Bobbo

Good morning!
I don't usually send out emails on Monday mornings but since the local show I'm playing is tomorrow and I'm on the radio today - I figured a little more notice is always better.
First things first:
Monday, June 29, 2026
KOCI Radio interview with Michaela Compton
6:30 P.M. PST - can tune in from anywhere!
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Campus JAX Singer-Songwriter Showcase
6:30-8 P.M.
Costa Mesa, CA
Over the weekend I played a really unique show at T.H.E. Show.* Being asked to be part of an event in a hotel conference room is usually…eh? You go into the thing knowing that the only people that wander in are just looking for a place to sit down or trying to get away from other things - whatever, right? And this event is for super-duper HIGH end audio stuff. My buddy Matt Moran was in charge of bringing in the musical acts and he was like “I'll introduce you around to the folks with the fancy speakers.”
He brings me down stairs and I meet Gabe from Supreme Acoustic Systems. Really nice dude in a cowboy hat with a room all tricked out with $20,000 speakers and an $8,000 record player and I don't even know the rest but it sounds incredible. I don't see a CD player anywhere around here.
He takes my record and puts it on.
The lighting helps with the sound. This is the Supreme Acoustics room.
Now, I've mixed my albums. I have decent studio monitors and I've heard my music and albums easily more than anyone else just from me being the one working on them. I don't tend to listen to my own stuff all that much after it's done but this? This was like hearing it for the first time. Oh my god. Hearing music like this is on a different level. I love it.
When "Not Lost" finishes playing, Gabe asks what instrument that was and when I tell him it's just pedal steel and acoustic guitar, he asks me if he can buy my record to show off his sound system. I'm chuffed. A feeling of “my album sounds pretty damn good” comes over me. It's not like I don't think my albums sound good but I also know I'm not Daniel Lanois or Bob Clearmountain.
Then I go back upstairs and perform and have a great set with a fully attentive audience. The folks dig it and the guy who made the speakers I'm playing through comes up to me after to tell me the lyrics in "Around Here" made him cry. Books and records sell. Only one CD though. Interesting.
I forget who makes these speakers but they sounded incredible.
It's not enough of a cross section of the population to make proclamations about vinyl vs CD sales but it was interesting that all the stereo equipment that I saw - no one had a CD player. Then there was some good conversation about how the thing that AI cannot replace is the connection at a live performance. With all the ways we can digitally connect, we still need to be in the room where it happens.**
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Ok, recent bookstuffs:
The first draft of Too Many Miles translated into German was completed yesterday. It's now going through the second phase of smoothing it out and making sure it reads right and all that. I'm super excited that my cousin Natalie is working with me on this. I knew the translation was going to make it longer but I did not expect it to jump in page length from 456 to 538.
I'm happy to report that I've sold over 400 copies of Too Many Miles in the past three months and I'm sending another 10 out today by USPS. I'm amused every time I'm at the post office and they ask “Sending anything hazardous?” I enjoy saying “Just ideas.”
Books ready to be mailed.
And I just found this review that I somehow missed a few weeks ago. (https://ocebook.com/.../bobbo-byrnes-turns-3200-pages-of...)
If you've read my book and feel like sharing your thoughts on it, I'm putting together a page on my website for reader testimonials. I would love it if you felt like sharing your thoughts - just send them here to me. Or if you want to be more official about it - Amazon and Goodreads have places for you to submit your own reviews as well. These are all greatly appreciated!
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Later on this week I will be performing around noontime at the Anaheim Farmer's Market on Thursday, July 2, and The Fallen Stars will be doing a 4th of July event in Long Beach, CA. Further out will be a songwriter event at The Artists Village Cafe in Santa Ana on Sunday, July 12, Jug Band Coffee in Long Beach on Saturday, July 18 and I'm finalizing the schedule for Bobbo's Backyard Benefit Concert on Sunday, July 19. This is our annual benefit show for the OC Foodbank.
Ok, that's a lot going on.
As always, thanks for hanging out with me, see you soon.
xo
~Bobbo
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*The acroynm is for something like The Hi-Fi Event Show or something. Kind of a terrible acroynm if you're trying to google it.
**Yeah, I went Hamilton on you.
***In English the word count is 141,792 and in German the word count is 138,925. So fewer words but apparently longer words and I guess that makes sense. When you say “sorry” in German it is "Entschuldigung" or “Es tut mir sehr leid.”

Thank you Thirsty Boots! Music review from Sweden. This was my favorite bit:

"Nicely produced, nicely arranged and occasionally just a little messy."

Glädjespridare Bobbo Byrnes - "Too Many Miles" 2026 Jag vet inte riktigt vad det är som tilltalar mig med Bobbo Byrnes skiva, "Too Many Miles". Den gör m...

Quick note from O.C. some songbits that didn't make my book Too Many Miles AND a free song!

Moin!*

I got a new tattoo a couple of days ago. It was my first time getting the poke and stick type of tattoo and was given to me by my friend Emma from the band The Potential Lunatics.** I asked her “Did you learn how to do this in prison?” and she flatly responded “I can show you how to make a shiv too.”***

Upon seeing my new tattoo, Tracy gave me a hard time about how random my tattoos are and how it's taking me forever to get sleeves. My tattoos are more like stickers on an old suitcase. To be clear, I have no intention of “giving up” but I really love the reminder, the persistence, the grind of, seemingly, everything I do - plus I can see it while I'm strumming guitar. At the end of the Glen Hansard song “This Gift” he often sings “Don't give up.” and that mixed with the angelic voice of Kate Bush in her duet with Peter Gabriel of the same name was the inspiration.

On that front - I've been working hard trying to get my book into places and in front of people that don't know me. I am incredibly fortunate to have been building a community of fans here and all around the world through my music. Most first time authors do not have that kind of fanbase or have the flexibility of playing music while reading from their book. I still can't believe that I've sold 400 books in the past two months.

I've been writing to newspapers, literary places and book festivals trying to get some coverage and so far the return rate is roughly one email response for every thirty emails I've sent out. I've been accepted into the Twentynine Palms Book Festival and they've asked me to be on a panel about the enduring allure of writing about the road and road trips. I will also be at the Anaheim Indie Author day in November and I will be packing up books to take with me to Europe on tour this autumn.

I am blown away to be featured this week on the website Hypebot with a great introduction about me and my book from Ariel Hyatt. She is also the author of Music Success in Nine Weeks and her new book is called From Buzz to Bond and talks about how connection in music is where it's at - not chasing streaming numbers or fuzzy metrics. It's all about the human connection.

Weirdly this all ties in with a new song I'm trying to write. My great grandmother was born in the early 1890s and she passed when I was about 11 years old. Knowing all the inventions she lived through - cars, planes, moon landing - we would ask her “what was the best thing you saw invented?” And she would always say “The crystal radio.”

As a kid, radio had always been there. I mean - tv, cars, radio, planes - had always been in my world but to hear her explain how nighttime was quiet and lonely. When the crystal radio came to be - it connected people unlike any other medium had before. The outside world could come into the house. And I've been thinking a lot about this in relation to where we are now. We have the world at our fingertips and yet, we often still feel alone. We still need connection and people.****

Anyway, I don't have it all worked out but I have done something I've never done before - I've reached out to my mother to see if she'd like to help me write this song.

Folks are always turning me on to new amazing music and when Emma was doing my tattoo she asked if I'd ever heard of Frightened Rabbit and we listened to one of their albums that had Swim Until You Can't See Land. And I'm loving this song right now.

The free song in today's email is the album closer Not Lost. This was an interesting collaboration with the poet Kirk Diedrich and was part of the reason I split with my manager. As a song, it was just a snippet that I started singing in my head one night lying in bed. It wouldn't leave my brain so I waited until Tracy fell asleep and I got up and whisper sang and strummed it into my phone so I wouldn't lose it. When I was recording it - I loved it but something was missing. A friend shared a poem by Kirk with me that read:

“I'm not lost
I'm just looking for the last place
I felt like me.”

With just slight modification and repetition, it sat in with what I was already singing and playing. It was perfect. I did not know Kirk but I wrote to him and told him about the song and asked if it would be ok for me to use and we could split the songwriting 50/50. He listened, loved the song and agreed.

I had been working with a manager during that time and we had a meeting with another producer where we listened to the whole album and the two of them gave me notes. When it got to this song they were both bored. Said the song didn't belong. It's weird and it esoteric and no one will like it. I argued that it was exactly what was needed to close out the statement of the album about how music can heal when we feel broken. They thought I was being too much of an artist and indulging my weird side. Then he said I should write darker material like Craig Finn of the Hold Steady. I said “That's not who I am.” and he said “And how's that working out for you?” I decided right then to fire him and to eponymously title my album Bobbo Byrnes as a show of ownership.

Not Lost isn't a pop song. It's a small meditation of peace. A dreamy bit of beauty that finds itself within all the distractions of the world. There's a dissonance on the pedal steel that happens 24 seconds in that I left because the rest of the take was perfect. I don't think AI could play that note a semitone flat like I did. Hope you dig.

Ok, I have to go now. Writing this email blast was a bit of a procrastination away from recording my audiobook.

Oh and I have shows coming up:

Saturday, June 21
Day of Music Fullerton
I have three shows around Fullerton - details on my website.

Saturday, June 27
I'm playing a Hi-Fi show in Costa Mesa, CA but I don't have any details yet

Tuesday, June 30
Campus Jax Songwriter Soundstage Writer's Round

xo
~Bobbo

*Moin is the greeting in Northern Germany. It's a lot like “morning” but is used at all times of day. It's pronounced like cutting the first letter from “more” and dropping the c from “coin."
**You may remember that I produced two albums with this sibling band starting when they were like 13 and 11. It's been great watching them grow up and grow as musicans.
***She's never been to prison. Her girlfriend taught her how to do it when they were teenagers and now she's been tattooing for over a decade.
****Through researching some of this I learned that the first radio station to be broadcasting in the Boston area was at Tufts University in 1921. This would be the same time my great grandmother would've been working in Cambridge at her job on Confectioner's Row making bonbons. The second radio station was from the top of a department store in Boston and they had Mayor James Michael Curley on and then there was WBZ - who are still on the air today.