kenmdeck

I started writing songs about twenty five years ago, at least that’s when I started ‘saving’ them. Divorced and living at the time in a shell of an apartment in Manhattan, Kansas with little else to do in the evenings but go jogging, I had a lot of time on my hands. I had an old acoustic guitar given to me by my oldest sister Barbara (we were the original Barbie and Ken) years earlier, a Gibson J50 I believe it is. I had no idea how to play it, but inside the case was a basic chord chart. Learning about eight or so chords, I began strumming away. I never really learned how to play, and still can’t, but I started pulling song lyrics out of that thing, somehow they would just form in my head. Dozens of them, and some I thought were pretty good. I remarried and ended up going from two kids to four kids. The songs and any aspirations I had of doing anything with them were shelved. There were a lot of mouths to feed and it would take two jobs and every minute of every day to raise them. After what seemed like four hundred and seventy five years at the time, now seemingly no more than a blink of an eye, all my kids were gone. The Beatles (Paul McCartney) wrote a song called ‘A Day in a Life’. I wonder, now that he is older, if he would name it ‘A Life in a Day’. Somehow, my wonderful wife and I did it, we survived.
Once again I found myself with time on my hands, though I still work two jobs. About a year ago I pulled out the old guitar, put some new strings on it, and I started trying to play and writing songs again. Now that the kids were gone, it seemed I was able to be influenced by life again, and this time the creativity seemed to be accelerated. I couldn’t write enough, I would walk around with a piece of paper and pencil so I could jot down a line, a thought, many times an entire song would just pop out. I would keep piles of ‘songs’ in my desk at work or at home in the little area on a table in the living room my wife said she wouldn’t touch. Sometimes the songs were complete as originally written, sometimes two or three would be combined into one song, and some are going no where ever. Influences were everywhere, one I wrote watching a John Wayne war movie. How you get a love song out of that I’ll never know, it just came out. All my songs seem to be either love or relationship songs. Many times just something I would hear someone say or out of the blue while walking or biking, something would trigger an emotion, and that emotion would create words. I wrote a pretty song about one of my daughters and the three grandkids she has given me while I was walking around the food aisles at Wal-Mart.
I found out I could have ‘demo’ CDs made, and I sent one of the lyric sheets and a couple of ideas about what I thought in to a company in Nashville to see what might happen. The song was accepted, produced and I was hooked. I found other producers and had other demo CDs made. After I had a few demos in hand, I started mailing to music publishers. One found its way to a company in Los Angeles. The owner saw something in it and he contacted me. We talked for some time about it and the music industry in general. I was getting some very good advice from a very high level. He gave me the name and number of his producer, and said to give him a call. All this was way over my head at the time, but these two guys seemed to genuinely care not only about the song, but about me, too. The process took several months, from the original submission until the final product, and the producer and I would talk every couple of weeks. During one of the early conversations we started talking about kids and grand-kids and wives and how we got started in music, just some good old fashioned visiting. He was saying how his wife and daughters were very talented, and told me about some of their songs. I wondered to myself whether their music was country or rock or gospel or just what. Somewhere in this thought process I subconsciously asked them “You must be very country, right?”, and the response was “Not that country.” This is where the “I Ain’t That Country” concept was born, and like so many of the songs that seemed to just pop out, out popped the song, and then this book idea, and hopefully a movie script which I have started writing. I have been lucky enough so far to ‘sign’ four of my songs and can’t wait to watch what might happen with them.
A very talented and gifted music producer in New York keeps telling me ‘You only ride this rocket once’, and he is so right. I try to stay healthy, exercise, treat people right, and constantly try and learn new things, such as the music, publishing, and movie industries. The people I have dealt with have all been truly amazing. These are terribly tough businesses, but ever you crack open a door, the rewards are many and come in many different forms. Lesson 101 in all these businesses is that you cannot possibly get anywhere by yourself. It takes help from every level, levels that you never knew existed. I now truly understand why award winners on the red carpet shows make lists of people to thank. I want to use some of my allotted words right now to say ‘Thank You” to all the people who have helped, guided, inspired, listened, raised, put up with, motivated and affected me on the amazing rocket ride. It is a very fine line between the people who seem to make it and the ones who have the potential. The talent I have witnessed or been fortunate enough to be part of over the last many months is outstanding, indescribable actually. I keep pinching myself, how can someone (me) who doesn’t even sound good in the shower, someone who can’t understand even the basics of music theory, be associated in any way with some of the names that have put their eyes on some of my chicken scratch?
I have four kids, and this book ‘stars’ one of them. I plan to write a story ‘starring’ the other three down the road. One story is bubbling around in my head now. All I know right now is that it will feature Amy, a corporate insurance fraud investigator working on a multi-billion dollar scam.
If you are reading this right now, then I thank you, too, for being on the ride. I appreciate you spending some time with me.
Write on/Rock on!