Rio Rico resident Bill Poulsen has released “The Ballad of Elizabeth Gutfahr,” a catchy mid-tempo country pop song recounting the allegations against the former Santa Cruz County Treasurer involving the disappearance of $39.4 million in County funds under her watch.
Posted on Friday, September 13 on YouTube, the video for “The Ballad of Elizabeth Gutfahr” has already amassed over 4,300 views—a big number for an unsigned, unknown artist—and is being shared widely across Facebook groups devoted to local issues.
The song is clearly striking a chord locally, which is what Poulsen was hoping for.
“I wrote this song to so that we as citizens might pay more attention to our local government and hold them accountable to the people of our community,” Poulsen explained in the description for the video.
“The Ballad of Elizabeth Gutfahr” is just one of many music videos that the prolific Poulsen has posted over the last two months on his “Rio Rico Radio” YouTube channel.
And like his odes to a favorite Sonoita winery (“Dos Cabezas“), the region’s monsoon season (“Monsoon Magic“) and his own rock hounding fanaticism (“Rock Hound Blues“), Paulsen constructed “The Ballad of Elizabeth Gutfahr” with the help of Remusic, an AI-powered “music generator.”
“I’ve been writing poems and other things over the years,” Poulsen said. “I took some of my old stuff and some new things and put them to music, I hate to admit, using the music generator for the voices and instrumentals. It’s kind of scary how real the voices are.”
And the videos?
“The videos I create manually using photos and video clips,” he said. “I only use AI to generate the melodies and voice. Can’t let AI take over everything!”