#159 Kim Cheshire
Aria nominated award winning singer songwriter Kim Cheshire featured on this episode. All the way from the UK, living loving and obsessed with music describing it as the sunshine that didn’t exist in England. Super inspirations for country music by Joni Mitchell and Merle Haggard, Kim Cheshire and Rae Leigh discuss the ups and downs of the music business and that no matter what challenges have gotten in the way and after all these years now in Australia Kim describes that you have to do music for the reward of music.
Song featured in this podcast: Have Mercy
Connect with Kim:
Transcript
Rae Leigh: Welcome to a songwriter Tryst with Kim Cheshire. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me.
Kim Cheshire: I'm happy to be there having.
Rae Leigh: So I like to start every podcast by getting you in your own words to tell us who are you and where do you come from?
Kim Cheshire: I grew up in England, in a little village in Norfolk, in England, a very tiny little village called Wiggin hall, St. Mary Magdalene. That's where I grew up. I started my, uh, staff had an interest in music programs. From as long as I can remember, my earliest memories of absolutely being obsessed with music was this would have been the 1950s and my mom and dad had a motorbike and sidecar and my sister and I used to sit in the side cabin a little transistor radio, and we would play it.
And this is the pop music. The pop music of the day. This is before the Beatles and the stones and the whole kind of rock and roll explosion. So it was prior to that, I'd always obsessed with that at the time. And then of course the whole pop explosion happened in England, the bagels and the stones, and just the whole pop music of that era sixties.
Yeah. And I got swept up in that and like every other kid in England who couldn't be a
professional football or didn't have dreams of that. I ended up playing music because I thought that's a way
out of being a working class
kid and you at some horribly,mindless job.
My parents bought me a guitar and I
started learning chords. I'd probably learn three chords and thought, okay. I know I did, I did it. I kept going like that. And I've probably
learned about half a
dozen more since then
and yeah. And new codes and, yeah.
And, probably writing songs with the same codes. And so I had been most of my life, you know,
Like, It's great. It's great to have really interesting code patents and very complex code patterns I've gotten up. And the guy said, Hey, that that's absolutely fine, but really for me, it's more like three chords and the truth.
Rae Leigh: Yeah, which is your true sort of your country saying it's what we all live by. So what, where did country music come in for you? Because your, your music is
Kim Cheshire: Oh, well, thank you very much. We'll look, I played in rock and roll bands. Like from that period on through school.
I had a bad.
But I met a guy one day there who was in a band that he was a guitar player in a band. I can't even remember the name of the band. I think his name is Jim. I think he's name was big gin. That's all I remember. And I'm not even a gig. And he said, oh, I must drop around my place. Sometime I did drop around there. I sat down and he told me this story about how he'd been traveling around America.
He just wanted to go with, like I did that eventually, wanted to find out where the music I loved came from. He went to America and he said he was in a place called lake Shasta in, Northern California. And he was fishing on a lake, and he met this guy fishing. He said, I met this guy fishing and he turned out to be a songwriter.
And he said his name was Merle Haggard. And this guy I'd never heard of him, never heard of Mo I'd actually heard of Merle Haggard. But I didn't know much about him. This guy I'd never heard of him. Didn't know he was a country. Staff knew nothing about it. He said, oh, I told him about buy guitar and write songs and he played me some songs.
And then that guy is amazing. Then I discovered who he really was. And I realized I'd met one of the legends of country music. So he said, I want to play you some of these guys. So, and so he played me three Merle Haggard song. The very first one was, lonesome fugitive to learn some Fugett, which is actually not a song ,
It's a song that he covered.
It's a fantastic, so it even sounds like a little Haggard song. He played in that, honestly, it just blew my mind. I just go, wow, what have I been missing? And then through a game, I've discovered George Jones and Hank Williams and, and Tom T hall
and just endless amount of fantastic signals and songwriter.
And so, so Mel stuck with me and then I love him as much today as I did
back then, sadly, he's not around anymore and I didn't get to meet him. I got to meet lots of my heroes and lots of times that I never got
Rae Leigh: So what, what led you to hate the music industry? What was it about the industry in the UK That made you so,
Kim Cheshire: Well, I had a lot of bad experiences. I was, I was very, very harassed by, men sexually. So that, that PEDA.
That had an
Rae Leigh: anyone off.
Kim Cheshire: and I had some pretty bad experiences. But that was only one part of it. You know, I'd also, was coerced into signing deals when I didn't win where the percentages weren't even written in the contract, because I was just a naive kid.
I didn't know what I was doing. I had a manager who wasn't real smart
and probably wasn't really honest. And so I ended up sentence, setting up all being connected to deals that.
I didn't even really know how long they were. I virtually had to leave the country to get out of there for them to finally terminate.
But yeah, I made an album with a band with my band there
in London, or went to Wales and recorded it.
I made an album there. Then I got signed as a solo act and I made a record with that company. And that was the last straw for me. I had a bad experience with that, where my songs
were. Produced in a way that I wasn't happy.
I was told that we're going to be a particular way and there's going to be particular rules set up for the recording of this particular album, but it didn't happen that way. And I walked away from it and literally walked away and said, I'm not going to fill my contractual obligation.
I'm leaving here and I'm leaving the
country. I'm just going to go on. I've had enough of.
Oh, it was okay. It's water under the bridge now. And it's all, everything that don't kill you only makes you stronger.
So,
Rae Leigh: Ah, look at what you've learnt because of it though. Yeah.
You're still doing me.
Kim Cheshire: Honestly, my life has been absolutely incredible. You know, I've had bad things happen like everybody, you know, but really I've lived a blessed life and I still do, and I'm still grateful for everything I've got. And I'm not bitter about the fact that I haven't become a big star or anything like that. As a matter of fact, halfway through my war, I decided that that probably wasn't what I was chasing anyway.
Rae Leigh: What do you think you were chasing?
Kim Cheshire: well, you know, when I was a little kid and I heard a song that really blew my mind, which a lot of feedback in the sixties, there were a lot of just awesome melodies and loved, great melodies. And. Commercial teams, teams that made you want to sing them.
Rae Leigh: Hmm.
Kim Cheshire: But the thing that would do it for me, would be,
I can hear a
song, like I can pick one, say something like the loving,
spoonful, doing one a day for a daydream or something. I don't know if you even know these kinds of songs. These are all songs.
But, I hear a song like that and literally living in blink old gray sky raining, England, the sun would come out. I'd hear a song like that. Now I literally feel like it would make me feel that way it would make this incredible. It would transform my day. It literally we're transforming.
Rae Leigh: I think I have the same, like I like co-writing. but I also love writing on my own and I, and that's probably cause I wrote on my own for a very, very long time, but sometimes I agree. I think sometimes the whole song just comes to me and it's out really quickly. So, you know, it's just there and it happens naturally and it flows.
And then there are other times when it's like, I have a chorus. I love, and I have a verse that I love, But everything else kind of just doesn't fit together and it just sits. And I've had those sitting there for five, six years before I've sat down in a co-write and gone, oh, what do you think of this?
And then all of a sudden, the song gets finished when it's been not finished for for years.
Kim Cheshire: have a TA, you have to take
those
Take those two bits and then make a song out of one and then make another song.
Yeah,
Rae Leigh: All the time. And sometimes I'll end up.
with like, I'll write five songs. And then I, I look at them all and I'm like,
actually that
verse, that bridge, that chorus, that line there makes one
song and they, they All fit together really well. I haven't got like, a set rhythm, like, You sort of said, this seems to be a pattern forming. I I'm a big, I love trying new
things. So I'm always
trying new things when it, comes
Kim Cheshire: Yeah. Well, I, I'm not, I'm not much of that. I do try new things. Usually if I'm thrown
into a situation with somebody else, of course, they write in such a different way. There's no way I can use my method. And so I get thrown into having to. Adopt a
new message, find the new method on the spot and see what I can
do with it, and I've had the occasional worthwhile thing come out of that, but I've also,
Rae Leigh: Yeah.
Kim Cheshire: it can be, it's like in your taste pool, it can be quite unpleasant, but a lot of my gone through anything unpleasant, I I'm happy to go through something unpleasant if we get a great soul.
Absolutely.
Rae Leigh: Yeah, and it grows it I find it hard sometimes if I've written a song and I really like it, but it definitely needs polishing. Sometimes I find that I know that it could be better, but I've stuck and it's been like that. for so long. And so then I take it to someone who I know is, you know, a very accomplished songwriter and they kind of helped me cut, cut the. The cheese, I guess, on, on those songs. Cause sometimes we get, we get really
Kim Cheshire: Oh, we get attached to all our ideas and we get attached to ideas that aren't really helping the song as much as we can get attached to the ones. I'm no different, I'm no different than
Rae Leigh: It's
Kim Cheshire: it doesn't get any well, for me, it hasn't gotten any clearer or 80 that has, I've got older and I I'm as old as the Hills, so yeah, I, don't think, I don't
think. It doesn't matter to me, it doesn't matter the major chloroform to conform to a particular pattern or approach. I'm not posting anything on unlike that in life. What, whatever, you know, I'm, I'm wanting to accept you. I don't, I don't,
have to have you agree with me to like, you know, I, I really admire the fact that you don't agree with.
Rae Leigh: Well, all words have power And you know, swear words have power and. And, and, you know, heaven and Jesus, and like those words have power and attachments that everyone has. And as songwriters, that is our color palette, that is what we have to work with. And if we're trying to make you feel a certain way, we're going to use everything in our color palette to make you feel the way that we're trying to make you feel through that song. As long as I have purpose and I think that's, for me, it's like, You know, if I have a word in there, it's, there's a purpose for that word. Especially if it's a very powerful word, like one of those. And I think that's, that's what we do as artists. We, we confront people sometimes with, with controversial words and the way that we put them together. I commend you on that. I think
Kim Cheshire: pallets. It's like you said, it's a palette. Yeah, That's a palette of colors and you want to use as many as you can to help you get across to as many people as you possibly can. I don't just because I mentioned Jesus doesn't mean have a up, you know what I mean? mentioned bicycles. that doesn't mean I'm a bike fanatic, you know,
Rae Leigh: Yeah.
Kim Cheshire: it's just, yeah. It's just what we call
Rae Leigh: But it will, it triggers things in people. It triggers people and, and everyone's had their own experience in life and that will impact the way that they hear those words. And I think that's, what's so beautiful And so powerful about songwriting. And what we do is that we get to. Poke at people, but it challenges us, and, it challenges people to to really think about why we feel certain ways because of certain words
I was going to ask you what your greatest advice would be, after all your years in the industry, what would be the number one thing that you would tell to her young. Begin a songwriter like
myself. Who's just entering the industry. Haven't signed any contracts yet. what's
Kim Cheshire: I would S oh man, I be philosophical because that's the way I am. But I'm at the age where you're supposed to be philosophical, I guess. But, I would S I would say
that, music is its own reward. Like love is its own reward. Don't do it. Yeah. You don't be love for any other reason, other than love, you just something you fail and you respond to it, and it's a beautiful, beautiful thing and don't try and figure it out, and I I'm the same with the magic of music. I don't want to figure it out on, I don't figure out how a magician didn't trick, I'd rather watch him do the trick of B, being inspired by it. And yeah, so really. Like I started out wanting to be a pop star and wanting to, wanting to get girls and wanting to have lots of money and all of the same stuff half the world has done, and this played music for, but it didn't really take that long for me to realize that that that, that wasn't, that wasn't really what I wanted to use music for. And, , and really, I just want to use this music to touch, just to touch their hearts, just to, just to make them realize there's somebody else out there that thinks something that they've connected with me. If they connect with the lyric, then that means there's somebody out there who understands that same feeling you're getting. And that's all I wanna do. It's a CA it's a bad connection. It's just about connecting with people, communicating and connecting really the money, all of the other stuff, Really pals into Minuscules insignificance.
Rae Leigh: If we can't connect with each other and love each other, everything else
Kim Cheshire: That's exactly right. That there's nothing more important. There's absolutely nothing more golden than that to me. And I'd always kind of felt like that, but it just gets even stronger as I get older. There's no reason to pay. Please. Don't use music just to make it. Please don't do it either just to make a living just to, I've got lots of friends around here and played the pumps and they play covers and they've long gone past the point of hiding, playing those covers. They, now they just have to do it because they've got to pay their rent.
Rae Leigh: Yeah.
Kim Cheshire: I think do it, do it for music, just do it for music. Music is magic. It's one of the most magical things in our world. Please don't denigrate it. Please. Don't take away.
Rae Leigh: Yeah,
Kim Cheshire: the allow it it's power and
Rae Leigh: we can't.
Kim Cheshire: yeah. and respect be respectful with your, with your approach to music and.
Rae Leigh: that's beautiful. All right. My LA lucky, last question. And I think I know the answer to this one, but I'm going to let you choose if you could co-write with anyone in the world, dead or alive, who would it be and why who's stealing my questions. What's going on here?
Kim Cheshire: Well, a good question. It's a good question to ask anyone.
Rae Leigh: that's all right.
Kim Cheshire: The only people I would wish to participate in the songwriting session when I feel would be so intimidating for me, I probably wouldn't come up with anything worthwhile. I would probably just freeze up. But having said
Rae Leigh: Yeah.
Kim Cheshire: I love to have a credit that says Ken Cheshire, Bob dylan, you know, and I wouldn't even die in the side. My,
Rae Leigh: Wouldn't we all.
Kim Cheshire: my favorite song of my era would have to be Joni Mitchell, who I think is absolutely astounding, creative artists, probably the most. Songwriter of my era, that that encompasses all aspects of what I consider the beautiful, but the idea of sitting down, sitting down with Jody mentioned running someone would go up, I'd actually be petrified. I probably wouldn't even, wouldn't get any further than saying hello, you know,
Rae Leigh: Yeah, well, then that means we need to work on your self worth because you deserve it.
Kim Cheshire: I'll go Fred's and my wife tells me all the time and you're brilliant. Kim is just the people haven't noticed that yet. And maybe,
Rae Leigh: Oh.
Kim Cheshire: know, but Hey, just keep doing it.
Rae Leigh: No one has ever recognized as much during their lifetime as they are after they die.
Kim Cheshire: but I, I, I say
Rae Leigh: what history shows us.
Kim Cheshire: it's great if you get that right. it. sounds selfish. but I, do, I, do it for me, home reasons. I explained to
Rae Leigh: That's not selfish. It's called
Kim Cheshire: well, maybe, hopefully.
Rae Leigh: Well done. I'd say that's wisdom and wisdom is pure joy.
Okay. is there anything else you would like to share before we finish up? What I'm going to put links to all of your music and your new stuff will be in the description of the podcast. And there'll be a, a personalized blog on songwriter, trust.com with this episode and all of your links. So people can find you follow you, listen to music, watch that music
Kim Cheshire: I'll say, I'll send you a
copy.
Rae Leigh: anything else you would like to share? before we finish up?
Kim Cheshire: I'll send you a company
Rae Leigh: Yeah, no, please do.
Kim Cheshire: Now, what was that question again? Guess that was such a long question. I forgot the beginning of
Rae Leigh: That's all right. Is there anything else you would like to share? the podcast is yours. You can say whatever you want to say.
Kim Cheshire: Just be true to you. Just be true to yourself. Just be true to your own instincts. Believe your own instincts. Know yourself as all the great philosophers would say Jesus plato and all of these great philosophers and thinkers. The most important thing in life is to know thyself or know yourself. I, because, if you know yourself the better, you know, yourself, the more you will be able to access something that's worthwhile the parcel and, and to be true to it really be true to it.
Just use your gut, use your gut. You've got, we're always telling you if you're on the right track, even if the thousands of people telling you on the wrong track and your gut tells you on the right track, stick with your gut,
Rae Leigh: can only change yourself. It's always about.
you.
Kim Cheshire: It's not about.
Rae Leigh: about. And that's fine. That is fun. Yeah. and that learning that really helped me becoming an artist because yeah, I get projections all the time. But one thing I realized is that 99% of people are really self-centered and, and, we're all kind of on our own journey, but most of the time, everything that they say, especially the negative stuff is purely a reflection on themselves
Kim Cheshire: It's really just that stuff has just insecurity. It's just their insecurity thing painted on the, you know, and it's.
Rae Leigh: Yeah, but then I see that I've triggered something in them, you know, and that means that they're going to be able to hopefully look at that and work on that for them. And I think that's, that's, a compliment for me as an artist that I've made them feel that way. Even If it's bad, I don't want to make people feel bad, but the way my music's written, if it's something that. is maybe something they need to look at, that's a good thing.
Cause they can heal if they choose. Anyway, we can talk forever on
Kim Cheshire: never actually think about. The person, who's going to be listening to the music while I'm driving.
Don't what I'm producing it. Yeah, sure. That comes up a lot, I think. Oh, how would
people respond to this? And if the song was done this way, how would they react to that? But, but regarding,
Rae Leigh: you work with rod mcCormick, don't you?
Kim Cheshire: yeah, I do, I did on this album, we had worked together with like two bands together over the years.
And I, I hadn't worked with him in 20 years. I called him up out of the blue and said, Hey, I got a couple of songs I want to recording you interested. Absolutely. Man, come down. I'd love to do it. That'd be great. So I went down, we recorded two songs, so he said, you're going to go. And we recorded them and he said, you got any more? We go to them. And honestly, this album is me digging up songs from a catalog of material I've written over the years. And I attended record a couple of songs. First, she retired and just even away recording and playing and I play a little bit, I don't play a lot anymore. And, yeah, so I didn't intend to make this out on the toll. It was kind of accidental. One really came about from. My relationship with wrong. We, we just, it was such an such a joyous thing to get back with rod, stop playing this music and realized the years we'd spent together had not diminished at all. Even slightly. We knew exactly what each other was thinking, what we were aiming at,
and it just came together so quickly and effortlessly this the most effortless record on ever. And it was just a beautiful experience. It sounds like that.
Rae Leigh: I think it sounds beautiful. I love rod. and I think what he does is incredible. So to see you both come together and produce what you've done and with Kevin, yeah, I think it's, it's beautiful and inspirational and I hope that It reaches lots of people and that. everyone enjoys it very much. I thank you for doing it.
Kim Cheshire: Thank you for listening. it takes stuff like that, you know? Yeah. when people listen to you, I, I'm just grateful people with type of account that listen to you now. We're so distracted by all kinds of stuff all the time. We're bombarded with information. So to get somebody's attention for three minutes and listen to a,
Rae Leigh: Hm,
Kim Cheshire: and, I'm really grateful that you took the time out to join this. So I'm always, especially when you read.
Rae Leigh: beautiful.
Kim Cheshire: Like somebody like yourself, you know, that's, that's a special thing.
Rae Leigh: I love it when people really listen to it too, especially, as much as I love the melody and I'm a melody person, I have to be able to hear the lyrics. And that's the most frustrating thing
If I, if I'm listening to a I can't understand the lyrics, it annoys the heck out of me, But best because I love to, I love to really hear what the songwriter is, saying in their art or what picture they're painting and yeah, So thank you. very much for sharing.
Kim Cheshire: Cool. Well, thank you very much for having me. Thanks for asking me and thanks for asking really nice questions and interesting question and yeah, it's been lovely, lovely talking to you. And so incredibly enjoyable.
