After Years of Playing Covers Locally, State College Couple Turns Their Stories Into Debut Album

After decades of playing other artists’ music, local residents Steve and Kristi Jean Branstetter are telling their own stories. 

The State College couple recently released the self-titled debut album from One Acre West, an Americana band built around original songs shaped by their years of traveling, raising a family, building careers and finding a home in central Pennsylvania. Released Sept. 18, the album blends traditional country influences with folk, blues and Southern rock. 

Recorded in Texas with an Austin-based producer, the 10-track album marks a new chapter for the musicians, who spent more than a decade performing cover songs around Centre County before deciding to focus on their own material. 

“We’ve been married for a really long time. We met when we were both living in Colorado,” Steve Branstetter said. 

Music has been part of their relationship since the beginning. The two met while living in Colorado and spent years performing in cover bands to support themselves, including gigs in Denver, Wyoming, Nebraska and Mexico.

“We played in cover bands for decades, and it just was one of those things that the nature of music kind of changed around in this area. COVID made a big dent in live music in Centre County, and it kind of felt like a time for us to be a little more introspective with things,” Kristi said. 

Moving to Centre County, Reviving Music Career

The couple eventually stepped away from music to pursue other careers and raise their children. Kristi worked as a corporate and securities paralegal before attending culinary school. Steve earned a doctorate in clinical psychology and research methods and pursued an academic career. 

The family moved several times, including a stint in Massachusetts while Steve completed his clinical internship and four years in West Virginia, where he worked at West Virginia University before returning to Denver. Although they expected to remain in Colorado, a job opportunity brought them to Penn State in 2009. 

“We thought we would always live in Colorado,” Steve said. “It was just home. It’s where we were…And then just out of the blue, I got a letter from the Department of Biobehavioral Health, and they were familiar with my research and wanted to interview me. And just by lucky happenstance, we ended up at Penn State and brought our little family with us, and we’ve been here ever since.”

Kristi now works as a local chef instructor, while Steve teaches at Penn State. After settling in the State College area, the couple gradually returned to performing. 

A local theater production of “Always, Patsy Cline” helped spark that return. Kristi performed in the show in 2012, with Steve playing in the band. 

“That’s when we first went, ‘Oh, this is kind of fun,’ and we decided to be in bands again. So there was a nice hiatus for us to concentrate on kids. But then, you know, kids got a little older, a little more independent, and we decided to start playing again,” Kristi said. 

They eventually formed Kristi Jean and Her Ne’er Do-Wells, a more rockabilly-influenced group that performed covers at venues around Centre County. The band gave them a way to reconnect with local musicians and become part of the area’s live music scene. 

“It was a nice decade, 12 years or so that we were doing the whole cover grind,” Kristi said. “A little over a decade of doing local covers around the area.”

Becoming One Acre West

After years of interpreting other songwriters’ work, the couple began to feel drawn toward material rooted in their own experiences. By 2023 and 2024, the pair had begun concentrating more seriously on original songs. 

They eventually had a collection of a dozen or more pieces they wanted to record, prompting them to move away from regular cover gigs and establish One Acre West. 

“At one point, we had like 12 to 15 songs that we really felt good about,” Steve said, “They’re all, you know, pieces of us, things that we’ve done for a while, and we’re like, we need to focus on these thoughts because these are where our passion is and our emotion — telling our own stories rather than trying to interpret somebody else’s.” 

The transition also gave Steve more room to write. He handles most of the songwriting and plays guitar, while Kristi performs lead vocals and helps shape the songs as they develop. 

“He’s the lyricist. He’s the one that wakes up in the morning and has a song that he’s written,” Kristi said. “I contribute very little on that part, other than ‘that sings funny,’ or, you know, ‘that doesn’t quite go,’ but I rarely have to do that because he’s a really amazing songwriter. It’s a pretty cool partnership. He does all the major heavy lifting.”

From State College to Texas, Creating Their First Album

The couple traveled to Red Boot Ranch Studio in Buda, Texas, just outside Austin, in September 2024 to record the album with producer Bradley Kopp. 

They had long been drawn to Austin’s music scene and the Texas songwriters who influenced their sound. Kopp’s previous work with established Americana and country musicians made him a natural fit for the project. 

“We lived in Austin for a little while. That was a place we were drawn to way before we were ready,” Steve said. “We were still kind of playing, playing mostly cover songs, and we’re like, we should go to Austin, and we’ll meet people, and we’ll do big things. We weren’t ready for that, but the scene there certainly inspired us, and a lot of the people we like as songwriters or guitar players have some Texas roots.”

The recording process stretched over nearly two years. The couple recorded the basic tracks during their trip, then continued working remotely with Kopp on guitar solos, harmonies, mixing and mastering after returning to Pennsylvania.

The band describes its sound as Americana, a broad style that draws from several strands of American roots music. The album, as well as the band’s, title also reflects their own journey. 

They named the project after the one-acre property they bought in 2009, about a mile from Penn State’s University Park campus. After years of moving between states and performing in different places, the property became a symbol of putting down roots. 

“We have a song called ‘Acre of Our Own,’ which is on the album, and sort of summarizes our whole experience,” Steve said. “This idea of moving from just being the two of us living in these tiny little places, traveling around in a van playing gigs to finally we had this acre of our own, right? It’s just sort of a combination of our roots but finally feeling like we’re here, we’re home, we have this little acre that’s us.”

The song is one of several that draw from the couple’s personal experiences. Rather than writing about an imagined life, they have used their own memories, relationships and changes over time as material. 

The couple said the area’s live music scene often caters to audiences looking to dance or hear familiar songs, making it more difficult to build a regular following for original music. 

“Just looking to take it to new audiences and expand a little bit with the different style because it’s a little harder around here to play original music,” Kristi said. “People here, we have students; we have people who want to go out and dance and party and listen to things they know. So listening to original music is certainly out there, and there’s some great original musicians and original music in the scene, but just to keep ourselves going a little bit, we started pushing a little more regionally and pushing out a little bit.”

The band has started performing farther afield, including stops in Nashville and Memphis during a short tour in May, an appearance at Musikfest in Bethlehem and a show in Brooklyn. The couple also has been playing smaller venues and listening rooms where audiences come specifically to hear original songs and the stories behind them. 

The album has received early attention from Americana music outlets, including Americana Highways, as well as radio stations in Pennsylvania and other states and some European markets. Steve said the response has been encouraging for an independent act releasing its first full-length album. 

“The response has been really good for us, especially as indie artists,” Steve said. “It’s still early for, again, indie people like us on a debut album where people don’t have any back catalog really to look at. You know what we consider big is not what normal artists might, but the reaction has been really positive.”

The couple is also learning the promotional side of releasing music in the streaming era, from pitching songs to playlists to building an audience online. 

What’s Next for One Acre West 

The Branstetters are already looking ahead to new music, with plans to continue working with Kopp and potentially bring a local producer into part of the next recording process.

The band also has several planned concerts coming up toward the end of the year. One Acre West is set to perform its original material at Pine Grove Hall on Dec. 27.

The couple also plans to appear at aThe State Theatre on New Year’s Eve for “The Last Lonely Song,” a 90-minute musical biography of country singer Patsy Cline. The production will combine Kristi’s singing with Steve’s narration and a full band featuring steel guitar, fiddle, piano, bass and drums. 

For now, the couple is balancing the work of promoting its first album with the familiar routine of performing locally and writing songs for what comes next. 

“We really jumped in a couple of years ago with writing our own stuff, and it’s been a really great process and really fun,” Kristi said.