KEN KAHN / MY STORY
I grew up in a house filled with music. My mother was the lead copyist for Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Frank De Vol and Henry Mancini – great arrangers, orchestrators and composers. She called them ‘the storytellers’.
I first encountered other great storytellers as I learned to produce music from my mentor Pete Welding. My job was to drive to the airport and pick up the artist we were recording, change the reels, pour the whiskey and listen. Those intimate all night sessions with artists like Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins and Johnny Shines earned Pete and his Testament Records label entry into the Blues Hall of Fame. They also changed my life. When the tracking was finished I sat on the porch with wise men. They had put away their guitars but they kept telling me stories as we watched the dawn.
I went on to write animation for television and became the lead Story Analyst for ABC Television. As I became a storyteller myself, writing songs that have been praised by Michael Jackson, Manhattan Transfer, Whitney Houston and others, I pictured the tale as I wrote it. Garth Brooks once said that a great song is just like a little movie that you can watch unfold right in front of you.
When I joined Pete again at Capitol-Emi, I was the lead producer for a project that sold 13 million records in 8 days. The key to my craft is simple – just tell the story.
We are 'the story animal'. We share stories from our first lullaby to our last farewell. Children refuse to go to sleep without a story and old people love to repeat them, but I love to create them, whether in a song, a film or a book. I don't know how my own story ends but neither did those wise men who once shared the dawn with me.