He Heard There Was a Star :: Gay Singer-Songwriter Roger Kuhn

Singer-songwriter Roger Kuhn grew up on a farm in North Dakota, but to judge from the slow, low drawl of his singing voice--which can switch from an Elvis croon to a tenderly gruff Tom Waits growl at a moment's notice--he picked up more than a hint of his mother's Alabama accent.

Toss in a stint in New York City, where he launched his music career, and Kuhn's vocal influences are just about complete--so far. One can only wonder what impact life in his current city, Boston, will have. So far, not much: Kuhn only arrived in the Hub of the Universe, together with his husband, in June.

The move marks a return for the pair, who are legally wed. "We got married in Boston in May of 2009," Kuhn told EDGE. "So we've been legally married in the state of Massachusetts now over a year."

But living in New York was just as good, wasn't it? Doesn't New York honor same-sex marriages granted elsewhere, even though the Empire State failed to bring gay and lesbian families in out of the cold when support among state lawmakers for a law to extend marriage equality collapsed early this year?

"Uhhh... they say they do... but it was always very sketchy," Kuhn told EDGE. "You could never get a full answer. I've known several people who have had problems, like a lesbian couple who wanted to get their names legally changed. [The state] wouldn't do it, because they weren't legally married in New York. There's no actual law protecting us in New York--it just sounds nice [to say that the sate will honor same-sex marriages granted elsewhere]. Which is one of the reasons why moving to Boston was an easy choice for us, because we were already married here. We thought, 'If we're paying taxes, let our tax money go to a state that's actually going to recognize out love.' "

Kuhn isn't about to sever is relationship with New York City. He's headed back to the Big Apple for a release party in support of Every Year Around Xmas Time, his new seven-track CD of holiday themed original songs. He still keeps a special place in his heart for New York, however.

"I love Boston," Kuhn said. "Let me start out by saying I love Boston."

But?

"But I didn't start out wanting to live in Boston," Kuhn confessed. "I grew up wanting to live in New York City. That was my dream: move to New York, become an artist, and that's what I did. New York will always be that special place for me, even though I've let the city go and moved on. But all the hard work that I did, all the passion and tears and hurt... this record was written in New York. All of my records have been written in New York. All my childhood dreams are there."

Though being an artist was his dream from childhood, being a musician was not. "I wanted to be an actor," Kuhn confided to EDGE. "But I think the fact that I was musical was kind of a quirk. It wasn't something I ever recognized about myself until others started to say, 'We want you to sing a little bit more... You should do this solo...' Music, and singing in particular, always kind of pushed its way ahead of acting.

"I moved to New York thinking I'd be an actor," Kuhn continued, "because I did musical theater and acted all throughout my time living in North Dakota. And then I got to New York and went to one audition--the line was wrapped around the block. I was, like, 'Fuck this! No way! I can't handle it!' It was too much. But within three or four months of living in New York, I got my first professional job singing, and I thought, 'Well, if I can make money doing this, maybe everybody was right!' So I did a really dramatic shift and started to perform as a solo artist.

"I'd always been writing songs, but not doing much with them, when I lived in North Dakota," Kuhn added. "But it was really in New York that [I started to perform]. I started out doing standards and lounge music at art openings and different parties around town. The people I was working with had a really crazy relationship and they had a breakup and I kind of fell in the shuffle of all that, so I said, 'You know what? Fuck anybody else taking control of my professional career. Let me just do it myself.' So I stepped out, got o n the stage, and started singing. Friends gave me a guitar, I took a couple lessons, and then pretty much from there was self-taught. That's how I got started."

Kuhn relied on talent, in other words, a talent that comes through in his expressive voice and his songwriting. Musically, his style has Johnny Cash moments and Lloyd Cole interludes--but those artists were not his primary influences.

"Musically, I grew up listening to '80s pop music--Madonna, Cyndi Lauper," Kuhn said. "When I got older, I started listening to more female singer-songwriters, in particular Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, The Indigo Girls, k.d. lang, Paula Cole. These were all women that I idolized not only for their performing ability, but their song writing--their craft. They taught me how to craft a song, how to tell a story.

"The male comparisons that I get vocally--I guess that's just how I sound!" Kuhn laughs. "I grew up listening to Madonna, but my Mom was always listening to Elvis and country music, so I think maybe by default I just kind of picked that singing style up, maybe to please my mother in some weird way!

"I get the Elvis comparison a lot, and I don't quite hear it myself, but I always like to joke that I'm the secret love child of Elvis and Cher," Kuhn added. "I think that they got together, had a kid, and it was me!"

Sorrow and Comedy

Kuhn's songs can be sorrowful or romantic, but they are just as effective when he writes a comic song, such as "What's Your Name," the first track on his previous CD, Proof, and a video on Logo a few years ago. "What's Your Name" starts off sounding like the typical love-struck ode to a new significant other--until the narrator, pulling himself back from his swoon, realizes, "But perhaps I should start with something simple--like, what's your name?" The romantic bubble is popped, but to the sound of sardonic, knowing laughter. In most of his songs, dramatic or comic, Kuhn isn't simply tossing out facile rhymes and then dressing them up with a hook; he's setting a scene, crating a mood, and telling a tale. But, EDGE wondered, isn't writing an effective funny song a tough task?

"I get an idea about a story I want to tell, whether it's my own story or an imaginary one I'm making up," Kuhn told EDGE, "and I don't set out to write a song with a funny twist. It just kind of happens. The lyrics come to me, and sometimes I don't realize until later, when someone starts laughing, and I say, 'Oh! I guess it is kind of humorous. I didn't think about it that way.'

"But I've also challenged myself, as I've gotten older and a bit more mature, that my song writing has to take on a certain level as well," the musician continued. "Part of it has been learning the craft of songwriting; learning to trust my instincts a little bit more; learning that it's okay to twist the story around to keep the listener guessing. I think it's the same thing that I'll do vocally, when all of a sudden I'll flip off into a high note. It's something to keep the audience entertained in another way. I've always been a performer, and the way to keep your audience entertained is either to deliver some drama, or to make them laugh a little bit."

Kuhn comes by his range and vocal control naturally. "I've never practiced it," he admitted. "I think it's a quirk." Although, he reckoned, his habit of mimicking the girl bands he listened to on the farm probably had something to do with his present vocal ability. "I would sing with them on old cassette tapes, and I would go out into the fields and sing as loud as I could. I learned how to control my voice in their range, so that when I hit puberty I didn't lose that ability to hit those notes; I just shifted it a little bit."

As for his ability to sustain vocal power even when singing in a near whisper, "I'm not a Broadway singer," Kuhn reflects. "I don't belt it out. I mean, I can belt, but I prefer not to. I prefer to hold that back. I get chills more when I listen to a male singer who's not belting, like Roy Orbison or Chris Isaak. These are men I started listening to only when people told me that I sounded like them. I listened to them, and I learned from them.

"I think the best artists are mimics," Kuhn added, "and we learn from other artists: 'Oh, listen to how he's done that!' Then I take that and I add my own influence into it as well. I couldn't afford to take singing lessons, I dropped out of choir... so I listened to the best singers that I could--Barbra Streisand and Celine Dione, people who you might call classically well-behaved singers. They can hit the notes, they can hold the notes. My music teachers were those artists."

But all's not chuckles on the new CD. Although there are light-hearted tracks like "Xmas Joys," in which the narrator warns a boyfriend who's been bad that Santa's going to leave him without treats and presents, or "The Saddest Day," in which a fan of the holiday season mourns the end of Christmas, there are also songs of brokenhearted people with no one to love, spoil, or scold for the holiday. It's true that the holidays are a sad and lonely time of year for many people, but Christmas songs usually gloss that over.

Not so with "December," the CD's opening track (co-written with James Erickson), which will bring a tear to the eye of anyone who doesn't happen to be the Grinch. Or "Oh What A World," in which an unfortunate young man ends up dead on Christmas morning. "Until I met my husband, that's what Christmas was for me," Kuhn told EDGE. "It wasn't good. It wasn't happy. It was hard, it was lonely, it was depressing. It's just something I didn't look forward to, and that had nothing to do with the commercialization of Christmas, because I always liked the presents.

"It was more just about that time, because even when I would spend it with my friends, the majority of them were in relationships," Kuhn continued, "so I'd go to the party but then I'd go home alone, and the only companion I had was my guitar. So I would often go home and sing sad love songs that I had written already.

"And then one day, I picked up my guitar and I wrote this song called 'Every year Around Xmas Time,' because I was thinking about somebody--there was not real person I was thinking about," Kuhn hastily amended, "I was imagining as if this pain that I had, that was so real... I hadn't had my heart broken, I was just lonely. But I imagined as if someone did it to me, because then it made sense, why I had these emotions.

"After I wrote that song I felt so much better. When I shared it with somebody else, they said, 'Wow--I've felt that way around Christmas, so sad, so lonely.' It just so happened that the next song that I wrote wasn't a sad song, it was a happier song. And then came another sad Christmas song, and then another happy one, and then another sad one.

"The sequencing on the record starts out very sad, with a song called 'December,' but it ends with a song called 'I Heard There Was A Star,' " noted Kuhn. "And December really is all about that lost love, that yearning for somebody at the holiday time. But then there's a redemption in the record, in that final song; if you listen to it, the song sounds like, 'Jesus was born, and life is so good because we have him.' But the song is actually about my husband, and about how he was born: 'Oh, hallelujah! Oh, precious sight!' That's what the song is about! I'm not a Christian, so I'm not going to write a Christian song. But I'll let people believe it's about Jesus.

"To borrow from a Christian phrase, he saved me," Kuhn continued. "He saved me from that lovely feeling I had at Christmas time, and now I'm never lonely at Christmas! It is utterly Christian [in the sense that the song is about being saved by love]. And if it weren't for the birth of Jesus, we wouldn't have 'Christ mass,' and even though this is not a Christian record, you always borrow from what you've had in your life. I used to be a Catholic."

Insofar as the songs on his CDs will have a broad appeal, perhaps this artist still is catholic, in the sense of the word pertaining to the universal. After all, who doesn't like a sad holiday crooner--or the snappy, funny Christmas ditty that comes along afterwards to console the listener?

Roger Kuhn's new CD, Every Year Around Xmas Time, is available through the artist's website and at Amazon.com.

Full disclosure: Roger Kuhn and Kilian Melloy both sing with the Boston Gay Men's Chorus