Photo credit: Courtesy of Korby Lenker
“I haven’t seen a dead body in a long time,” singer, songwriter turned author Korby Lenker told Hollywood on the Potomac while heading to Arlington, Virginia for a reading of his book Medium Hero and a musical performance at One More Page Books. “The last time was at my grandpa’s funeral. It was a thing of my childhood. My girlfriend and I did visit my parents over the holiday though and one of the features of course, when showing the girlfriend around, was to go visit my dad at the mortuary. There was a body being embalmed. I didn’t really think about that until after. Things just kind of happen without you realizing it.”
Medium Hero is a quirky collection of 27 short stories inspired by his life as a traveling musician with a cat and finding beauty in everyday life. A mortician’s son from rural Idaho, Korby now lives in Nashville where he is celebrated as the new “it” man that people can’t take their eye’s off of in the city’s rich music and literary scene.
We asked Lenker to describe what it was like growing up in rural Idaho and how his dad’s profession influenced his music. “It was great,” he said. “As a little kid it was fun because in that time -I was born in ’76 – it was a simpler time. Even then people probably locked their doors in Twin Falls, but we never did growing up, ever. I walked a quarter of a mile to the bus stop. Sometimes I’d walk to school. It was a couple of miles. There was never a feeling of fear about the world or anything when I was growing up. In that way it was simple. Also, we weren’t wealthy when I was a kid at all, so our family vacations usually hovered around the camping theme, which was awesome. Great camping was an hour away, and that’s some of my fondest childhood memories – roasting marshmallows. My parents had this cheap trailer they bought third hand, but it had a little table you could set up inside. We played cards around the table. The lantern, it smelled the way it smelled. The kids would sleep in the tent outside. It was just a blast. All that stuff was so great. That said, what a wonderful place to leave at eighteen, which is what I did, and never went back. Really though, my childhood had a huge impact on me.“
As for the Tales from the Crypt, they probably influenced his music somewhat. “Death was never very far away. It wasn’t a gloom and doom thing, but definitely, you thought about bigger picture things. Obviously it made a big impact because it was so close, and it was also so close to normal life, death was, and also not to be taken for granted. Not all of my songs are love songs. Definitely some of them are, but I have things that I sing about that are absolutely more … I don’t know …….. thoughts of the eternal, or questions. I think there is definitely a questioning tone in my music over all. I like all kinds of people and that includes dark people. I’m definitely melancholy by nature. The book, it kind of gets at that. There’s some stories that go there.”
Korby Lenker
“I wasn’t a very super-cool kid in high school, but I had a band and for a high school band, especially a high school band in Idaho, we were pretty serious. We played at the school dances around the Magic Valley in Southern Idaho. We rehearsed twice a week and we made little recordings in my friend’s basement. We worked really hard on the songs that we liked and wanted to cover. We just tried to really get it just right. In hindsight, I have tapes of me singing, and it’s hilarious how bad I was. I wasn’t good at all,” he laughed.
“In high school when I was a junior,” he added, “there was a Battle of the Bands night. The seniors – they were like all the really cool kids. They had a band. Then the junior class had a band and we were that. Then the sophomore class had their band. One played after the other. I just remember people going nuts. It was in the high school gym where we played. I remember there was this moment where we did this version of a cover of The Doors song Hello. I’m like shrieking, ‘Hello! Hello!’ There were these really cute girls. They were twins, and they were up on stage sandwiching me. They had lost their minds. These girls would never talk to me during the day, ever. They were nuts. I just remember like, ‘What?’ ‘Woah,’ these girls think I’m cool.” It was like, ‘Holy crap! The power of music.’ These kids have lost their minds, and I’m part of it. It was a huge thing for me, actually. My friend and their parents were there up in the bleachers. They had a camcorder and the video taped this from the cheap seats. It was my junior year but it was a critical event in terms of what it made me do after I graduated. It had such an impact on me that I was like, ‘wow. I can do this and I want to do it and I should do it, so I’m going to.’ I went to college, but I’ve had a weird life.”
“My poor mother,” Korby told us when we asked what his parents thought about his decision to be a rock star. “They’re very supportive and they also, like decent parents do, want and wanted the best for their children, but I said ‘Mom, I want to be a rock star,’ which is what I told her. I didn’t just say I wanted to, I said I’m just going to. I said it like it were a foregone conclusion, like, ‘I know that’s what I’m going to do, mom. I’m not asking you or I’m not even wondering if I’m going to.’ This coincided with my announcement to my family that I was not going to go directly to college, but that I was going to take a year off. I was a good student. I liked school. I was in the classes that you should be in to get a good scholarship. My Mom wrote me this letter because she couldn’t tell me this in person. It was too heavy. She wanted to confide in me that she knew this guy that she went to high school with who much like me had some musical talent and decided not to go to college. He went into a band and the band failed. Last she heard from him he was addicted to heroin. She didn’t know what happened to him afterwards, but it wasn’t good. It took them a long time for them to come around. It took them years. We barely spoke for a while. My father was more just kind of, you know, live and let live a little bit.”
Korby Lenker
So now Lenker in his latest transformation is On the Road Again, but nothing like the way Willie Nelson does it. He doesn’t have a tour bus and is not glamorous in that way, but he loves how he travels…on his own, in his car, on Amtrak or other less exciting modes of transportation.
Medium Hero and Other Stories (Turner Publishing, December 2015) “is Korby Lenker’s hilarious, poignant stream of consciousness organized into 27 short stories inspired by his life as a traveling musician with a cat. From spontaneously forging a friendship with snake handling pentecostals in the mountains to the shame of urinating on himself in a “hipster” coffee shop, there’s nothing off limits. Lenker also sheds light on the underbelly of making a living as a musician on the road, 300 days a year. Whimsical on one page, thought provoking on the next, this songwriter is making his mark in the literary world with this debut work though it will not be his last. Originally self published, this is the Cinderella story of one in a million grabbing the eye of the traditional publishing world. Sticking to what he knows as a touring musician, Lenker will be promoting his book in more than 25 states across the country with a splash of his signature music thrown in.” Publisher’s Notes.
“Korby Lenker’s keen control of narrative voice is spot-on in each of these stories – distinctive, disarming, entertaining, and completely convincing. The stylish, often funny, sometimes tongue-in-cheek tone of the book made it feel as if I were hearing the stories being spoken aloud to me late at night.” – Tim O’Brien
“I think it’s a funny book. I think it opens funny and it’s not hard to read. But I’ll also say that I don’t think that it’s a light book. I think that I do in my book what I try to do at my shows, which is to create an arc overall, take the listener on a journey. I try and do that with my stories, too. I want to make it so that it’s easy to like, but I want there to be something that you think about when you’re done reading the book.” Korby Lenker
Lenker at his book signing at One More Page Books
“If I had my druthers, I would be writing novels,” Lenker notes. “Right now my lifestyle isn’t such that I am devoting the kind of time that I need to write serious novels. I never want to not play music and I’m about to record another record. I’m going to see that through and I’ll tour for the rest of the year and kind of see what happens. The five year plan is at most playing fifty shows a year, hopefully at theaters, but really spending the majority of my time at home working and writing.”
Right now, he’s on the road for his book though. “I don’t have a bus. I’m just in my car right now by myself. There’s certain things that are lame about that, and then I think there’s other things that are, you know, that’s why the book got written partly. Traveling by myself all the time affords me a freedom that I wouldn’t have even if I had one other person. Sometimes I tour with other people, and it’s definitely a different animal. It’s fun in a way. It’s always fun to share things with somebody, but there’s something about being alone that you’re just receptive to the weird. You can kind of make it work whenever you want. You can go home, you can stay at this person’s house instead of this person, just because it seems interesting. I enjoy that a lot. I’m on the road pretty much solid from now until mid-March. Then after that I’ll be in town for a month and a half, and then I’ll be gone for most of the summer. Then after that, that’s pretty unscripted. I like to be home, for a guy who tours a lot. It is kind of the season right now. I”ll be working on this tour for a while and then I get to be home and be a weirdo.”
As for life in Nashville he says: “Well, it’s different for different people. I mean, there’s not just one scene. I’m not part of the country clique. I’m not trying to write cuts. I’m not a session singer/songwriter. I have friends who are, and all of us at some point or another living in Nashville, toyed with that or tried our hand at it or written with other people. There’s a lot of people that are, you know, professional songwriters, that just go down to The Row and they have an appointment at 10:00, they have an appointment at 3:00 and they write two songs a day, but you don’t get to tour anymore.”
“If you’re a foodie, it’s hard to beat,” he says about daily life. “I mean, that’s probably what’s changed more than anything is that it’s just exploded with this high cuisine. There’s a restaurant opening every month that’s like, really going for it. There’s all these great chefs. It’s just got this reputation. It’s so fun to go out to eat there. I mean, I can’t afford to, but I do. I never see Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, but I’ll see Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban. You see these people at the grocery store. I can’t speak for LA, but the vibe in Nashville is that people are really not gawky, the normal folks. I don’t know. I never get that star struck. I see Jack White all the time, like weirdly often. He just goes to coffee shops, and people see him but nobody walks up to him or like secretly tries to selfie him or something. Nashville’s changed a lot even since I’ve been there. It’s such a more cosmopolitan mix now.”
