The anticipation at the ACM Performance Lab last Thursday before Dirty Loops took was stage was as thick as the reverb on an 80s snare drum. Musicians and music lovers who had discovered the Swedish fusion band in the last two years were meeting up and swapping stories of how they first heard the music of Dirty Loops.

I strolled through the crowd snapping photos, and from every corner of the room I could hear statements like "Who first introduced you to Dirty Loops?...", "I heard it from Brad, then I Facebooked everyone!"..."Have you heard their Gaga cover yet?"

One of my saxophonist friends, Brian Mitchell Brody, came up to me and said, "You know, I first found out about this band from your Facebook post in 2012--they had a cover of Justin Bieber's "Baby" on YouTube and thought 'yeah, whatever'...then I clicked it...and I was blown away!"