process that you came up with for that part.

ZT: Well, so you asked about my structure. This is where structure helps, right? So, I sat down and wrote this book without even thinking about the dates. I did think about the passage of time between the scenes. So, it was really, really hard to go back in retrospect and start adding these dates because there were some dates that might not align, that might have been on a holiday or something like that. But one of the fun things about those dates is that, typically, all the dates I use align with cultural events, and some are personal to me. But that was really, really hard to invent structure when you’re writing with no structure.

Author Zach Taylor at a book signing — Credit: Facebook

MaM: Are any of the characters in the book based on real people, like Lloyd Brannon, for example?

ZT: Absolutely. Pretty much every character in this book is based on a musician, an artist, a personal friend of mine, or an acquaintance. You know, we kind of talked about Lloyd Brannon and Aberdeen in general. I'm a huge Incubus fan, and I respect him so much. The characters in this book are nothing like the guys in Incubus. They're really not. There's no connection between personalities. But there's a lot of connection between Lloyd Brannon and Brandon Boyd, the late singer of Incubus. And then the bandmates themselves all share names with some of my favorite bands.

MaM: Aberdeen loses its lead singer, Lloyd Brannon, and then they bring in Klein and Eddie. Mike Kilmore, the guitarist, didn't welcome them in. What were your thoughts or motivation behind that?

ZT: Well, mostly it's because I wanted to make Kilmore the prototypical rock star, right? So, this is a guitarist. And probably like a lot of these guys, they're not the most famous person in the band. It's always the lead singer, even though they're super important. So, he's used to being second-tier. So, he was the prototypical, ‘Hey, I'm the next man up. I'm going to be the artist.’ And so, when they bring in an outsider who robs him of what he thinks is an opportunity. But he's also motivated, as you're going to learn through Echoes and into Mirrors, that he had other monetary reasons why, not necessarily that he hated Kline and Eddie. He did not want to be successful. He didn't want this album to be successful. He wanted it to fail, but you have to read the book to find out why.

MaM: My next question is kind of leading into the next book. It would appear that Rayne Harlow and Klein have a budding romance. Where is that romance going, and what part of that does Chrys play in it?

ZT: I'm not going to spoil it, but we finally kind of get to learn who Chrys is at the end of Echoes inside the epilogue. And yes, Rayne was created as a love interest because she's actually not based on anybody. She’s inspired by famous female artists, specifically punk artists. But I found it far more interesting to deny that romance between the two of them in Echoes and into Mirrors and even in the final show, because I just, I thought it was so much more complicated to have two people that clearly want each other but can't because of their separate situations. And that friction, it jumps off the page. I'm not saying it's lazy to create love interests and see them come to fruition. I think we all want the happy story at the end, right? We all want to see the two be happy and get together. And maybe they will, maybe they won't. You're going to have to read to find out.

MaM: Burning question, especially for me, once I finished the book, who is the rock star? Lloyd, Klein, Eddie, Kilmore, Raine? Who's the rock star?

ZT: That's a great question. And the answer is none of them and all of them, right? We chose this title because it was ambiguous. And I've kind of said this before, but a lot of people are going to say, "That's such a lazy answer.” You read a book about rock stars and call it rock stars. But for me, the idea was that after they get done with this book and Mirrors and all the books going forward, what you're going to learn is that none of them are rock stars, but all of them are rock stars.

MaM: I've heard you mention a playlist for the book. Where can we find that playlist?

ZT: Spotify – both books have one.

Rockstar Echoes Companion Playlist available on Spotify

MaM: It seems that the manager, Paul White, and Aisha Holt have a history. Are we going to find out more about that history between the two of them in Mirrors?

ZT: Yeah, so Aiesha Holt was probably the last character created in Rockstar Echoes. And that was because I wrote this book, but I didn't really understand the industry. I love live music, I love rock'n'roll, and I wanted to write a book about the inside of that. But I wrote all of Echoes literally, realized I didn’t have a publicist or an A&R person. She was brought in by Paul White to address Aberdeen's waning popularity. And of course, you know, Lloyd Brannon dies, but she left Washington, DC, where she was working with politicians and running their campaigns. She took this job to do that. And one of the things that people read this book and go, a band like that wouldn't have such a small team. Well, they would when they're struggling the way that Aberdeen is. They've run out of money. They don't have this big team. So instead of having more people do fewer jobs, they have Paul and Aiesha who can pretty much do everything. And they're a two-man team, and they work really well together.

MaM: You know what else you're missing? The book. You don't have a photographer in that book. I noticed that. (laughs)

ZT: Well, we're going to solve that.

MaM: What character surprised you the most, either in their actions or their personality, after you developed them?

ZT: I actually think it was Aiesha Holt because I created her for a need. And later on, and especially in Mirrors, she kept growing. Her influence kept growing. And a lot of that's because I created this really strong African American woman who's super successful. But as I developed her and wrote, she surprised me by taking the reins, because that's what a person like her would do, right? And she's really driving things behind the scenes.

MaM: How did you do your research for the scenes? For example, there are scenes in the Whisky Go Go.

ZT: Some of those scenes came from watching movies like The Doors that famously were, you know, there at Whisky Go Go. They were a house band for a long time. I did a lot of just pulling up on Google and looking at pictures of how the bar was laid out. A big thing was just watching, and I think The Dirt. Motley Crue played there, and there's a scene where it's in Whisky Go Go. Harvard & Stone was one I couldn't find much information on. I couldn't see the bands playing or how the stage was set up.

MaM: Now, I noticed in the book as I read, there's a lot of song lyrics, not full songs, but partial songs. Are you an aspiring songwriter?

ZT: I think so. I actually wrote a lot of these songs to completion and used Suno AI to finish them. And it's not the perfect way to do it, but you can get close. There's only so much you can do with creating those songs with AI. I can give it a style. I can kind of give it timing. I can lead the horse to water, but I can't make it drink most of the time. I found that I can actually write pretty good songs, and that kind of came out early. Now, the irony is that the songs that appear in Echoes and then Mirrors are some of the first songs I wrote, and the more I wrote songs, the better they got to the point where I wish I had used some of my later songs.

MaM: If you could sit down right now and have a drink with one of the characters from the book, who would it be and why?

ZT: Well, Ava would be a great one because I'm a glutton for punishment. I like having good sparring contests. Good mental logic sparring contests with friends and family. My wife hates that about me. Not all my friends have the same political or cultural ideals, or anything like that. But she's someone who could have a great stand-up fight with me. But other than that, I think Markus is a great one because he has so little page time, especially in Echoes, and he has more going forward. And you start learning a little bit about him. And he was a DJ, right? And so, it's really easy to stereotype, oh, he's the African American male that did the DJ thing and some of the rap parts. Then, the more you learn about him, the more you learn that, as time went on, as Aberdeen came out of Nu Metal, he went back to school, learned how to produce, and became a PhD in a couple of different things. He's super educated, super nice, just very mellow. I think he'd be an awesome guy to sit down and just talk about music with.

MaM: How do you hope that your work, like Rockstar Echoes and Mirrors, will impact your readers?

ZT: One of the main reasons that I wanted to feature grunge in particular was that we've not seen a lot of grunge in pop culture, right? So, we have Daisy Jones and the Six, which kind of covers the 70s. We've seen a lot of that 70s and 80s, and we obviously live in the modern era, but nobody has used grunge except the artists themselves. Kim Thayil had just had a book come out. Mark Lanegan has his own book. Scott Weiland's got his own book, but those are memoirs, those are autobiographies. We've not seen any fiction that features grunge. And so, I want readers to either revisit it if they lived through the grunge era or, for new readers, discover it. What we're finding is that, believe it or not, our main market is women ages 18 to 25 because the Painted Queens' characters align with them.

MaM: What is the best advice that you have been given as a writer?

ZT: Not to rush things and to know that this game is 95% rejection. I sat down and wrote a book, and then went, "Okay, what's the next step?" I didn't understand that you need years to write a book successfully if you want to be serious about it and go back through it over and over and over. Then the cover design and the interior design. Then once that's done, you're not ready to publish yet. You still need six months to get that feedback from your beta readers, alpha readers, and advanced readers. And so, build in whatever time you think you need to write and publish a book, you need to double that or triple that.

MaM: Can you share any news about your upcoming projects for your future books?

ZT: Yeah, I'm really excited about Mirrors in particular because we get to really start delving into a lot of these characters. So, right now, Rockstar Echoes is 80% Kline, 20% Rayne, and really nothing for anybody else. That was just how I developed as a writer. And then in Mirrors, we start getting far more characters. We actually get some new characters going into Mirrors. In particular, there will be Mary and Olivia. Mary is Clara's editor, and Olivia is her roommate who works for the legendary KROQ. She's the secretary at LA's KROQ. So, we get to learn about these new characters and their backstories, and see them in action. I'm really excited about expanding a lot of these characters.

MaM: How can our readers discover more about you and your works?

ZT: Well, the best thing to do is to follow us on social media. We use Instagram more than anything. I also do Facebook. Zach Taylor Books for Instagram and TikTok, Zach Taylor Author on Facebook. I'm always pleased when people reach out to me to ask questions or talk about it.

One thing I didn't dig into deeply is Zach’s day job. Not only is he a gifted writer, but Zach is also an engineer with NASA, and I will leave those questions to you. Go find Zach on social media and ask him about the latest Artemis II launch he was involved in. Now’s your chance to ask a NASA engineer about man’s trip back to the moon. You don’t get that opportunity every day.

Zach and I are teaming up on more projects in the future, so stay tuned!