Although he was nominated for a Texas Country Music Association award earlier this year, it wouldn’t be fair to describe Zak Webb as just a country artist.
As he wrapped up a two-hour set at Marie’s Wine Bar in downtown Waco recently, Webb, playing guitar, and his drummer-who’s-also-his-cousin Jeremy Richard, ripped through a crowd-pleasing 15-minute medley.
“We start with ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ then go into ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie,’” Webb said. “Then we hit ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Bad to the Bone.’ Then we go into an extended version of ‘Uptown Funk’ into ‘9 to 5,’ ‘Rubberband Man,’ into ‘Tutti Frutti’ and then we close out with The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ and then back to ‘Uptown Funk.’”
That’s nine songs in at least five genres. During a performance, he can easily run through anywhere from 30 to 50 songs, depending on how much time he spends talking to the crowd and the vibe of the room. Most of those tunes are covers, like in his closing medley, but he throws a couple of his original compositions in there as well. He said he could easily play a four-hour show performing just his own music.
Webb, 32, grew up in Brownwood, about two hours west of Waco, and has been singing for 30 years. He has a video from his second birthday party in which he’s singing “Happy Birthday” to himself.
“Music runs in my blood, real deep,” he said. “My whole family, extended family, immediate family, they’re all vocalists and musicians in some kind of way. Both of my parents were vocalists. And I grew up singing in church and I did choir in high school, so, it’s just always been in my environment.”
Even though everyone around him was a musician, Webb didn’t start playing guitar until he was a senior at Brownwood High School. Then during his first year at Ranger College, which he was attending on a choir scholarship, he and his roommate Marlon Hamilton formed a duo called TYME – Two Young Men Entertaining. Their first performance was at a Ranger choir show, then afterward, they booked more gigs and began writing music together. That’s when Webb first thought that he might like to pursue music as a career.
And he’s been doing that for the last 11 years or so. His first solo gig was at Daingerfield State Park in far northeast Texas, about a five-hour drive from Brownwood. It took Webb a little longer to get there, however.
“I drove this old Cadillac, and the radiator was bad, so I had to stop every 30 minutes,” he said. “It was such a terrible experience, but I still wanted to go play. The show was great.”
Webb plays most of his gigs as a duo with Richard, but he also performs with a five-piece band on occasion. He recently moved from Waco to Cameron so his wife, Jaclyn, could take a job as director of nursing at a nursing and rehabilitation facility. The couple has been married for seven years. They met at The Oasis, a club in Brownwood, where Webb had worked as a DJ. On the night they met, Webb had recently gone through a romantic break-up, and also “had a music partner that quit on me,” he said. He had been dancing with other women, then “it was just like a movie,” he said. “She came in, I saw her and she just literally changed how the whole building looked for me.”
During the gig at Marie’s, Zak and Jaclyn sang a duet, and he looked like the happiest man in the world doing so.
“She’s the reason, the only reason, I can do this career,” he said. “I credit her with saving my life and making my life currently what it is.”
“Good Grief”
Zak Webb lost both of his parents when he was young. He’s channeling the emotions he went though during those times into a project he’s calling “Good Grief.”
“It’s six tracks that go through all five stages of grief, and then it has a track that is just about my healing,” he said.
The song that deals with anger “is a rock track to the bone,” Webb said. “It’s a monster of a work” featuring a guest drummer, Lennon Lopez, who plays in the heavy metal band INCITE.
Webb hopes to partner with schools and churches, counselors and pastors, to help people deal with grief, no matter its source.
“There are a lot of resources I didn’t know about when I was going through it with my mom, and it would have helped me out a lot,” he said. “I want to create a tool that people can use to help their kids, their family members, their friends. And grief is all over. It’s when you change schools and you leave your teachers, you move towns, you leave your friends, you get broke up with. Grief is just a part of life, and so I want to move past just being an entertainer. I want to become a resource and become a tool. I want my songs to be used, and I want my story to be heard.”
