Rising Stars: Meet Colin Burns of Grand Rapids

Today we’d like to introduce you to Colin Burns

Hi Colin, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I began playing music when I was 9 years old. Earlier that year, I walked into my dad’s workshop when he was listening to music. As I entered the room, Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” began, and I was floored. My dad showed me more Led Zeppelin, along with his favourites Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Genesis, and Rush. I became enamored with the image of musicians, playing music and creating it for a living, and one day I realized; that’s what I wanted to do. My parents bought me a guitar and got me started on lessons, and I worked every job I could find as a teenager to afford more equipment. While I set aside the goal of playing music for a living, my passion for creating music hasn’t waned at all. While on a work trip in 2019, I discovered Beepbox, a free electronic music software. I immediately fell in love with the program, and before I knew it, I had an entire album’s worth of material, which I decided to put out there for the world to judge. I put it under the name Burnzy 8B to differentiate it from my more personal, instrument-based music, which I still hope to release. When Covid hit in 2020, with entire days of free time on my hands, I dove headfirst into the Burnzy 8B project, even going as far to stream my music creation process on Twitch, and eventually releasing 20 full-length albums and two music videos. While now, life has taken me in a direction, not allowing me to dedicate much time to Burnzy 8B, I’m now too busy with my day job and working on making my first new short film since 2018. I am still proud of this project, and happy that I have such a plethora of music out in the world that I can truly call mine.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
This is a complicated question. Burnzy 8B is only a small part of my creative life, and while Burnzy 8B itself was fairly straightforward, everything else around it seemed to complicate it in ways I still struggle to comprehend. I wanted to be a typical rock musician and perform music live, and my efforts to make that a reality were all met with a brick wall. I went to film school and graduated in 2019, but my attempt at a career in film was completely halted by the outbreak of Covid. While my creative career has otherwise been met with difficulty after difficulty, Burnzy 8B is by far the most simple to get out there.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m most proud of a few tracks; Summer Plans, Tesseract, The Long Walk, Yay, and Deaf Tomes. These are tracks that I felt were all, in weird ways, turning points for myself as a musician and in my knowledge of what I could do with the Beepbox program. While most of my time spent with it has been disciplined in the fact that I purposefully try not to explore too far into it’s surprisingly immense capabilities, these are the tracks that all stemmed from me experimenting with trying to find a specific sound that would fit what was in my head, coming from the seeds of riffs or chord progressions that I was making in the program. I’m proud of the fact that I was able to take these weird sounds and simple noises, and without bending the programming or sounds too much, create full-length tracks of hopefully interesting music. So, in summary, I’m proud of my ability to take something incredibly simple and limit myself in one way that forces me to be creative in others. I’m flourishing in my discipline.

Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Creating makes me happy. If I spend hours making something new, even if no one ever sees it or realizes it exists, it makes me happy. When others enjoy my creations, even though I never expect them to, it does make me very happy.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/burnzy8b?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@burnzy8b692?si=pP-9148MPuozGZnh
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7aSapmlkNj5ER8RJHhlVWw?si=yggG5LT7Tr-0fjlRndY5Sg