UCN Interview – Big Kenny: “Music Is Medicine”

14 years ago Liv Carter Comments Off on UCN Interview – Big Kenny: “Music Is Medicine”
Photo via bigkenny.tv

Last month, I sat down with Big Kenny for a very inspiring conversation. When I got to the house, my attention was drawn by the most wonderful welcome sign I have ever seen, suspended above the front door. The house is an extraordinary place and not in a ‘let me show you my wealth’ kind of way, as it becomes clear very quickly that what Kenny considers to be his real wealth is his family. We started by talking about how more and more country artists are taking their music overseas and about his own plans he had this to say:

BK: I can’t wait to go to Europe, either in the fall or next spring. I don’t know when it’s going to happen but one of the things I’ve been working on is a European release with probably more rock. You know, I’m all about expanding music, without prejudice, about busting genre walls down. I want to make an album that specifically for a release there. I want to partner with a label over there that would help us get it out to the people. And I want to go over there and tour. I want to play everywhere I can go, play for all sorts of different cultures and fans.

UCB: ‘The Quiet Times of a Rock and Roll Cowboy’ CD, is overwhelmingly positive, it seems to be its central message. Do you think because that’s the message, it can be taken anywhere?
BK: Absolutely! There’s enough catastrophe going on in life, I don’t want to expand on that. I need music to lift me up and music has always been that great escape that made me find something better to look forward to. I believe that it has a phenomenal power to bring forth positive change. So, yes, I want to expand on that kind of music.

UCB: One song I always single out when talking about ‘Quiet Times’ is ‘Less Than Whole’. It’s become very important to me. I heard that song just when I needed to hear the message in the lyrics. Could you talk about that song?
BK: I’m gonna put that out there, that song is going to be heard around the world; that’s a universal message. At Music Saves Mountains, Dave Matthews came up to me and just grabbed me saying “That was great, that song was great!” And I was standing in church the other week and Amy Grant and Vince Gill came to sit in front of us and she turned around and said “I heard that song ‘Less Than Whole’, that’s great!” It hasn’t been released other than on the album but that’s the real indicator of songs, when people hear them and it just starts travelling on its own.

UCB: Each song on ‘Quiet Times’ has its own strong message. Do you set out to write about those messages or does that happen organically as you write?
BK: It just happen organically. When I write a song it’s very important to me, as I’m crafting it, to have it be as powerful and as positive and as musical and as moving as it can be in every way. But it always comes about organically, like there’s something that hits me. There’s been so much catastrophe. The world’s in a recession, you know. And it’s not necessarily a physical thing, it’s a change of attitude and we gotta flip that around. Music has the great ability to do that. A song like ‘One More Time’ was written a year and half ago and the second verse goes: when all the walls come tumbling down/pick up the stones and build a new house/bring on the hurricanes and the fires/bring on the rains the floods/lift love higher. And bam, the album comes out and there’s an earthquake of greater catastrophe than anything any of us have every witnessed! And one of my best friends is right there in the middle of it. Then the floods hit Nashville! No one expected that. And you know, people always ask me when I go to places like Haiti: “What can I do? I can’t go that far.” And I say “Right now you can find someone in your own community that can just use your help. And if it’s not right now, I promise you it will be soon.”

UCB: I was really impressed with how the whole [Nashville] area banded together. People weren’t asking ‘what’s in it for me?’ but it became about helping everybody else. How did you experience those days when everyone started helping everyone else?
BK: It was exactly that. Everyone started helping best they could. There was a great outpouring of compassion in the area. Everybody who could would go help somewhere. There were people given opportunities to save lives. And when you get put in a situation like that, those are life-changing experiences. I truly believe that Nashville has experienced a life-changing event. Everyone was affected by it. This whole street got flooded. You wouldn’t expect it but everyone here is making repairs. We went out handing out water with the Mayor one day, a real eye-opening event out in Antioch. It was amazing how many mothers would be there with the kids in the car and you’d see stuff shoved everywhere. Everything they had was in their vehicle because they had been completely washed out of their homes.

So many things have made me realize that I don’t really need no more fame or fortune. You know, life’s just… *snaps his fingers*…and you never know when it’s gonna be. So at this point, I want to put something good out there, I wanna throw some energy out into the world. I believe that music can be medicine. That’s why I’ve been traveling with the Big Kenny’s Love Everybody’s Musical Medicine Show. Because music is medicine! There’s nothing like it that can just change your attitude so quickly as going to a concert. And the world needs it now! Everywhere.

The greatest shift in attitude that I’ve noticed in my lifetime has happened in the past 2 years. The world has been in a recession and it’s totally a matter of attitude; I’m convinced. We as the creative force, as songwriters, and artists and musicians, can have such a great effect on that. So I’m constantly encouraging everyone to pick up their guitars and believe you can do it and write your songs and play. It might start out being your friends in your living room but then one day, before you know it, as I experienced, it’s 50,000 people in a stadium. You just have to believe. I believe that songs have the ability to change all of humankind. Songs can not only bring great fun and joy and just the pleasure of listening to music but I believe they have the ability to bring great change. I know that songs that I’ve written have already brought forth great change. That makes me feel good.

UCB: One question I get about my charity work is “Why bother? You’ll never fix everything”. I try to explain that’s not the point but how would you respond to that?
BK: You never know when it’s gonna be you looking up and needing that hand that’s reaching down to pick you up when you’re in your lowest point in life! *pauses* I’ve experienced it first-hand so many times… I know it’s true. 25 cents of salt water in an IV… 25 cents of an antibiotic… There’s 9 million children that die every year in the world before their 5th birthday… But people get involved. I was on the farm in Virginia last week I still have my home there. I built it 20 years ago with my own 2 hands when the construction industry there we
nt bust and I lost everything I had and I needed a roof over my head. It needed some repairs so I got a hold of a contractor there and he was telling me that he was involved with the Fire & Rescue Department up there and I asked him about that. He said: ‘my life changed 15 years ago when I drove up on my father who’d had an accident. He was life-flighted out and ended up not making it. I was lost at that moment.’ And from that point he started helping with the volunteer service there. Everyone has someone they care about. You never know when that person, or you or your child is going to be in a great time of need. And you just hope that everyone is sensitized to the point that they’ll want reach out there and that the world will come running in a great way. I saw the greatest act of that in Haiti and it was again my friend that helped me years ago when I went to Sudan the first time that pulled me there so quickly. And then I end up on a site where he was last known to be but there were people from a dozen countries there. This hotel was like the UN of Haiti with all these people from different countries so the Search & Rescue teams from all these individual countries were showing up there. There were 8 countries represented there on these 5 acres of disaster area. They didn’t necessarily speak the same language but they all spoke the language of the heart. There was no doubt that everyone there had the heart to find someone alive. And if not to at least be able to put the body in the hands of their loved ones so they could say goodbye. The first morning I wake up, there’s a mother looking at me. I was lying in a parking lot and this guy comes up in an orange jumpsuit and this lady behind him is very distressed and in tears. I got up and talked to them and they were trying to ask me if I had a specific tool they could use. He described to me that they had been tunneling all night beneath the rubble and got to a concrete wall. They only had hand tools; they were tunneling through the rubble like moles. What he needed was an electric powered chisel. I asked them who there were trying to get at and this mother started describing her husband and her 4-year-old son. And I have a 4-year-old… So she brings me to this building. I had been focusing on one building and hadn’t even looked around. I didn’t even know what had been there before but it was a 4 story apartment building that was now collapsed to one story and she had been outside when it happened. She was holding her year-and-a-half old daughter as she watched the walls collapse between her and her husband and 4-year-old son. She had no one there to help her at the time. She was from Honduras and was able to fly back to her country, get help and bring them back. They were the Aztec Search & Rescue.

UCB: Is it difficult to keep such disasters in the public consciousness or do you feel the world easily moves on to the next disaster?
BK: No, the world hasn’t moved on to the next thing, it’s just more people get called to duty. So there are people who have a heart for Haiti and will go do that and there are people who have a heart for the Gulf of Mexico right now. I was on the phone with friends from Mississippi and trying to just figure out what we can do. I mean this is as great a catastrophe as a nuclear bomb dropping, in my opinion. It’s affecting people immediately and it will affect them for decades to come and affect the environment in ways that we don’t even know yet. More people have just been called to action. And you never know when that time’s gonna come. But I believe it all stays in someone’s awareness somewhere. Everyone’s affected by different things. But you have to understand that process and know that everything is going to get better. That’s the point I think where music comes in; to keep out attitude and heart strong that we can overcome this, that these days, these tough times will pass, that it always will get better. That is the heart that allows us to be able to deal with these kinds of tough times. I know for me that’s the thing that does it and I don’t think I’m no different than anybody else.

UCB: Are you able to easily follow up on your projects? How is the project in Sudan going?
BK: Since my awareness of it in 2005, my first trip there in 2007, and my last trip in 2009, it went from war to children being bought out of slavery and educated under a tree with nothing but a chalk board to now, there’s 550 girls registered in the school. There are 4 buildings built, teachers are employed and there’s an entire community that has taken the responsibility for the school. By giving them a hand up, it’s given them a bigger heart that they can do it; that all children can be educated. They understand that these girls could become the next great leaders of their country. It’s been a great inspiration for that community. I can’t describe to you the change I’ve seen there. It’s from gang rape, murder and burned alive to education and a little clinic. I saw a little boy there lying in his grandmother’s lap in the 100 degree sun. I was told by the clinic worker that the boy had lost his mother and older brother the week before. They gave him a couple of hours to live. They told me there was nothing else they could do as cholera had hit. I had worked to bring in another plane with nothing but medical supplies and in that were lots of IVs with 5 cents worth of salt water as the salt reactivates the saline when you’ve been dehydrated by something like cholera. And that first day there, seeing that, I said to one of our team’s doctors: “Maybe we can encourage them to try this”. And they did, they put an IV in that little boy that was written off as dead and about a day and a half later after working at the school, I came back to see the group from our team at the clinic. They put solar panels up so they had a light bulb and cleaned the place up. I’m looking at how much the team had done and the improvements they made and I saw that little boy up and walking. 25 cents… I’d hope somebody would do that for my kid…

You know, my father… he’s 80 years old. When I got to Virginia last week to see him he’d cut down 60 acres of hay. It rained on Saturday and then Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, he’d worked 15 hours a day to get that hay down. He didn’t have to do it, but he still feels like he needs to put out as much as he can into the world, you know. He told me ‘You’ve experienced as much in the past year as most people experience in a lifetime’. He had told me at Christmas I had experienced as much in the last 10 years but this time he said I’d experienced as much in a year. So I guess I’m just out here, your friendly time traveling musician. And I didn’t know when I moved down here from Virginia to Music City USA, I didn’t know 15 years ago that any of this kind of stuff would happen. I just had a dream that I could play music and perform on stage and I knew that music had meant a lot to me so it would be something, if I could ever get good enough at it, I could give to other people. I didn’t know it was going to bring all this, but lo and behold… You never know what life’s got in store for you, you just take it as it comes and make the best of it. I’m glad I could be there, I’m glad life pulled me there even if it was just for that one kid. But now I’ve seen hundreds have their live changed.

As the good Dr Frist says in his book ‘The Heart to Serve’, there’s no country in the world that would go to war against a country that’s helped save their children’s lives. So I believe that we as musicians are the greatest messengers of peace. I truly believe with all my heart that we’re all brothers and sisters. You and I are related. It might be very distant but we all started from a small society that’s grown and grown and traveled and we all moved. But if you count back, we’re all related. So I keep coming back to that. There’s no medium that need to come between me and my brothers and sisters spirits, no
matter where they are. We are all one. No doubt in my mind.

UCB: If you could address all the kids in the world at the same time, what would you say?
BK: *pauses* That’s a good one. I’m going to think about that for a bit… *long pause* I would say what we just discussed – that we are all one. That I’m your brother, your cousin, your father, your friend… In some way we’re connected and related. I have nothing but love for you in my heart. If you choose to accept it, that’s fine, either way, if you do or you don’t. But we all are one in the great spirit of life and I hope I get to play music for you and have some fun one day, wherever you are, whatever language you speak. The language of music is common to everyone.

UCB: This was great! Thank you very much.
BK: You’re welcome very much!

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Liv Carter

Liv Carter

Liv is a career coach for creatives, and the people who work with them.
She holds several certificates from Berklee College of Music, and a certificate in Positive Psychology from UC Berkeley.
Her main influences are coffee, cats, and Alexander Hamilton.
Liv Carter

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