CKY’s ‘An Answer Can Be Found’ Was Nearly Lost Forever and Almost Ended with a Murder
Because making an album isn’t hard enough, CKY’s An Answer Can Be Found was almost yeeted into oblivion thanks to what might be one of the more avoidable tech disasters I’ve heard in a while.
According to frontman Deron Miller, the entire record just disappeared one night thanks to a hard drive allegedly overloaded with data and maybe, possibly, literally melting. Or maybe not. Nobody really knows the state the drive ultimately ended up in.
Miller recently sat down with The Garza Podcast and recounted the absolute shitshow in vivid detail.
“You’re supposed to, like, back it up onto a drive or something. I don’t know, but something happened. Apparently it melted. I don’t know if literally it melted… but the drive or whatever held way too much information and just broke or something — and the whole album was gone.”
Let that sink in. An entire CKY album—gone. Wiped off the face of the Earth like a fart in the wind. Miller says he got the news at 4 a.m. while watching All in the Family on DVD with his wife (d’awwww how cute), when Chad I Ginsburg called him in full panic mode.
“‘Dude, our album’s gone.’ And I was like [nervous laugh] because we had just worked so hard on it, and I thought it was some kind of prank. And he said, ‘No, I’m not kidding.’”
Things escalated fast. Apparently Chad was ready to do time for murder, and Miller had to sprint to 4th Street Recording just to stop him from turning the engineer into a chalk outline.
“I don’t want to say his name, but I want to so bad. I shouldn’t say his name, but I want to so bad… Chad said, ‘I’m going to the studio right now to kill him.’ And I put my clothes on and head over to prevent a murder.”
Instead of telling their label Island Records that everything had gone to hell, the band went full spy movie. They hired a literal data recovery company—the kind the FBI uses—to Frankenstein the album back together from whatever bits and corrupted files they could salvage.
“We ended up getting the album back in pieces. Like a puzzle.”
From there, CKY quietly flew to Sony Studios and basically rebuilt An Answer Can Be Found with spit, duct tape, and pure willpower. They never told Island. Some parts were re-recorded, some were bad takes that had to be used, and Miller now hears nothing but stress when he listens back.
“It was a nightmare. It was bad. It caused one of the gray hairs on my head.”
And just when you think the story can’t get any dumber—guess who called asking to get paid?
“The engineer who erased the album actually called us while we were at Sony Studios – asking if he could get paid for his time. Can you believe that? The balls it takes to call and ask to get paid after erasing a $100,000 record. I can’t even come up with a proper analogy. It’s like if I babysat your kid, smacked them around, got arrested for it, and then called you from jail to ask, ‘Yo, can I get paid for babysitting?’ It just doesn’t make sense.”
Shout out to Pablo Arraya, the unsung hero who helped un-fuck the entire situation. CKY got the album out in the end, but holy shit, what a journey.
