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

Alright, Kent thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

The question of success is all about intention. If your intention is to generate a sustaining income through songwriting that’s one thing. If it’s to attract attention and/or move an audience that’s another. But if your intention is to write something that reveals something deeper about yourself or that illuminates something you care about in ways you can’t say otherwise, that’s a legitimate goal and a measure of success as well. I believe that the third option is the one that is the most satisfying, the most personally powerful and, ironically, the one that can possibly make the first two happen and matter in much bigger ways. I once heard a psycho-socialogist-research type person speak who had been studying to discover what factors, if any, lead to artistic success in this culture. He narrowed them down to two: authenticity and novelty. I would have to add persistance. But talent is way down, if even on, the list. Take the Chili Peppers. Their early performances were arguably terrible. It was just a bunch of wild-ass friends with unlimited energy and no inhibitions. But they were unique and as real as it gets. They were obviously authentic and novel. Their personalities and energy drew audiences, they kept at it relentlessly and “getting good” and making money happened along the way almost as accidental by-products.
I did ok. I made a living for a long time as a songwriter/artist. But I spent far too much time writing for, or singing in, someone else’s voice and not enough finding my own. If I were starting over (and truthfully I always am), I would try to be far less concerned with expectations or “trying to impress”. Insead I’d let myself write and perform more fearlessly. But it comes back to authenticity, you have to be honest about what “fearless” looks like in you. It doesn’t have to mean shocking. Be fearlessly whatever you are. I confess that I tried to often to be what I thought someone else might like. Luckily, along the way, I got good at being something that matters to me.

Kent, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My family has been making records for as long as records have been made. My Great-grandfather, Draper Walters, was a Kentucky fiddler and some of his recordings from the 30’s are in Smithsonian collections of American Music. Every generation after on my father’s side were recording musicians. My dad had a music store when I was growing up and I spent a lot of time there. I played in my first band in sixth grade, played my first professional show that year. I was still playing with one of the guys from that band, Ted Parker, in highschool and he was writing original material. That’s the first time I was exposed to the idea. I moved to Nashville in 1982. I had no taste for country music but Nashville was close and a bit less intimidating than New York or L.A. By the late 80s I’d put a band together that was doing some of the material I was writing. A representative from Warner-Chapell, Johnny Wright, saw us play at a frat gig and signed me to a publishing deal. That band was Jane His Wife. It was a great band, kind of a “Doors meets Pink Floyd and pretends to be David Bowie” kind of thing. We had a serious buzz going for a couple of years, big regional crowds and lots of label interest, but we just didn’t know how to push it over the edge.
A few years after Jane broke up I still had fans on music row and decided to pursue a staff-writer deal. For the next several years I had deals with Sony, Windswept Pacific and RPM. I’m proud of the fact that I had songs recorded in multiple genres; Americana, country, pop, rock, bluegrass and even Euro-dance, by artists from Barbra Streisand to Del McCoury. But that’s also indicative of how “all over the place” I was. Very confusing for publishers. But songs, to me, are like conversational inflections. You raise your voice, you lean in, you let go. One genre works better than another for different messages. So one day I’m a rock artist, the next bossa nova. I don’t see it as dishonest or inauthentic, But it makes it a bit harder to find a professional home.. People, especially business people, feel somehow safer with categorization and pigeon-holes..
During those publishing company years I was co-writing five days a week, sometimes twice a day, almost exclusively for country music artists. It was good for building confidence and craft but I really had no interest in most of what was happening on country radio and I found myself getting further away from the kind of writing that matters to me.
Since then I’m writing much more freely and primariy by and for myself. I still have occasional co-writers and once in a while a song is recorded by other artists but it’s more a natural result of breathing into the process than the goal of it. I’ve got a couple new projects on the streaming services, “The Meteorite” and “Crop Circles” and I’m about to go into the studio to record the next one. I’m also writing a lot of poetry these days. That started as a practice to keep myself writing every day and has become a habit. Lastly, I’ve been making lyric videos. I started teaching myself Adobe After Effects so I could make lyric videos for my “Meteorite” project, recorded just before covid. Since then I’ve been hired by serveral artists to do lyric videos for them. I like the process, very zen, totally absorbing.
All of that is to say, I just try to keep producing. Whether it’s songs, poetry or video. It all bleeds into each other and keeps me growing.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I write from a deep desire to make sense of this experience of living. When I write a lyric or a poem that I consider “good”, it reveals something to me that I couldn’t quite articulate otherwise. And, yes, it’s also a longing to communicate as intimately as possible how I feel and what I think. Sometimes I feel like the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters. He was obsessed for reasons he didn’t understand to create a shape he didn’t recognize. Longing, loss, regret, love, pain…simple language isn’t sufficient to convey the true power of those. Art is the only chance we have to “understand” who we are and what “this” thing we’re all going through is. That’s all I’m trying to do. Perhaps that sounds selfish. But everyone of us has an entirely unique perspective on life. I believe our best chance of living a beautiful one is sharing what we see as honestly and effectively as we can.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think that I alluded to this earlier, but the lesson that keeps presenting itself to me over and over is to trust my own voice. The need to “unlearn” comes, I suppose, from my blue-collar, small town, midwestern background. It has been good for me in most ways but I wasn’t exposed to anyone who was “doing what they loved” for a living. Even now I have an underlying guilt about not “clocking in and clocking out” every day. Also all the long lessons of “not offending” and “being responsible”, though they make civilization more workable, aren’t part of a blueprint for a life dedicated to art. I’m sure that deep urge to please is how I found myself trying to write music that didn’t mean much to me for artists I didn’t particularly like. I was doing my job, clocking in and out. Yet, so many times the evidence was right there; opportunities that were just a “letting go” away. All of that work did allow me to get good at the craft, which served me well, but at the same time it delayed me finding my own voice. Ideally it happens the other way around: trust your voice, learn the craft.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.kentagee.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kent.agee/
• Youtube: kent agee@kentagee101