Logan Kustka

Logan Lynn Kustka comes from rural Crockett County, Texas and is a gymnast and country music artist. She learned both disciplines in her childhood and went on to become a low-level professional gymnast. But there are limited opportunities in gymnastics outside of the Olympics or colleges, especially in the middle of nowhere in Texas. So she needs to supplement her income with music. When Logan is not doing gymnastics, she is writing and recording songs, and vice versa.

With no hospitals for miles around, she was born on her family’s vineyard - located on the segment of Texas state highway 137 between TX-163 and US-190 northwest of Ozona - on an April morning in 2004. There wasn’t much for her to do in her formative years. The small town of Ozona didn’t have that much to offer for her. It was over 200 miles to San Antonio and even further to El Paso. San Angelo, 80 miles away, was the closest town large enough to have a mall and regional airline service to other cities. Crockett County sits on the Pecos River in the somewhat western part of Texas. Interstate 10 passes through the county, which is where the deserts of the American Southwest start to transition into the forests of Texas Hill Country.

Logan’s father, Ernest Kustka III, has no fear of heights. He was and still is a cell phone tower worker with winemaking as a family tradition, hobby, and side hustle. His work sends him all over the central and western parts of Texas. But more importantly, Logan inherited his fearlessness of heights. Another thing was that her dad had learned to play the guitar as a teen sometime around 1988, while he survived and was recovering from a rattlesnake bite with no medical attention. 

Her mother Rachel is a former St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital staff member and is the same age as her father. In 1994, she was in Texas heading west on I-10 on her way to El Paso as part of a fundraiser. She was on a trip to California and had already finished events in New Orleans, Houston, and San Antonio. She stopped in the town of Sonora, 33 miles east of Ozona, to get gas. This was when Logan’s father met her while he was making a wine delivery to a bar in Kerrville. It was a case of love at first sight. He could not get enough of her blonde hair and green eyes and their personalities just clicked together. After this, Rachel began dating him via mail and phone, and eventually quit her job and moved to Ozona to marry him in 1997.

Logan is the second of Ernest and Rachel’s three children and their only daughter. Her older brother, Ernest IV, is 6 years older than her. The youngest is Owen, 4 years younger than Logan.

When Logan was 3, her parents noticed she favored the country music they always listened to. Her dad happened to have a guitar and let Logan play with it. When she learned the alphabet, the very first thing she used the alphabet for was to learn the order of the guitar strings. By age 6, she was able to play Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man.

At the age of 8, Logan began training in ballet, and then gymnastics. There were very few opportunities for her to learn or practice gymnastics in this part of Texas. So to further her ventures, she moved to San Angelo at age 12, where her aunt lived. Further fueling Logan’s decision to move was a bullying incident at her school that made headlines across several towns. A 10-year-old Amish student named Esther was heavily bullied during her first few days there for not having a phone or playing video games. The victim had a pen ink cartridge thrown at her, which splattered onto and ruined her dress. The three students bullying Esther then insulted her family for being unable to afford a new dress and it escalated to her being beaten up. She was given an uppercut, which damaged her jaw so badly that she needed to be airlifted to Dallas for facial reconstruction surgery. The mounting medical bills nearly forced Esther’s parents to file for bankruptcy. One of the bullies went unpunished due to his uncle being on the school board.

In any case, San Angelo had much more to offer for Logan, such as a mall and faster internet service. Her aunt lived on the southwest side of town, where she had an extra, albeit tiny, room for Logan to move into. There were some gymnastics academies in this city, one of which was Camp Nikki, headed by Nicole Welch, a former Baylor gymnast. Enrolling in the camp, she rose through the ranks to become a serious candidate for the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team by adulthood.

When Logan was 16, she began performing her music to the public. In 2021, a video of her singing “Free Bird” to other students of Camp Nikki went viral. This began to turn her favorite activities into a viable dual career as a gymnast and country musician. Shortly after her 18th birthday, Logan got an opportunity to perform before some low security level inmates at the Torres Unit, a Texas state prison in Hondo. The music was recorded by an inmate who was taking an audio engineering course while incarcerated. The concert included “Ring of Fire”, “Can’t Hardly Stand It”, and a country-fied version of “It’s Just A Burning Memory”. It ended with “Folsom Prison Blues” as the finale.

With permission in writing from both Logan and the inmate who recorded her prison concert, the prison staff sent the recording to Hornstab Records, a country music label in Fort Worth. They offered her a record deal within the week, when she got it via email. She printed out and filled out the form and mailed it back to Hornstab. She was then invited to their recording studio in Fort Worth.

Taking a regional flight from San Angelo to Love Field in Dallas, she then got an Uber to take her to the studio over in Fort Worth. Once there, Logan recorded 11 more covers. On August 1, 2022, her debut record, Live From Torres, was released. Within its first month, it sold about 5,000 copies. While Logan got around $900 a month in royalties, the inmate who recorded her initially got a paltry extra $10 a month to spend at the prison commissary. Since her first record, Logan has released several more singles, but has yet to release any more LPs. Her best selling single is her cover of “Blind the Wind”, at 32,000 copies.

On Halloween night 2023, Logan performed outside her home state for the first time at an alien-themed concert in Roswell, New Mexico. Her second concert outside Texas was held in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on June 8, 2024. It was at the Revolution Raceway RC racing arena, better known as the location of the original backrooms photo. Fittingly, Logan played guitar covers of “647” by Instupendo and “It’s Just A Burning Memory” in the parking lot.

Logan’s guitar of choice is a red Wacker Model 87. This is a six-string electric guitar with several effect switches built into the stock, so she doesn’t need to use many common effects pedals separately. The effect switches on the Model 87 are designed to be turned on and off quickly, with off being the left position and single click to the middle position turning them on. To turn them off, Logan pushes the switches further to the right, and they then retract to the off position. It has many pairs of jacks that allow more effects to be connected in between the guitar’s built in effects. The main jack is red and its output has passed through all of the guitar’s built in effects plus any effects that were connected within the series.

The built-in effect switches alone aren’t always enough for Logan. She may also use a few conventional effect pedals in her music. Her favorite is Percy’s Faux Banjo pedal, which increases the pitch and reduces the lengths of electric guitar signals to produce a more banjo-like sound. She also has a Frutiger Aero pedal from Percy. This converts guitar signals into soft electronic notes like those of Y2K or Frutiger Aero music. Her amplifier is a K&R 848T that was made in 1999 and weighs 32 pounds.  Besides country and rock music, she also has a soft spot for Y2K jungle drum and bass music.

Logan has good knowledge of how electric guitars work. She knows how to replace broken strings and whammy bars, but isn’t as great at the pickups, knobs, and other electronic parts of guitars. Someday, she would even like to build an entire guitar herself. Logan has tried playing other instruments as well. Although she doesn’t own a bass guitar or the lower-frequency amplifier they require, she has practiced the bass in music stores and taken lessons. She also knows a few piano chords.

Her other guitar is a Talbot Sway. This was made by the Canadian guitar workshop Talbot. It has an oak body and fir neck and bronze strings. This guitar has a manufacturing flaw where the pickup selector gets tighter the further it moves to the right, so Logan rarely uses it in public. Her most memorable performance using her Talbot was when she played “Eye of the Tiger” and “If You’re Gonna Play In Texas” to the Arkansas Razorbacks gymnastics team when they were visiting Dallas.

While Logan’s gymnastics career is smaller than her music career, she is still definitely a pro gymnast. For years, she has been under heavy consideration for the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team. She has won two gold medals for Camp Nikki and numerous lesser medals. In one event, she pulled off a Yurchenko vault in 2.28 seconds. She also defeated 24-year-old Tessa Redd one-on-one, who had defeated 20 other gymnasts and the notches on her leotard numbered one and 19 more. The swiftness of Logan is still talked about today. 

Logan is considering someday trying the Produnova, a vaulting move also called the vault of death because of the high risk of breaking a gymnast’s neck. She wants to either do it before she turns 27 or wait until she turns 28 years old. This is because if she actually dies trying this dangerous maneuver, she will at least avoid becoming part of the “27 Club” of musicians that died at that age, which includes legends such as Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. But if she does the Produnova successfully, she will be the sixth person in history and the first American to do it.

Logan has slightly wavy ash blonde hair that turns more golden toward the front and mud-colored eyes. There is a mole to the left of her upper lip. Her signature concert outfit is a thin, skimpy white T-shirt with a tie in the middle and jean shorts. Worn on her jeans is a black belt with a round gold buckle engraved with her name. She does her nails a coral color. Her debut studio album has a picture of her with this outfit with some prison bars in the background since the album was recorded in a prison.

In gymnastics events, Logan ties up her hair. She wears a leotard with a maroon front, outer sleeves, and upper back; thick white stripes on the sides and inner sleeves; and a purple lower back. These colors represent her family’s heritage as winemakers. Her leotard is studded with mostly fake crystals in the shape of a star with a Texas shape behind it on the chest, and gradient patterns on the upper chest and ends of the sleeves. There is only a single real diamond on the entire leotard, an ovular one just above Logan’s navel. She owns several other leotards besides this one. She usually puts purple tape on her feet to protect them from injury. 

Logan’s ancestors were originally from Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. They have been involved in winemaking since the 1700s. In the 1920s, Logan’s great grandfather Ernst Kuśtka immigrated to America with his parents as a 15 year old. As they passed through Ellis Island, immigration authorities anglicized his name as Ernest Kustka. Since then, his son, grandson, and great grandson have had their names spelled as such. They initially stayed in New Jersey and had a small backyard vineyard there. But the family moved to Texas early in World War II, out of fear of an Axis invasion of the US and also to have more land to grow their grapes. They bought a tract of land northwest of Ozona, Crockett County in 1942.

This was where Logan was born at home and lived until moving in with her aunt in San Angelo. Today, she splits her time between both places. Her brother Ernest moved to Houston to work as a sommelier there, be near the gulf, and make friends with rich people; while her other brother Owen still lives at the Kustka vineyard. Despite being way underage for drinking, Owen helps his father with some of the wine production process. They describe their products as “Texas desert wine from imported Tuscan and Champagne grapes” and their motto is “tradition unto infinity”.

There are at least two other branches of the Kustka family who have also kept the family tradition of winemaking as a hobby or career. In the 1950s, one of Logan’s great aunts married into a family in Carson City, Nevada and influenced her new husband to build his own wine press and make their own wine. Another relative, Logan’s uncle Gordon, also has his own vineyard in Tennessee.

Picard is the Kustka family’s dog. He is a Cardigan Welsh corgi who was given to them as a puppy by a family friend. Ironically and somewhat dangerously, he lives at a vineyard and grapes are super toxic to dogs.

Logan’s PC is a Dell Latitude 3540 laptop covered in stickers. She plays Roblox and Stardew Valley on this machine, though she is only kind of into gaming and completely disgusted by modern gaming practices such as heavy monetization and games being online-only and getting shut down. Logan is a serious software pirate. She has several pirated movies and PDFs on her PC. For some reason, she also has a cracked version of Toon Boom Harmony, even though she cannot draw, let alone animate, to save her life. Her phone is a Motorola Moto G54.

When it comes to vehicles, Logan prefers pickup trucks over passenger cars, which she calls “pathetic” and “useless”. She owns a ruby red 2014 Ford F-350 4x4 dually crew cab that she bought used for $26,000. It has Ford’s renowned 6.7 L Power Stroke Turbodiesel V8 engine and is a class 3 truck. She has also added different mods and accessories to her truck. There are custom running boards with storage and on the front is a blue ice chest. In the bed is a roll bar with lights. She has a stash of contraceptives in the fusebox under the hood. Her Texas license plate is a Texas Music specialty plate that says “LOGAN K”. She has a minor habit of speeding but is otherwise an ordinary driver.

Her dad also has a Chevrolet Express delivery van for the family winery. But on rare occasions when it’s in the shop or already out on another delivery, he may call on Logan to make a delivery with her Ford. For this, she has a truck shell with her family winery’s logo. The tapered front of the camper allows it to coexist with the roll bar in her truck’s bed. Owen wants a Miata when he gets to driving age.