Often the key to longevity in a creative scene is just a willingness to say yes and to embrace opportunities whenever they float your way, but it’s also knowing how to change with the needs of your community and how to change with the phases of your own life and your own art.
For OKC-based singer, musician, and creative polymath Chase Kerby, that’s meant taking on a number of different roles across the community and trying out a lot of different artistic avenues, even when he’s felt out of his depth.
Over his years in the Oklahoma scene, Kerby has been a frontman, a sideman, a solo artist, a photographer, a poet, an arts director and organizer, and even a TV singing competition contestant – at times all at once.
Chase Kerby: I’ve never been a big fan of being pigeon-holed in anything. That's one aspect of who I am.
You know, the arts administrator of me is this, and the artist me is this, right? And it's like, I love how that can all be the same person. you know.
Brett Fieldcamp: For Kerby, that’s meant fronting bands as a singer and songwriter, organizing local shows, supporting singer Beau Jennings in his backing band The Tigers, and even overseeing booking and organizing for artists of all kinds as the longtime director of the OKC Arts Council’s Art Moves program.
But whether he’s performing his own music or creating spaces for others to perform theirs, he says that his goal is always the same: just showcasing and demonstrating the importance of art in the local community, and hoping to inspire more of it.
It’s a goal that he’s recently found himself exploring more directly as the Education Manager for the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, not only inspiring young musicians to develop an interest in classical and orchestral music, but also showcasing the importance – and the fulfillment – that comes from working behind the scenes.
Chase Kerby: My job is to inspire people to either pursue or have a respect and affinity for music? Cool. Yeah, I can do that.
I come from no classical background at all, and I work for a classical music organization now, you know?
One of the things that I've tried to do with my job recently is explain that there are more jobs in art than being an artist. And I want to display that, I want to show that. I just want people to know that they can.
Brett Fieldcamp: That’s the same reminder, and the same kind of encouragement, that Kerby has had to work to give himself in recent years.
Following his short stint on NBC’s “The Voice” nearly a decade ago, he says he’s been exploring these various avenues, outfits, and outlets to reconnect to art and music and to reconsider what it means in his life, all while slowly writing and developing the songs that’ll go toward his first-ever solo record, songs that he says he’s only recently been able to approach with the kind of blunt, unrestrained honesty that he’s been seeking from himself.
Chase Kerby: So I remember being so nervous with “The Voice.” It is terrifying. And after that moment, though, it really, like, singed my nervousness. After that, it just was like playing local shows, I wasn't really nervous.
And it wasn't until I went through tragedy, you know. I lost my grandfather. He and I were super close. But a year after “The Voice,” I lost my dad.
From that point forward, emotionally, my world was, like, kind of shattered, and ever since, I’ve really been, like, piecing back together what my identity is, you know?
Now I'm getting nervous again, because who I was and who I am now and who I will become are very, very different people, you know? And so, yeah, I'm nervous again.
And I'm also writing lyrics where I'm not masking anything, and I'm saying what I want to say, and I'm writing my songs for me. I'm doing my photography for me. Because when an artist is alone and creating, it's the most honest they'll ever be with themselves.
Brett Fieldcamp: Kerby’s current role in educational outreach, then, is an opportunity for him to pay those energies forward, to impart to both young artists and aspiring organizers the same philosophies that have helped him rediscover the magic of music and creation and the excitement for the next phase of his own art.
Chase Kerby: I’ve been playing shows since I was 15 - so 25 years now - and I have done some fun tours, and I've done national TV, and I don't even think that I've hit the tip of the iceberg for what I'm going to create and who I'm going to be as an artist, you know?
And there's a peace of mind that comes with that. So I guess in some ways, it's like I've never really thought about my standing in the community, just knowing that I needed to keep being present
Brett Fieldcamp: Ahead of Kerby’s forthcoming solo album, you can check out his past bands and releases at chasekerby.bandcamp.com and you can keep up with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic – including their educational outreach – at okcphil.org.
• Song excerpt is Chase Kerby’s “Open Highways.”
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