top of page

Calculated Design, Impatient Master: Randy Keith Makes Sharing A Bespoke Art Form

June 28, 2021 Dana Miller

It was the indomitable German Romantic composer Robert Schumann who first taught us that “The musician’s art is to send light into the depths of men’s hearts.”As a society, we have spiraled a long way down the careless caldera since the era of a collective enlightenment like Schumann’s, and we now mostly inhabit a cultural cladogram where everything from music to morals to mushrooms are made either deadly boring or dead wrong.

​

Democratizing celebrity through ego engines like the internet has done much more than rob the world of every potential icono-wonderful egomaniac like John DeLorean or Frank Sinatra in future sight. It also simultaneously drowns out the quiet storms of equally artistic and inspirational voices that won’t spruik for the spotlight like our dear DMC-12 designers and Ole Blue Eyes. A culture of Big Smoke oversharing only means that most of what is actually worth sharing either never gets said or never gets heard in the right places, least of all when it comes from the small smoke places where truth and authenticity never fail to bide and hide.

​

If you are in need of a belay ledge built on insuppressible numinosity and Homeric insights to grip amid this endless vista of hyper-aestheticized pop culture crags, please meet multi-instrumentalist and truth seeker extraordinaire, Randy Keith. Self-describing as a “modern wandering minstrel of sorts,” he is also a 100-carat composer with a neo-surrealist touch and an instrument designer with a story that naturally inveighs against any excuse you are currently making for not living your dreams.

​

Twice critically bedridden with debilitating medical issues and long snagged by the harder forces of life, he has let nothing restrain him from his passionate pursuits of both music and personal growth. It was my outstanding privilege to lingo-lark with Randy recently on matters both divine and deeply challenging in his noteworthy life. Read on if you love music, think about thoughtful creation, are concerned about compassionate living, have an interest in spinal conditions and neurology, or simply need something a bit more intellectually solid than VSCO girls to keep your mind from fully unraveling.

DM: Thanks so much for doing this, Randy! I know our readers are going to get so much out of all that you have to share. Let’s start by having you walk us through a little bit of background about your musical journey. How did you first get into music and where did that passion begin?

​

RK: Sure! Well, I think it’s important to start by saying that I come from a broken home, so I spent a lot of time with my mother. My brother went to live with my father and my sister was in the same house but I hardly ever remember seeing her–she was kind of there but not there and it almost felt like she was visiting when she was home. We didn’t have a whole lot of family relationships going on, but my mother and I would go to Lytle Creek near where we lived in Fontana, California. Those were probably the most impressionable times that I had. There wasn’t really that much experience with music being played in the home.

​

At school is where I got most of my exposure to music. I remember listening to James Brown, of course the Jackson Five, The Beatles. That music for me was fun! Certain songs–the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue,” I remember liking that. There was a song put out by Jim Stafford called “Spiders and Snakes”…I remember this one lyric in the song where he pulled out a frog and shook it at his girlfriend and as a kid I always liked that for some reason! [laughter] So, I had exposure via the radio, friends, and school to what you might call pop music, like The Archies “Sugar, Sugar” and all that. As a kid, I never thought of being a musician.

​

However, during elementary school, this music school came in for just one day to teach violin. I remember holding the violin and thinking “I’m really sounding good”–and you know the violin doesn’t sound good most of the time without years of practice–but I really was making it sound okay and I was so excited by that and I just fell in love with this instrument. That was really the time for me to get into music if I was going to, and the next day I was rushing in like “where are the violins?” but they didn’t show up the next day and that was the end of that! It was so crushing and disappointing. I had this inner ear condition too and I was sick a lot as a kid. It also affected how my brain processed pitch. I tried to get into choir at school and I just really sucked at it, but I knew I could feel it–because I had the natural ability to do it, just not the physical ability due to my condition.

​

There was an old Gretsch Dreadnought guitar in my garage, but the thing was as big as I was at the time. I remember standing in the living room staring into the garage and my mother was playing classical music on the console. I was listening to this symphonic piece and I just started crying. And I remember thinking to myself: “All of the other music I listen to, that’s play music. This is the real thing.” It was so powerfully impactive. But it wasn’t until my late teens that I found one of those Thrifty guitars from the old Thrifty drug stores where I used to go and get ice cream with my mother and look at the cheap musical instruments in the back. I pulled that Thrifty guitar literally out of the trash and that was my first guitar!

DM: Wow! That’s incredible. Toughened up your fingers, I bet! [laughter]

​

RK: What’s interesting about that time is that my perception was that you didn’t practice; you just picked up a guitar and played it! So when I got my first guitar, did I practice? No! I was much too impatient for that so I was making bird sounds and whale songs and just making noise. Then I heard Eddie Van Halen and got my first electric guitar a year or two years after that. I heard him do this dive-bomb stuff, right? And my guitar wouldn’t do that, but I made it do it! [laughter] So I kind of goofed around with it, but I didn’t really start playing until my mid-twenties, which is quite late.

​

Funnily enough, that happened when we got a piano and I started noodling around with the piano. I learned basic theory with respect to the piano–which I never applied to the guitar–and then I started to get really serious about writing songs. I would use my ear to play and decide what was musical to me. Age 28 is when I started applying music theory to guitar and it’s also when I started getting critically sick.

I went to community college for less than one semester because I couldn’t afford the books, but that’s where I learned music theory–that was my education! By 33 I was bedridden for the first time and would be out of the game entirely until I was 38. I began to develop my own system for understanding music theory and I was searching for my own voice. Well, how do you do that? In the simplest terms: you stop listening to all music. Your influences will dictate where you go, directly or indirectly.

​

These days, for young people looking to find their distinct musical voice, I would recommend not using a phone but an actual handheld digital recorder–an analog one would be even better. Use something that’s readily available, even pencil and paper, where you can capture or write something down to where you understand it. You need to create your own little shorthand. What you’re doing is mirroring yourself. Even if you think you suck, you have to sing because that’s part of your real voice. You have to hear that.

​

I think a lot of people get frustrated or intimidated because music theory is presented in such a manner that is way, way too complicated. If you study the chord scale, that’s all you need. You just need to know how to map and harmonize the scale. If you don’t like the sound of a certain scale, don’t use it early on! Use the ones that you like because that’s part of your voice. When you start harmonizing the scale, you’ll start to see the correlation between the scales and maybe later in your musical pursuits you might want to branch into some of those that you didn’t love at first. You’ve got to find yourself.

Music for me is sacred. For me, it has to be important and kept separated enough to bring something that is useful for the consciousness of this planet. As you know, you listen to pop music and there really is no substance to it whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of pop music, I love well-crafted songs. But the way things are recorded these days, it’s like: do you ever hear a performance?

DM: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. As our treasured and shared friend, the incomparable English maestro-musician Paul Garthwaite, said best: “it’s the difference between going into a studio to capture a performance versus going in to create one.” While I’m a rabid fan of all kinds of electronic music, I see a tragedy in the way easy access to that has made people who simply don’t want to do the necessary work to produce meaningful music use an SSL board to generate a performance. I think that’s both backwards and a lie to a great extent.

​

RK: Exactly. As opposed to going away to a cabin somewhere–or just in your living room like I’ve done–and just working things out. I’ve written everything from film scores to pop songs there. I play multiple instruments because I like different timbres. To be honest with you, if I had to choose only two instruments to play forever, those would be a touchstyle instrument and a piano. The touchstyle Warr guitar is harmonically similar to the piano, so it made sense to me.

With guitar, you can have these wide intervals and orchestral chords going on, but it sounds like one instrument. You may hear lower and higher notes, but there is no separation. On the touchstyle, as with the piano, you have a separation of bass and melody. It’s like a three-headed serpent when you first start playing it! [laughter] Because it’s meant to be held vertically, with my current medical situation, I can’t play it right now the way I used to or would like to.

DM: You certainly don’t have to give details if you don’t want to, but for those new to your projects, can you explain just a tiny bit about what’s going on with your health?

​

RK: Of course–well, I’ve had a history of traumas and accidents in my life prior to now that didn’t leave my body in a great place to be dealing with Upper Cervical Instability, which sprang upon me earlier this year pretty much out of nowhere. It’s basically a condition where there is a profound amount of pressure on the spinal cord that causes all sorts of problems with the relay system in the brain stem. I’ve been unable to work and play for months as this particular prognosis comes with a hefty dose of pain and relative immobility.

​

I have a luthier friend that is currently making a stand for me so that I can play the touchstyle properly and hopefully continue teaching touchstyle lessons even while dealing with my condition. I’m also in the process of designing my own brand of the touchstyle that would be affordable and accessible for the mass public. I have a completed prototype of it that I play in my video for Crystalline Blue. I have spent so much time making every aspect of that design highly calculated to the player and there’s really nothing like that on the market right now so I’m hoping eventually to even be able to consult on the finishing of that prototype with either my friend or another luthier.

​

DM: Are you able to work on any compositions or is the music in general providing any quiet therapy during these trying medical struggles?

​

RK: Well, I actually can’t concentrate on composing or playing right now because it feels like I have an ice pick in my neck. I have only written one thing since this medical event happened and it was a piece I constructed for Michael Hedges called “A Man Called Hedges.” I wrote most of that in my head and memorized it in my head for days and days before I even wrote it down.

​

I couldn’t do that now because the condition has gotten so much worse and it affects my memory. I’ll go through these almost Alzheimer-like bouts and it also affects my nervous system so badly that a lot of times I’ll see the word and I’ll hear the word, but I can’t say the word. Crazy! It’s just fleeting but it’s also progressive. I’ve released my RK and the Groove “Lover Girl” song set, with a gracious assist from the world-class drummer that is Albert Kohn–“Awesome Al”, as we know him–as an effort toward counterbalancing my medical costs, but haven’t really been able to play much since all of this happened.

​

DM: Goodness, I’m so sorry you are experiencing something so painful and frightening like that and I’m really hoping that your treatments are going to bring about not just the much-needed physical relief but your speedy full return to your usual musical grandeur. What are you the most musically proud of that you’ve created so far in your career?

​

RK: Well, what may shock you is that none of my stuff that you’ll hear on my website or YouTube is mastered. I’ve used the most obsolete programs imaginable to make most of that stuff and it’s just in a fairly unpolished state with regard to production. That said, the last thing I completed before I got sick that I was super proud of was a series of motifs in a song I did called “Again To Claim Who We Are” that just came out really beautifully and I felt that they were the perfect sequence for that composition. One thing I will say is that, while I recognize the many leaps forward that digital components to recording have brought, I have no idea how anyone can listen to anything on a phone. With high-quality analog stereo systems, you can hear harmonics in a song you’re listening to. You will never hear that in a digital format. For the album Oscillating Frames of Light, I wanted to do a live recording. Here’s the problem: most people online don’t know the difference between live music and processed, recorded music.

​

DM: That’s the thing! Oh, if only this Material Girl had even half a penny for every time I’ve railed and charged like Bodica at that very issue in my work as well as in my social conversations….I could buy you every piece of analog audio in this world three times over and a Ferrari to tow it all too! [laughter]

​

RK: They don’t understand what a real performance is and what a fabricated performance is. So, if you go out there with the real thing and they compare that to whatever spit-n-polish version of something they’re listening to, their impression is that you’re not worth listening to, which is a complete insult to the artist. I put it out there that I wanted to do in-house concerts because at least then I could know that anyone who was there was there for the music–not to drink or party. I don’t actually like performing, but I do like sharing. I like that engaging, sharing experience like you have sitting across the table from someone at an intimate dinner.

​

It takes time to get people to drop any of their programming, and since my spirituality is so deeply entwined in my lyrics, that’s the kind of atmosphere where people are open to an art form that also teaches, informs, and instructs in a way that brings down barriers. Music allows the heart to open up. I like performing on a level where my audience is because everybody should be equal in that experience–and we all know that whole podium thing is a load of garbage anyway.

It was always important to me to be of service. No matter what anyone’s religion or spirituality is, that’s what the word “ministry” means. Over the course of my life, I’ve been deeply into every kind of spirituality from Christianity to Keylonta, but any truth or goodness I’ve found has always come down to sharing and service. The big things and the little things are all one thing and I think spiritual mastery is being able to see all things as being equally valuable.

​

DM: I think you’ve done a fabulous job of taking all of these disparate threads of your life and turning them into a very unique tapestry that is all your own. It’s admirable because many people are irretrievably geared toward adhering to a single thread due to the fact that one little idea feels so safe and contained. They never allow themselves to ask or wonder about the myriad other colors comprising that little idea they’re so addicted to.

​

RK: Well, I appreciate that and I genuinely thank you because you know truth can be a very isolated and weary path. I do think when someone is seeking truth, none of it is by accident and you don’t have to grandstand about it. I’m not a brand; I don’t believe in brands. We don’t need personalities; we need integrity. If you have love working within you, you can never be offended.

​

DM: Thank you so much for taking time to share your story with Curiosity Shots, Randy. I know that it will speak to the hearts and minds of many in our readership and we greatly appreciate your time, musical mission, and courageous candor about your health. All of our very best wishes for the full recovery that I hope will shortly be yours and for all of your forthcoming artistic projects!

​

RK: Thank you Dana! I  am so glad for the time that you generously shared with me. I always appreciate when I am able to spend time with the uncommon folk; it always feels like true family. Again, thank you for that.

 

​

bottom of page