Nonprofit Music First Aims to Boost Musicians' Resources

Becca Raccone's passion for the musicians she endeavors to help through her job is evident as she recounts building her budding nonprofit, Music First, which launched in January.

However, Music First's origin story is far from happy. After her close friend, a musician, passed away in the summer of 2021, Raccone began to realize how his untimely death was too common for many musicians.

"A few musicians have told me that when you agree to be a musician, you succumb to the fact that you're gonna live a certain level of poverty, and that typically means no health insurance, no stable job," Raccone explains. "I don't think that that's fair. If it was a little different and my friend was able to get the care that he needed, he would've been able to catch what ended up taking his life."

Through dedicated networking and many weeks working fourteen-hour days between her day job at Denver's Twig Custom Builders and Music First, Raccone is transforming her immense grief into a blooming passion project that she hopes will fill the deficit in care that failed her friend.

Each musician who joins Music First has a say in how the nonprofit grows, and the only requirements to receive assistance are that they "have to play originals...[and] we ask that every musician play one of our events," Raccone says. Musicians can receive music lessons as well as help with booking gigs, instrument repair costs and, most important, health services, including substance abuse programs and mental health care through the licensed therapists with whom Music First partners.

"That's one of the similarities that I've found in most musicians: They don't have a recourse other than their music as their outlet, and they're kind of expected to have this happy-go-lucky face whenever they're out performing for people," Raccone explains. "But really, sometimes they're suffering, and that [can be] what aids in their great music creation, but I don't like the fact that they're suffering in silence."

Music First is already making an impact, something to which local guitarist Charlie Stevens can personally attest. "I think Becca is doing something really incredible with Music First," Stevens says. "In addition to helping me find performance opportunities, she has also made herself available as a resource for me when I have questions about certain aspects of the music business. I think Colorado is incredibly lucky to have someone so kindhearted and dedicated to helping our local musicians." Thirty local musical acts are already members of Music First — including guitarist Jordan Bass and Jeanne McAdara, a member of Parchment Doll — and the nonprofit is currently working through more partnership requests.

Raccone's immense empathy isn't the only reason her passion for her job is obvious. "I am not a musician. I have always been a lover of music myself. I am actually autistic — or it's now referred to as spectrum disorder — and I've always used music as a way to go through what's referred to as stem, or decompress or de-stress, when there's a lot of people in public spaces or there's the loud music or bright lights," Raccone explains. "I've always been able to pop in headphones and use music to stem myself so I can get back to my best neurodiverse self and live my best life."

Although Music First is a young nonprofit — so young, in fact, that its website is not yet live — Raccone has big plans for her organization. "It's all coming to fruition way faster than I anticipated," she says. "In a year, I would like us to be a little bit more stable and have more of a name within the musical community. I would ideally like to have a location, a physical brick-and-mortar, where a musician can go and actually talk to a therapist, maybe sign up for a lesson, and give them, hopefully, a music venue to play in as well."

Music First's calendar is already chock-full of events. Every Saturday for the next month and a half — except March 25, because of a prior booking — Music First musicians will be performing live in breweries around Longmont and Loveland.

The next Music First shows happen at 6 p.m. Saturday, March 18, with Charlie Stevens at Grossen Bart Brewery, 1025 Delaware Avenue, Longmont; and 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 6, with the NoCo Songwriters Series at Black and Blues Music and Brews, 423 North Cleveland Avenue, Loveland.