Your career of playing music is kind of more recent to the public eye.
Well, yeah, I was described as going through the looking glass, 'cause for many years, even though I did music as a hobby — I wrote songs and played guitar for my own amusement and for friends — I was a music journalist. I wrote for Sauce for a couple years, a local magazine. I wrote for Playback: stl for many years. I did a little bit for the River Front Times and other publications as well, so that's kind of what I was doing besides my regular proofreading job at an ad agency, but that was the bread and butter.
Yeah, you always have to have something steady.
Yeah, 'cause very few people make a living from writing about music, you know. [laughs]
Dave Marsh maybe...
Yeah, exactly. I was doing that for a long time and I had dreamed about making a record some day. I always felt like I had enough good songs to make a record but had no delusions about actually getting into it seriously until late 2008. I did a Neil Young tribute show and people started telling me I sounded like Neil Young; the guy that owned this little coffee shop was really impressed with this little guest slot I did there, so he asked me if I wanted to do my own show and I said sure. I talked a couple of friends into joining the deal with me, and I just started doing that very casually. But meanwhile I'd written this song called "Up in the Air ." Most of my songs tended to be about uncertainty or not knowing what the heck I was doing with my life or longing for love — all the grandiose things. So I thought it was a pretty decent song, but I wouldn't have done anything with it if a movie hadn't come along called Up in the Air. It was an astonishing bit of serendipity. And still, nothing would have happened if Jason Reitman hadn't come to St. Louis. If he had been shooting it in L.A. or something, and I sent him a tape or CD through the mail, it never would have gotten to him. I know that.
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You gave him a cassette tape, right?
I gave him a cassette tape. I had recorded most of my songs on cassette. I was a lo-fi kind of guy. I didn't have the money to buy digital equipment at that point.
So were you using just a stereo cassette deck to record things to or a 4-track?
It was a little Realistic recorder — an old RadioShack thing. The night before his lecture, here in St. Louis, I just put a couple of takes of the song on there and I even described why I thought it might be appropriate for the movie.
You knew the movie was called Up in the Air but you'd already written the song called "Up in the Air?" That's a weird coincidence.
Yeah, right. And I wasn't sure even what the theme was of the movie. I knew that George Clooney was in it. I thought George Clooney played a pilot who was trying to find the meaning of life or something. So, I just barged up to him — first, I asked if it was okay to give him the song and there was some laughter in the audience cause it was a Q&A. So I put my hand up, but I'll never forget what he said. I said, "Would you be kind enough to listen to this song?" And there was a pause and he said, "Sure." He said, "The more different the way I get the music, the better." I thought that was kind of cool.
Not a music supervisor shoving things under his nose.
Yeah, right. So then he probably didn't think I was going to follow through, but I chased him down after his lecture and handed him this package. He actually felt it and said, "Oh, this is a cassette. I don't even have a cassette recorder. I don't know where I'm going to listen to it." I thought I was doomed; I thought nothing's going to happen with this. But I found out that either that day or the next day he actually went over to a friend's car with a car stereo and played it and liked it. That was just the most wild thing that could have happened to me.
And they used your original cassette version for the movie, right?
They used the same thing I recorded on that little recorder. They even used my voice introduction saying, "Hi, Jason. My name is Kevin and this is a song about uncertainty and trying to find my way." That's in the credits. [laughs]
So that was your demo setup, just catch it on a cassette recorder?
Yeah, I had pretty much been recording everything on cassette; I still have a bunch of cassettes that I've recorded little melodies and fragments on. I just call them Kevin's Tidbits, you know; so whenever I get a melodic idea which I do sometimes in the middle of the night, I just turn on the cassette and sing into it or play some chords and then later on I develop the song out of it.
Have you done anything or bought anything now? You have several CDs out now.
Yeah, I've been able to work with a few engineers. I've reinvested a lot of my Up in the Air money into trying to keep recording stuff, 'cause I do want to get somewhere with this. My notion is that if I just keep putting a lot of effort into recording songs, writing songs — I have another song coming out in a movie next year which is not going to be quite on the level of Up in the Air, but it has been accepted. It's a song called "Ballad of the American Farmer" and it's another acoustic kind of narrative, but in this case it's about the farming crisis and it's for a documentary called In the Interest of National Security. I have two other directors that I've been in loose communication with. I'm just trying to make the connections and see where it goes. It's very cool that I tapped into this angst that I guess a lot of people were feeling — after Up in the Air I got emails from around the world — I'm talking countries like India and Iran and South Africa. People would write to me and say, "You're speaking for me. This is how I felt about my life and my job situation." I could never have imagined that in a million years.
