Sonny Keyes
When I was four, I remember getting a piece of music stuck in my head, fully arranged for brass ensemble, which I was unable to dislodge. After a while it dawned on me that the music didn't come from any of the records my parents played, and that I must have made it up myself. I worked long and hard to learn how to play it on the piano, and by the time I was six I could play it and had named it "The Jolly Street Band."
After that, I played piano at every opportunity through my childhood and adolescence, discovering fundamental laws of music that I was convinced I had invented. When I took music in university, I learned the proper names for all these musical relationships and realized that they (and several others I hadn't thought of) had been discovered hundreds of years before I was born. Oh well.
At some point during my adolescence, I became aware that playing piano resulted in a cluster of girls listening, so I made every effort to pursue music as a career, and ended up co-founding a band called Whistleking that eventually became The Kings.
The early days of The Kings are well represented by the CD "Whistleking - The Lost Tapes of a Seventies Bar Band" available here and anyone familiar with the band will hear why the songs I wrote didn't suit the power-pop direction we ended up following. I recorded several of my songs in the 80s as publishing demos, but when I listen to them now they sound like period pieces, with syndrums and synthesizers, and my voice, which I'm not crazy about.
After I became a father, regular income seemed like it should be a priority, so when the opportunity to design sound effects for commercials came up, I went for it. That led to a career, first as a sound designer, then as a composer and producer of television and radio commercials which I am still involved in today. As it turns out, all that experience in advertising has been valuable to my songwriting, and it occurred to me recently that I should use my production skills to record (or in some cases rerecord) all the songs I have written, but to the standards I have now learned to attain. I solved the vocal problem by using other, better vocalists to sing them. As I finish these recordings, I'll keep adding them.
A word about the videos: I do not have a budget for video, but I'm always a little disappointed when I play a song on YouTube and the visual is just a title card with the name of the song and artist on it. I resolved to put some more elaborate kind of visual on each song, and further resolved not to spend any money on that, so I have searched diligently for any kind of free visual footage I can get. That's why my videos look like that. The exception is "Party On The Enterprise" which seemed to demand a little budget!
