Sometimes, you hear the right record at the right time, and your life changes immediately — and in ways you might never foresee.

He was an Iowa kid, a small-town boy. By the late 1990s, hip-hop had already become the rebellion music of choice for teenagers all over America, regardless of race or background, and for Zach Wolfe, the soundtrack of his youth was the New York hip-hop coming from artists like Jay-Z and Nas.

In 2001, Wolfe found himself back in Denver, where he’d gone to art school, after a brief and unsuccessful sojourn to Los Angeles.

“I went through a bad breakup,” he says. “It was kind of a first-love situation.”

A friend, hoping him to cheer him up, gave him a copy of “Southernplayalisticadillacmusik,” Outkast’s first album from 1994. He’d never heard it. He’d stayed loyal to the hard New York sound. He hadn’t opened his ears to the Southern thing.

“I felt like I’d never heard anything like that,” he says. “It just changed my life.”

Soon after, he arrived home to find a U-Haul parked in front of the place he shared with two roommates, both of whom were chefs. Both had found jobs in Atlanta. They asked him if he wanted to move there with them. To make the offer clear, one said, “If you want to, you need to put your stuff in this truck now.”

He packed his stuff and put it in the truck.

“I wanted to meet Outkast,” he says.