Kray Van Kirk to Perform at Crazy Crow Productions

Hi Everyone,

There will be a great concert at Crazy Crow House Concerts at the Seldovia Rowing Club on the Old Boardwalk this weekend by Juneau artist, Kray Van Kirk. I have enjoyed Kray’s music on several occasions on Anchorage and Juneau and am very excited to host him here in Seldovia. You can read more about him and listen to some samples of his music at www.crazycrowproductions.wordpress.com .

All are invited and please feel free to bring a friend.  Please give me a heads up by phone or email at 234-7614 orcatdoggle@gmail.com. to make your reservation or to ask for more information. 

This will be the last concert of the summer season, but there are some great surprises planned for the Fall at Crazy Crow. 

See you at the concert!

Susan

Here is how Kray describes his background.

My father was a rather taciturn professor of Fisheries at Humboldt State University in Northern California, and my mother was working on her Master’s degree in Biology when she delivered my older brother instead of her thesis. Growing up was mostly outside. Arguments at the dinner table were usually resolved by appeals to the dictionary, one of my father’s textbooks, or a field guide to some North American phylum. Going for a walk, my mother might exclaim not ‘Oh, look, there’s a toad!’, but instead ‘Oh, look, some species of Bufo!’.

But my mother was also a concert pianist, and my father’s secret wish was to be a writer of short stories. In grade school I wanted to be an artist, and was encouraged by my parents to fill dozens of sketchpads with dinosaurs, birds, and mammals. My brother played piano and trombone, and I picked up the guitar (rejecting the ukulele) at eight to play along with records of Pete Seeger, Gordon Lightfoot, and James Taylor.

Our town got its first bus system when I was 10, and I recall staggering off the bus from the city library with all thirteen of L. Frank Baum’s Oz sequels piled up under my chin. When I realized that my father’s position with the University allowed me to check books out of the library there I took up permanent residence in the stacks with Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, and dozens of others, and the record player at home began to spin Planxty, the Chieftains, and Steeleye Span.

Inspired by seeing Chris Proctor play, I began playing coffee house shows in college, and busking on the streets of Munich, Germany during a year abroad. In 1989 I dropped out of graduate school in Berkeley to tour and play music full time, living out of my van for a number of years. It took me a very long time to learn what many writers and performers seem to know instinctively – to love and protect your Muse at all costs, to throw your vulnerability at audiences like a gift, and to make invaluable those very things that you are most hesitant to reveal to anyone else for fear of ridicule or lack of commercial success. Being a songwriter is like being a little bit naked at a formal gathering: you hope that nobody will notice, or if they do, that they will somehow approve the sudden appearance of such raw earthiness in their cultured midst.

So, whenever someone asks me what kind of music I play, I could choose to give the standard and somewhat tired answer ‘Oh, it’s acoustic singer-songwriter stuff… sort of like James Taylor or Dougie MacLean…’, which really doesn’t say much at all. A better answer might be to jump on top of a table in a crowded coffee shop and shout ‘The wind is changing! Look sharp! Get out the map – it’s time to go! We ride across a thousand pages and sail beyond the sunset, to seek, to find, to strive, and not to yield!’. Some won’t understand it, and that’s perfectly fine. But those who do will wipe the tears from their eyes, smile knowingly, and drain their cups, toasting their own wild lands and wilder passions.

I’m a single parent these days, meaning that I can’t tour full time. I ended up with a Ph.D. in fisheries population dynamics; my day job is trying to figure out how many fish are where, what they are doing, and why.

For a number of reasons, I no longer record CDs, and I don’t sell my songs – everything is free for the taking on my website. People can listen, invite the songs into their own homes, see if they’d like to stay, and share them with whomever they want. We generally associate cost with value – more expensive things must be better and have more value, and things that are free must be of no value at all. I beg to differ. Of all the things we value in the world, the most valuable thing by definition must be free, and that is love. I love the songs that visit me and I love the people who listen to them and come to hear me. It’s a grand parade – come along and see what it’s all about.