My name is Kenny Foster. I grew up in a small town in Middle America called Joplin, Missouri. My father was a musician in his youth, and I started singing in church choir, and playing in all sorts of school organized bands, but I didn’t pick up the guitar or start writing songs until my late teens. I loved music. Lived and breathed it. It’s how I communicated with my friends. I’d find a song that captured how I was feeling and then share it with my friends at home, or in the car, wherever. I’d lose myself in a song. It would transport me somewhere else, without pictures or anything, it was all in my mind. It’s like it would unlock a part of me that I couldn’t see before I’d heard those words, sung that way, by someone else who really meant them. It was so human. It was so real. I wanted to do that: make soul-touching magic out of nothing.

At some point a friend in University said: “Look, you’re good at this, and you cover everyone else well, but have you ever thought of writing your own stuff?” I didn’t even know I could do that. No one I knew had ever done it. It just sort of became this obsession of mine. “You mean, people might pay me to make stuff up? That sounds awesome!” And so I went in search of those people. I moved to the songwriting capital of the world, Nashville, to see how I measured up. Turns out it takes a long time to get good enough at something that people are willing to pay for it. And so I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote until even my peers who were also trying to get amazing at this started saying: “You know you’re kind of amazing at this.” And so I started practicing those songs, and touring those songs, and now I make a living traveling the world singing songs I made up. It’s bonkers, and it was so hard to get here, and now I love what I do more than anything else I could have been doing (believe me, I’ve done enough things along the way to know). I feel honored to get the opportunity to make music for others to enjoy. To create a moment in time for them. To show people worlds and ideas they’ve never seen before. To unlock parts of people’s minds and hearts that they wouldn’t have had access to before I wrote and sang some words, in a particular way, so as to make them find it themselves. Like a sherpa for complete strangers to the inner workings of themselves. It really is like magic. Only it’s real. Very real. It may be one of the few real things left.