Interview with Troye Kinnett
Troye Kinnett is the keyboard player in fellow Hoosier John Mellencamp’s band, where he plays accordion, piano, organ, harmonica, and percussion, and sings background vocals. Before joining Mellencamp’s group he performed and recorded with Donovan, The Boxtops, Rare Earth, Eddie Money, Jimmy Ryser, and Grammy Award winner Sandi Patty. More recently he has appeared with with Billy Joel, John Fogerty, Sheryl Crow, Joan Jett, Paul Schaffer, and Derek Trucks.
RW: Thanks for taking my call. Where are you guys today?
TK: I’m in my room in a hotel in Times Square. We’re playing our last show Tuesday night at Forest Stadium.
RW: I see that it’s that your summer tour is going to end in September, playing for Farm Aid.
TK: That’s right. What’s your book about?
It’s is designed to cover the basic information about the industry in a compact form, along with information about the Midwest scene that isn’t included in other music business books.
RW: You were born in Muncie and started playing piano when you were 8 years old, and inspired by the great music of the time such as what Stevie Wonder and Elton John. When did you realize that music was your thing?
TK: It was just something that I could do better than my big brother (laughs) so I just kept doing it. I took lessons like everyone else and there was a period when I wanted to quit, but my mom made me finish that year. By the end of the year I reached a new plateau and it became fun.
That was the time when the Wapahani High School Marching Band was wining competitions year after year at the state fair. We marched in the Macy’s Day Parade in New York City, and had a lot of opportunities for a school in a little county that didn’t even have a football team. That’s where I grew up, and it was just good timing I guess. Jim Craig was the band director and put together a really good band program. I was very involved in that and played piano in solo and ensemble contests. Before you knew it, I had a scholarship to Ball State University to study music.
RW: What did you do there?
TK: I usually joke around by saying, all three of my parents were teachers. My step mom, my mom, and my dad was a principle. I know that I would have liked to have taught music, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as being a composer and to play. In the first two years I hadn’t gotten into the core of the composition classes, but I was very involved In the jazz program and I loved music theory, I always liked that. I’ve always thought I’d like to come back and teach theory some day if the performance things doesn’t work out (laughs), so it was really cool to be invited back last year and be part of that class in Surviving the Music Business class that Dan Porter did with Kevin Ray.
RW: While you were a music major, did you happen to meet Cleve Scott at the house out on Bethel Avenue? Is that where you started learning about audio production?
TK: I had a meeting with him and talked about that program, but with the Music Engineering Technology program at the time you had to minor in physics. I wasn’t really interested at the time in engineering. I got thrown into that later out of necessity.
RW: What bands did you play in before you met John?
TK: There was a band called 10:01 that was playing in the area. They were huge around Muncie and Newcastle, and I thought, “This is the band that is going somewhere. This is what I want to do.” I had an opportunity to make $200 a week.
RW: Where did the name come from?
TK: It came from how time is displayed on a digital clock.
RW: That’s pretty deep. In the right frame of mind that could be mind-bending!
TK: (laughs) That was the idea. It was palindromic, and also about the same time the band would go on at night to start playing in clubs.
RW: Yeah, you were probably more likely to be up at 10:01 at night than waking up at 10:01 in the morning.
You played with a lot of other groups. How did you work up to playing with John Mellencamp?
TK: It didn’t take me long to figure out that 10:01 wasn’t really going anywhere. I didn’t want to just travel the country in a band playing clubs. In the process, I met people who were doing studio work and got an entry level position at TRC Studios in Indianapolis. Their main writer was John Cascella—he played on all of Mellencamp’s hit records. All the accordion lines that I ended up playing when I joined John’s band were from John Cascella. I was at the studio getting whatever work I could—answering the phone, doing odd jobs, and writing music for industrials and TV spots.
RW: Were you doing any engineering work?
TK: No, it wasn’t until the ‘90s that I got into that. I was working at Bennett Innovations, and that was part of the job.
RW: I interrupted you. You were talking about working at the studio.
TK: As far as the connection with Mellencamp, I did a lot of sessions at the Gaither Studios. I also brought Dane Clark in for a lot of the commercials I was producing wherever I happened to be working. I had recorded with Jimmy Ryser who was Mellencamp’s guitarist at one point, and worked with a lot of the other guys in the band at times over the years. But it was Dane’s recommendation that got my foot in the door.
RW: Keyboard Magazine described you as a “multi-talented musician and composer”. What are you best at, and what do you do with it?
TK: I appreciate Ernie Rideout saying that. I think he saw that I can do a variety of things. But I’m a piano player first. That’s something that I don’t do a lot of in John’s band, but it all starts from that I think. It helps to be able to adapt to other things. Some of the other things that I do with John like harmonica, accordion, and occasional percussion are just kind of an auxiliary thing. You have to be versatile. I’ll do this six-week tour we’re on and a few more dates in August, and then that might be it for the rest of the year. I’ve directed music at church, I’ll do some charting and arranging for singers that are putting together a show, maybe play locally, and session work. You have to be able to do a variety of things.
RW: On your website you have the brand tagline “Musician – Composer – Professional”. It sounds like you’re mostly a musician along with some composing.
TK: Right. The website includes a variety of projects including some industrial things. It’s just not something that I’m doing a lot of right now. Occasionally I’ll get a call for to compose something—I’ll be scoring music for a documentary later this year, but right now it’s kind of hit and miss. That part of the work has really changed in the last few years. There used to be a lot more opportunity and budget for scoring TV spots and video. Now there’s a whole lot of library music you can pull off of the Internet.
RW: What’s the purpose of your website? Is it for clients interested in hiring you as a composer? You’ve probably already got your network established as a performer.
TK: I feel like it’s for people just like you, who want to make a connection and find out a little something about you. I did that with you. I met a bunch of people when I was at Ball State last year and I couldn’t remember which one you were. Once I looked you up I realized “Oh, yeah, I know which one he is.” You need to have some kind of web presence. A lot people just go to Facebook now.
RW: Do you have any advice for people who are just starting out as performers?
TK: People will tell you to practice hard. I’m not so good at marketing myself, but that would be a good thing. My biggest advice if you’re performing live would be to always have a backup plan on stage. Technical problems happen. You’ve got to be able to move to something else quickly so that the show doesn’t come to a screeching halt.
RW: Probably having multiple acoustic instruments in your setup gives some options. In case the Hammond Organ blows a tube you can pop on the upright piano and finish the song. It’s not like you have 12 keyboards all synced up and ten your laptop with all the sequences goes down.
TK: There are a lot of people in the industry that rely on a lot of technology. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in John’s band it’s all organic.
RW: Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, followed by the opening of his own exhibit. I remember his hits, but what would you say to today’s teenagers who haven’t heard of him? Where’s his place in Americana?
TK: I’d say he is the most famous musician from Indiana, and in regards to a radio format his music is most associated with Americana. It’s bluesy, with songs about patriotism, small towns, and everything that people think about related to Americana. He had a lot of hits, too. The music is organic, in part because of the prevalence of acoustic guitar, accordion, and field organ (a little pump organ with an acoustic sound).
RW: You and John are both Hoosiers. Did sharing Midwestern influences help you get the gig?
TK: John Cascella was Mellencamp’s keyboard player, he’s the one you hear on the hits. Working under him in the studio put me in a good position since I knew his style and the parts he played.
RW: How did your harmonica and accordion concept develop?
TK: In the early ‘90s I was around Cascella,and Larry Crane was putting a band together. He had an accordion, and I thought “Maybe I should learn how to play this.” I bought my first accordion, it wasn’t something that I used a lot, I just pulled it out as a different kind of keyboard. In John’s band it’s not carrying as much as it does in Louisiana zydeco or German polka. It’s just playing hook lines, and almost always in unison with the violin.
RW: How do you decide which keyboard is right for a song? When do you switch from Hammond Organ to piano? Are you thinking more about the timbre or the articulation?
TK: It kind of depends on what the guitar player is doing. You have an idea that it’s going to be an accordion song, and then you discover that it doesn’t fit with what the guitar player is doing. If they are covering a lot of the rhythm you may decide an organ pad would combine better. Sometimes it’s trial and error in the studio. John may have an idea right away and tell me “You’re going to be playing organ this” and then we’ll try it, and he’ll say, “OK. Go get your accordion.”
RW: Are all those acoustic instruments on stage for theatrical effect? By the time they’ve been amplified couldn’t you get pretty much the same sounds with an electronic keyboard playing samples?
TK: Going back to the Americana thing, John wants a totally organic sound, and that comes from things not being perfect, which is what you get if you have a digital piano, It sounds so perfect. It’s also cool if you’ve got the means to put an acoustic piano up there and have it well-maintained. It’s harder to do that when you’re touring as a member of a local band. It’s the same with the organ. You can get really close with a synthesizer, but it’s the imperfections in the Hammond organ that give it its character. The organ that I play onstage is from the late ‘50s and it’s been with me for years. Like the piano, it’s a job to carry it around, but it’s really nice to have that up there, and like everything that’s up there on stage, it’s the real deal. Fortunately we have a crew to handle the transportation.
RW: For sure! I don’t miss those days of carrying a Hammond Organ up the stairs in a club. Moving a Fender Rhodes piano by myself was enough for me.
What do you think is different about the Midwest music scene?
TK: One thing that I think is unique in the Indianapolis area is that a lot of the studio work is driven by publishing with Hal Leonard, which is mostly recorded at Airborn and The Lodge studios. For years Gaither Studios up in Alexandria was a hub of gospel music. Studio work is something that’s been important around here for a long time. I also toured with the Christian singer Sandi Patty which came out of the Anderson connection.
RW: When you were on campus last year you told the a story you’d heard from the basketball player and coach Steve Alford, who came up through Indiana basketball culture and led IU to a national championship in 1987, before going on to coach for the UCLA Bruins. He was famous in part for the hard work and practice he put in to improve his performance. If I remember correctly, you told the story about Alford’s first day on the job coaching at a high school, and being challenged by one of the players to top his having just made 23 consecutive free throw shots. Evidently he didn’t know that Alford had shot 89.8% from the line in college, the fifth best in NCAA history. Alford took the student up on the bet and proceeded to establish his credentials by sinking 218 in a row. How does the discipline of basketball training connect with the value of hard work in Americana music?
TK: Hoosier Basketball is all about mastering the fundamentals and doing the hard work. In Mellencamp’s band we work as a unit. There’s not a lot of hot shot stuff going on, it’s not driven by flashy guitar solos. It’s all about solid supporting parts that serve the song, and the hard work in the rehearsal room to make everything clean, so that when we go off to perform it’s very consistent. Steve Alford didn’t just go outside and shoot free throws when the weather was good. He would practice free throws when he was tired and sweaty from playing basketball, so that he would be working under the same sort of conditions he would face during the last quarter of a real game. We do the same kind of thing when we’re practicing. We don’t check off the songs that we know we can play and leave it at that. When we’re preparing for a new tour will run the show over and over to make sure all the details of going from one song to another are worked out.
RW: Do you put in as much effort on the staging?
TK: That’s also important. There are many spots we’ve got to hit throughout the show. There’s one point where I have to finish a song on piano and immediately strap into the accordion for a quick cue. All that stuff has to be practiced over and over.
RW: I’ve lived many more years in warm climates than cold ones. I went to graduate school in San Diego, lived on the equator in Brazil, followed by 13 years in Southwest Louisiana. I’m still adjusting to life in the North. I think it’s understandable that people here are more cautious and careful in their planning, otherwise you can slip and fall on the ice, or not starve in the winter if you didn’t put enough nuts away in the fall. The hard work and team mentality that you describe at work in the band behind the scenes sounds more like something that would happen in the upper Midwest than in Los Angeles, Miami, or New Orleans, where people aren’t as worried by the possibility of freezing to death.
Well, I know you need to relax before your gig tonight. Thanks for taking the time to fill us in on your background, and a little about what it’s like to play in the band known as the voice of the heartland. Good luck with the rest of the tour.
TK: Sure thing, bye.
©2017 Troye Kinnett and Robert Willey
RW: Thanks for taking my call. Where are you guys today?
TK: I’m in my room in a hotel in Times Square. We’re playing our last show Tuesday night at Forest Stadium.
RW: I see that it’s that your summer tour is going to end in September, playing for Farm Aid.
TK: That’s right. What’s your book about?
It’s is designed to cover the basic information about the industry in a compact form, along with information about the Midwest scene that isn’t included in other music business books.
RW: You were born in Muncie and started playing piano when you were 8 years old, and inspired by the great music of the time such as what Stevie Wonder and Elton John. When did you realize that music was your thing?
TK: It was just something that I could do better than my big brother (laughs) so I just kept doing it. I took lessons like everyone else and there was a period when I wanted to quit, but my mom made me finish that year. By the end of the year I reached a new plateau and it became fun.
That was the time when the Wapahani High School Marching Band was wining competitions year after year at the state fair. We marched in the Macy’s Day Parade in New York City, and had a lot of opportunities for a school in a little county that didn’t even have a football team. That’s where I grew up, and it was just good timing I guess. Jim Craig was the band director and put together a really good band program. I was very involved in that and played piano in solo and ensemble contests. Before you knew it, I had a scholarship to Ball State University to study music.
RW: What did you do there?
TK: I usually joke around by saying, all three of my parents were teachers. My step mom, my mom, and my dad was a principle. I know that I would have liked to have taught music, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as being a composer and to play. In the first two years I hadn’t gotten into the core of the composition classes, but I was very involved In the jazz program and I loved music theory, I always liked that. I’ve always thought I’d like to come back and teach theory some day if the performance things doesn’t work out (laughs), so it was really cool to be invited back last year and be part of that class in Surviving the Music Business class that Dan Porter did with Kevin Ray.
RW: While you were a music major, did you happen to meet Cleve Scott at the house out on Bethel Avenue? Is that where you started learning about audio production?
TK: I had a meeting with him and talked about that program, but with the Music Engineering Technology program at the time you had to minor in physics. I wasn’t really interested at the time in engineering. I got thrown into that later out of necessity.
RW: What bands did you play in before you met John?
TK: There was a band called 10:01 that was playing in the area. They were huge around Muncie and Newcastle, and I thought, “This is the band that is going somewhere. This is what I want to do.” I had an opportunity to make $200 a week.
RW: Where did the name come from?
TK: It came from how time is displayed on a digital clock.
RW: That’s pretty deep. In the right frame of mind that could be mind-bending!
TK: (laughs) That was the idea. It was palindromic, and also about the same time the band would go on at night to start playing in clubs.
RW: Yeah, you were probably more likely to be up at 10:01 at night than waking up at 10:01 in the morning.
You played with a lot of other groups. How did you work up to playing with John Mellencamp?
TK: It didn’t take me long to figure out that 10:01 wasn’t really going anywhere. I didn’t want to just travel the country in a band playing clubs. In the process, I met people who were doing studio work and got an entry level position at TRC Studios in Indianapolis. Their main writer was John Cascella—he played on all of Mellencamp’s hit records. All the accordion lines that I ended up playing when I joined John’s band were from John Cascella. I was at the studio getting whatever work I could—answering the phone, doing odd jobs, and writing music for industrials and TV spots.
RW: Were you doing any engineering work?
TK: No, it wasn’t until the ‘90s that I got into that. I was working at Bennett Innovations, and that was part of the job.
RW: I interrupted you. You were talking about working at the studio.
TK: As far as the connection with Mellencamp, I did a lot of sessions at the Gaither Studios. I also brought Dane Clark in for a lot of the commercials I was producing wherever I happened to be working. I had recorded with Jimmy Ryser who was Mellencamp’s guitarist at one point, and worked with a lot of the other guys in the band at times over the years. But it was Dane’s recommendation that got my foot in the door.
RW: Keyboard Magazine described you as a “multi-talented musician and composer”. What are you best at, and what do you do with it?
TK: I appreciate Ernie Rideout saying that. I think he saw that I can do a variety of things. But I’m a piano player first. That’s something that I don’t do a lot of in John’s band, but it all starts from that I think. It helps to be able to adapt to other things. Some of the other things that I do with John like harmonica, accordion, and occasional percussion are just kind of an auxiliary thing. You have to be versatile. I’ll do this six-week tour we’re on and a few more dates in August, and then that might be it for the rest of the year. I’ve directed music at church, I’ll do some charting and arranging for singers that are putting together a show, maybe play locally, and session work. You have to be able to do a variety of things.
RW: On your website you have the brand tagline “Musician – Composer – Professional”. It sounds like you’re mostly a musician along with some composing.
TK: Right. The website includes a variety of projects including some industrial things. It’s just not something that I’m doing a lot of right now. Occasionally I’ll get a call for to compose something—I’ll be scoring music for a documentary later this year, but right now it’s kind of hit and miss. That part of the work has really changed in the last few years. There used to be a lot more opportunity and budget for scoring TV spots and video. Now there’s a whole lot of library music you can pull off of the Internet.
RW: What’s the purpose of your website? Is it for clients interested in hiring you as a composer? You’ve probably already got your network established as a performer.
TK: I feel like it’s for people just like you, who want to make a connection and find out a little something about you. I did that with you. I met a bunch of people when I was at Ball State last year and I couldn’t remember which one you were. Once I looked you up I realized “Oh, yeah, I know which one he is.” You need to have some kind of web presence. A lot people just go to Facebook now.
RW: Do you have any advice for people who are just starting out as performers?
TK: People will tell you to practice hard. I’m not so good at marketing myself, but that would be a good thing. My biggest advice if you’re performing live would be to always have a backup plan on stage. Technical problems happen. You’ve got to be able to move to something else quickly so that the show doesn’t come to a screeching halt.
RW: Probably having multiple acoustic instruments in your setup gives some options. In case the Hammond Organ blows a tube you can pop on the upright piano and finish the song. It’s not like you have 12 keyboards all synced up and ten your laptop with all the sequences goes down.
TK: There are a lot of people in the industry that rely on a lot of technology. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in John’s band it’s all organic.
RW: Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, followed by the opening of his own exhibit. I remember his hits, but what would you say to today’s teenagers who haven’t heard of him? Where’s his place in Americana?
TK: I’d say he is the most famous musician from Indiana, and in regards to a radio format his music is most associated with Americana. It’s bluesy, with songs about patriotism, small towns, and everything that people think about related to Americana. He had a lot of hits, too. The music is organic, in part because of the prevalence of acoustic guitar, accordion, and field organ (a little pump organ with an acoustic sound).
RW: You and John are both Hoosiers. Did sharing Midwestern influences help you get the gig?
TK: John Cascella was Mellencamp’s keyboard player, he’s the one you hear on the hits. Working under him in the studio put me in a good position since I knew his style and the parts he played.
RW: How did your harmonica and accordion concept develop?
TK: In the early ‘90s I was around Cascella,and Larry Crane was putting a band together. He had an accordion, and I thought “Maybe I should learn how to play this.” I bought my first accordion, it wasn’t something that I used a lot, I just pulled it out as a different kind of keyboard. In John’s band it’s not carrying as much as it does in Louisiana zydeco or German polka. It’s just playing hook lines, and almost always in unison with the violin.
RW: How do you decide which keyboard is right for a song? When do you switch from Hammond Organ to piano? Are you thinking more about the timbre or the articulation?
TK: It kind of depends on what the guitar player is doing. You have an idea that it’s going to be an accordion song, and then you discover that it doesn’t fit with what the guitar player is doing. If they are covering a lot of the rhythm you may decide an organ pad would combine better. Sometimes it’s trial and error in the studio. John may have an idea right away and tell me “You’re going to be playing organ this” and then we’ll try it, and he’ll say, “OK. Go get your accordion.”
RW: Are all those acoustic instruments on stage for theatrical effect? By the time they’ve been amplified couldn’t you get pretty much the same sounds with an electronic keyboard playing samples?
TK: Going back to the Americana thing, John wants a totally organic sound, and that comes from things not being perfect, which is what you get if you have a digital piano, It sounds so perfect. It’s also cool if you’ve got the means to put an acoustic piano up there and have it well-maintained. It’s harder to do that when you’re touring as a member of a local band. It’s the same with the organ. You can get really close with a synthesizer, but it’s the imperfections in the Hammond organ that give it its character. The organ that I play onstage is from the late ‘50s and it’s been with me for years. Like the piano, it’s a job to carry it around, but it’s really nice to have that up there, and like everything that’s up there on stage, it’s the real deal. Fortunately we have a crew to handle the transportation.
RW: For sure! I don’t miss those days of carrying a Hammond Organ up the stairs in a club. Moving a Fender Rhodes piano by myself was enough for me.
What do you think is different about the Midwest music scene?
TK: One thing that I think is unique in the Indianapolis area is that a lot of the studio work is driven by publishing with Hal Leonard, which is mostly recorded at Airborn and The Lodge studios. For years Gaither Studios up in Alexandria was a hub of gospel music. Studio work is something that’s been important around here for a long time. I also toured with the Christian singer Sandi Patty which came out of the Anderson connection.
RW: When you were on campus last year you told the a story you’d heard from the basketball player and coach Steve Alford, who came up through Indiana basketball culture and led IU to a national championship in 1987, before going on to coach for the UCLA Bruins. He was famous in part for the hard work and practice he put in to improve his performance. If I remember correctly, you told the story about Alford’s first day on the job coaching at a high school, and being challenged by one of the players to top his having just made 23 consecutive free throw shots. Evidently he didn’t know that Alford had shot 89.8% from the line in college, the fifth best in NCAA history. Alford took the student up on the bet and proceeded to establish his credentials by sinking 218 in a row. How does the discipline of basketball training connect with the value of hard work in Americana music?
TK: Hoosier Basketball is all about mastering the fundamentals and doing the hard work. In Mellencamp’s band we work as a unit. There’s not a lot of hot shot stuff going on, it’s not driven by flashy guitar solos. It’s all about solid supporting parts that serve the song, and the hard work in the rehearsal room to make everything clean, so that when we go off to perform it’s very consistent. Steve Alford didn’t just go outside and shoot free throws when the weather was good. He would practice free throws when he was tired and sweaty from playing basketball, so that he would be working under the same sort of conditions he would face during the last quarter of a real game. We do the same kind of thing when we’re practicing. We don’t check off the songs that we know we can play and leave it at that. When we’re preparing for a new tour will run the show over and over to make sure all the details of going from one song to another are worked out.
RW: Do you put in as much effort on the staging?
TK: That’s also important. There are many spots we’ve got to hit throughout the show. There’s one point where I have to finish a song on piano and immediately strap into the accordion for a quick cue. All that stuff has to be practiced over and over.
RW: I’ve lived many more years in warm climates than cold ones. I went to graduate school in San Diego, lived on the equator in Brazil, followed by 13 years in Southwest Louisiana. I’m still adjusting to life in the North. I think it’s understandable that people here are more cautious and careful in their planning, otherwise you can slip and fall on the ice, or not starve in the winter if you didn’t put enough nuts away in the fall. The hard work and team mentality that you describe at work in the band behind the scenes sounds more like something that would happen in the upper Midwest than in Los Angeles, Miami, or New Orleans, where people aren’t as worried by the possibility of freezing to death.
Well, I know you need to relax before your gig tonight. Thanks for taking the time to fill us in on your background, and a little about what it’s like to play in the band known as the voice of the heartland. Good luck with the rest of the tour.
TK: Sure thing, bye.
©2017 Troye Kinnett and Robert Willey