Kevin Thornton: The NHT Interview
Thornton kicks off national tour of “Sex, Dreams and Self Control” in Nashville
Multi-talented performer Kevin Thornton is perhaps one of Nashville’s best kept open secrets. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Performance from Ball State University in 2001, he balanced dramatic roles such as Pale in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This and Jake in Sam Sheppard’s A Lie Of The Mind, against musical roles like Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar and Archibald Craven in The Secret Garden.
After relocating to Nashville, he recorded Had A Sword, an album of original songs, which won a prestigious Nashville Scene Award in the category “Best Experimental Rock” in 2004. During that time he also worked as an actor, ironically, to pay the bills. He has appeared in several regional theatre productions, playing John in John and Jen at the historic Tibbit’s Opera House in Coldwater, MI. His most recent theatrical appearance was as a guest entertainer aboard Crystal Cruise Lines during a four-month journey around the world.
Waves on Waves, his current band, recently recorded an album, and now Kevin is excitedly performing his one-man show Sex, Dreams, & Self Control! nationwide. Sex, Dreams, & Self Control! is a humorous yet touching coming-of-age tale about a young, Midwestern man meeting his conservative family, God, and sexuality head on. This one-man show moves the audience through hilariously embarrassing adolescent anecdotes to the painful trek of his teenage years and beyond.
Told through a unique mix of storytelling, stand-up comedy, and music, this is a 90-minute tour de force for star and writer Kevin Thornton. Though the story is personal, its themes are moving and universal. Sex, Dreams, & Self Control! will be showing at Bongo Java After Hours Theatre January 22, 23, 24 at 9 p.m. For more information, clips of the show or to buy tickets please visit www.sexdreamsandselfcontrol.net . Recently, Now Hear This! caught up with Kevin at Bongo After Hours Theatre during one of his rehearsal run-throughs to chat about the show.
NHT: Many people already know you from your work with your previous bands Thornton and Waves on Waves which were really the same bands but with different names.
Kevin Thornton: Well, there was a big difference between the two bands—it was the same guys; Enoch and Luke—but there was a break in there. Thornton was a really kind of sleepy art rock band and all of us were so over that when we got back together. We had toured the country with that music and we discovered that while playing these sleepy piano ballads in clubs NOBODY was listening. If you want to be subtle and nuanced drunk people will totally talk over that shit. We had all been apart for over a year and Thornton had kind of started out as my solo project that morphed into a band. This time around we decided to start from scratch and make it fresh and new for everyone. So we decided to do something more pop with a sort of Tears for Fears influence and thus was born Waves on Waves.
NHT: After having performed as a singer/songwriter/rock band front man for so long why did you decide to go in such a drastic new direction?
KT: This is the most creatively alive I have felt in a really long time and I’m not hesitant about it at all. I don’t want to put down the work that I’ve done before but the music world is getting harder and harder and it is so very difficult to make anyone care anymore. The little bit that I have done to preview this I have seen people just light up and I haven’t felt that in a long time. I would say that I have been subconsciously working on this for a long time. I have a big background in theatre—that’s what my major was—so it’s definitely in my blood. I always thought that I would do something like this someday when I was too old to be in a rock band b t a little while back I came to a point where everything was kind of at a crossroads. Nothing was working and I was very frustrated on a number of levels so I decided that I needed to bet out of town just to clear my head. I decided to go and visit my parents in Evansville, Indiana where I grew up just to get away from Nashville for a second. I was feeling super nostalgic while I was there so I started driving around to all of these places and at one point I went to the house that I grew up in and I hadn’t been past it in a decade or more.
NHT: How did that experience help to inform what eventually became this show?
KT: The whole neighborhood had become a kind of shithole and the house itself had been totally overgrown by the yard and there was an old abandoned couch lying outside. The house had obviously not been painted since we had been there in 1989. Whoever lived there now had clearly just given up. So I just sat there for hours staring at the house. I was fascinated because I was in front of the place where I was created and it sparked tons of memories. I spent the rest of the time hanging out with my parents which was really good for me and at one point spontaneously I decided to drive to Northern Indiana where I went to college and I also had not been in many years. I walked around campus and went past my old dorm room and just bathed in the memories because that was a phase in my life where I was becoming who I am today. I was just starting to accept my sexuality and starting to realize there was more to the world than the tiny, backwards place I grew up.
NHT: Were there other outside influences on you during this time?
KT: In addition to being overwhelmed by all of these memories I had been reading David Sedaris and I listened to an old Sandra Bernhard disk while I was on the road. So I had all of this stuff kind of whizzing around in my head and when I got back to Nashville I didn’t really have any answers about what I was going to do next but my brain was on fire. So I just sat down on the porch of Bongo Java and I just wrote out one of the stories that I kind of remembered on that little weekend trip and when I finished it I thought it was very funny and good. The next night I was at the Café Coco open mic and decided to try it out and it brought the house down. I was like “Really? Wow!” I knew right then that I wanted to do it again the next week so all that week I worked on a new story and went back the next week and got the same reaction. For the next month and a half I literally did not leave my apartment and wrote like a crazy person. At the end of it I had ten 10 minute short stories that were all kind of related.
NHT: How do you feel like this work represents you not just as a person but as an artist?
KT: I feel like everything in my life so far had kind of built up to this. I’ve been immersed in theatre; I’ve dabbled in stand-up comedy in the past, my songwriting and the things that I went through in my life that had given me these stories. After I did the first workshop night at Bongo Java I knew that this was what I wanted to do. Doors have been flying open for this piece all over the place and we are still booking dates even now for the national tour.
NHT: In this day and age people are kind of used to seeing the typical “one-man show about growing up gay in a Christian family.” What is it that makes your show stand out from the pack? What can people expect that will entice them to come see the show?
KT: There are a few things. It is a hybrid of a concert with original music from a professional singer-songwriter that is part stand-up comedy and part true spoken word storytelling in the vein of David Sedaris. I have poured my heart and soul into this piece and I’m not using this in order to get a sitcom pilot like so many one man shows. I really am serious about wanting to make an art form out of this and follow in the footsteps of Sandra Bernhard. It’s really not anything new but it is unique from anything else you will see right now.
