Ken Widis

My Musical Biography

I’ve always loved to sing.  Often, as a child, I would break into song when there was no-one around.  It felt good.  When I was seventeen, I learned to play guitar.  I practiced for hours each day learning tunes from Dylan and the Beatles.  It was great singing those songs but I soon realized something early on.  I was never going to be a great musician no matter how much I practiced.  I didn’t have that gift.  But I did have the love.  And so I kept at it.

I eventually learned to play well enough so that I could accompany myself while singing.  Having said that, I could never play very fast so everything I did came out slower than the original.  And that’s okay if you’re just playing by yourself but it pretty much kills any hopes of being in a cover band.  Bands are pretty picky about that kind of stuff.  Here’s the silver lining, though ( you didn’t think I was going to go through all this and not have a silver lining, did you).  Once I realized how difficult it was playing other people’s songs, I decided to try and write one myself.  And that was pretty cool.  You don’t have to be a great musician to write a tune.  You can even do that in your head without a musical instrument which is what I’ve sometimes done throughout the years.  Once I started writing songs, I got hooked.  And even though all my songs were still for the most part pretty slow, at least now they were no longer slower than the original.

Which brings me to the other part of my musical biography, the “words”.   For whatever reasons, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life trying to figure things out.  You know, the basics: love, hate, war, peace, and in particular existence which at times has monopolized my life.  It still fills me with awe how something can come from nothing.  Anyway, it turns out that all that thinking about “whatever” is good stuff if you need to come up with words for a tune. 

And so that’s what I’ve done over the years.  Every now and then I’ll take one of my tunes and put words to it.  And if I’m lucky, years down the road, I’ll still enjoy singing that song (slowly).