Mark’s had exactly two guests on this show, ever. This week’s is the third, and it might be the best argument yet for breaking the no-interview rule: an aerospace engineer who somehow found time to write a three-book (okay, closer to seven-book or more) saga about a fictional grunge band, and it’s good.
The Book Nobody Else Was Writing
Zach Taylor is the author of Rockstar Echoes, the first entry in a series that started as an attempt to fill a gap he kept noticing. Everyone was rediscovering the 90s, Daisy Jones and the Six was everywhere, The Dirt had already dropped, but nobody was really digging into the grunge era specifically, the one that quietly took Shannon Hoon, Chris Cornell, Layne Staley, and Scott Weiland. So Taylor set out to write a modern-day story soaked in that nostalgia, anchored in a real place. He picked Los Angeles, the Whisky, the Troubadour, Harvard and Stone, even though he’d never set foot in any of them. He treated it like an engineering problem: find your datum point, build everything else off it.
What started as a standalone book turned into a full arc almost by accident. Taylor says he had the ending mapped out from the start, until a character named Rain started demanding more room. By the time he finished the manuscript, he was so annoyed there wasn’t a resolution that he sat in his backyard swearing at the sky while his daughter asked what was wrong. That’s when he realized the story wasn’t done, and the trilogy (now closer to a six or seven book universe, including an origin story for a character named Lloyd Brannon and a future-set entry with a science fiction twist) was born.
The character names are where this gets fun for repeat readers. Kline Thomas borrows from Scott Weiland and Layne Staley. Eddie Cornell splits the difference between Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell. Taylor was careful never to map any single musician directly onto a character, both for legal reasons and because the real story he wanted to tell needed room to be its own thing. Lloyd, the band’s late frontman whose absence haunts the whole book, is loosely inspired by a still-living alt-rock singer Taylor won’t name outright, though he’ll tell you the letters in Lloyd Brannon’s name rearrange into someone very recognizable if you’re paying attention.
Then there’s Clara, a framing device Taylor added after the first draft of Echoes was technically finished. Her chapters, written as excerpts from a story within the story, became one of the tools he leaned on harder in the sequel, Mirrors, out this February. He’s blunt about the early mistakes, saying he didn’t trust his readers enough the first time around and over-explained things Clara could have shown instead. That kind of self-critique, paired with how much he clearly loves this world, made for one of the more honest conversations Mark’s had on the show.
Taylor also laced the book with music references that mean more the second time through: a scene involving a busted cover of an obscure Stone Temple Pilots deep cut, a moment inspired by a Candlebox song he discovered only after the scene was already written, songs that shaped moods he didn’t even know he was chasing until they showed up on shuffle. He’s not calling them Easter eggs. He says it’s layering, and it took longer to build than the actual writing did.
A Silver Snoopy on the Side
Before any of the book talk, Taylor and Mark got into something else entirely: Taylor’s day job. He’s a NASA engineer who spent years as the lead non-destructive evaluation engineer on the solid rocket booster program, chasing down a manufacturing defect that could have grounded the whole line. His fix helped produce the best boosters NASA had ever built across 138 shuttle flights, and it earned him a Silver Snoopy, an award voted on by astronauts themselves and given to roughly one percent of NASA’s workforce. It’s a wild detour for an episode ostensibly about a grunge novel, but it says a lot about how Taylor operates: obsessive, detail-driven, and incapable of leaving a problem alone until he’s solved it his way.
Where It’s Headed
Taylor’s writing routine sounds a lot like his engineering career, minus the rocket fuel. He treats every free hour as an opportunity to build something, partly because he’s lost friends along the way and doesn’t take time for granted. He’s also been doing music journalism on the side for Mixed Alternative Magazine, interviewing regional and local bands around Huntsville, Alabama, which has quietly become a scene worth paying attention to. That work has cracked open his own listening habits too. He grew up on whatever his dad played and whatever hit the radio, and he’s spent the last few years backfilling entire decades of grunge, punk, and outlaw country he missed the first time around.
As for the future of the Rockstar universe, Taylor’s not short on plans. Beyond Mirrors, there’s an origin story for Lloyd, a planned two-part follow-up he’s still deciding whether to split into separate books, and a future-set entry with a science fiction angle built around AI’s threat to live performance art. He’d also love to see it adapted for the screen, though not for the reasons you’d expect. He wants a show that doesn’t gloss over the ugly parts of making art the way he feels Daisy Jones and The Six sometimes did, one that closes every episode with a full performance, no cutaways.
If you’ve read Rockstar Echoes already, Taylor promises the reread hits different once you know what you’re looking for. If you haven’t, now’s the time. Go find it at your local indie bookstore if you can, or grab it on Amazon or Kindle Unlimited, and consider signing up for Taylor’s ARC mailing list so you’re first in line when Mirrors drops in February and an early look at all the books in the pipeline.
