Meet Kenny Gray

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kenny Gray. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kenny below.

Kenny, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?

An important part of my rest and recharge in the creative process is to make sure there are days in my week when I’m not being creative, where I’m just living and experiencing life with family and friends. While it’s great for my career to have a week where there’s a show every night, it’s detrimental to my creative energy. Those nights where I’m just at home with my wife and cats, making food and talking, allow me to rest and show up better in the studio and as a person.

But the other half of keeping my creativity alive is making sure I’m learning and experiencing good art. I recently decided to go down the rabbit hole of listening to a musical artist’s entire catalog, which I wanted to know more about. I started with David Bowie, which led me to Talking Heads, Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, B-52’s, and the Beastie Boys. I listened to podcasts and watched documentaries about them and it really filled me with inspirations and new musical color palettes to work with.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

When it comes to comedy, I mostly do characters. It’s kind of like the stuff you see on SNL or Key and Peele. I recently took a one-person sketch show to Edinburgh Fringe, where I played 10 characters over the course of an hour. In that show there is also a bunch of music, which I wrote, performed, and produced. I’m often not sure where I fit in the grand scheme or showbiz as a combo music and comedy guy. Cause as of nowI don’t really write comedy music the same way Bo Burnham or Cat Cohen might (both of whom I’m a big fan). But I suppose what makes me unique is that I leverage my background as a musician for comedy. I think it lends an extra dimension to my character work / shows.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Two years ago, I started taking clown classes, which have helped me as a performer. Much of the work centers around accepting and working with failure, which is every performer’s nightmare (to bomb). As someone who is very introverted, I find the classes to often feel like creative exposure therapy. But it’s great because learning how to navigate and work with that inevitable flop has given me a newfound resilience.

After college, I also learned how to record/produce music independently, which has been huge. Growing up, I learned how to write music and play instruments, but only knew the basics of recording. Writing a song to me feels like a black-and-white sketch, and then producing/recording it is coloring it in. While it’s great to play live, we live in an era where most people consume music digitally, so being able to produce it competently on a laptop is super helpful.

And lastly, a quality I’ve found helpful is my willingness to release stuff. I strive to put out a lot of stuff, which is good for quantity, but it’s not always the best quality. But I’d rather release too much than not enough. Cause I’ve had periods of my life where I’m scared to release stuff, worried about what people will think, but often people are just impressed you did anything at all – so I just keep at it.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

I really enjoyed Rick Rubin’s book “The Creative” act. One of my favorite nuggets is the idea of “plating seeds”. As an artist, you just wake up and make little things, not concerned with what they will become. And if you keep making stuff, eventually, a few of them will blossom into something beautiful. But you only get there by planting many seeds and developing the practice of learning how to water and harvest (to complete the metaphor).

For example, I had a few musical demos with no lyrics/vocals that I made a few months back and wasn’t sure what they would become. This week, I wanted to make a musical comedy video thing and was like “oh right, don’t I have some demos?”. So I just opened up the tracks and added the comedy vocal idea on top of it, and it came together super fast. Past me had helped future me without even knowing how.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Will Gianetta
https://www.instagram.com/wgianetta

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