about Levon Walker

Levon Walker is a singer/songwriter in Knoxville, TN. Fundamentally a pianist, consequentially a guitarist, and aspiringly the founder of a band. Levon writes poetry and is learning modern dance.  He can top off the same cup of coffee all day and never jitter.  He has no strong feelings towards hipsters anymore, obscure popularity is better than none.  Levon’s garden this year will be more heavily concentrated on beets and sweet potatoes than last year’s.

Biography

In the Western Coal Fields of the Bluegrass Kentucky, I was raised in the small, quiet town of Madisonville, the self-proclaimed “Best Town on Earth.” We got there when I was very small and my dad had sold the farm in Crittendon County to begin an insurance business.  My mom inherited the family piano and at age six I began the Alfred Piano Method.  Mom was raised playing hymns for her tiny Southern Baptist Church.  I’d wake up sometimes before school to hear her playing, stride bass with full octave right hand melodies, “Then Sings My Soul.”   Dad brought me up on Jim Croce, The Guess Who, the Beatles, and Neil Diamond.  He was a singer.  I remember him practicing all the time. My favorite performance came every year, my dad singing “Proud to be an American” before the fireworks, standing on a flatbed trailer, microphone with an orange windscreen.

By age 14, I was playing the piano in our Southern Gospel Church.  We had a choir, a Hammond B3 and the retired lead guitarist from Black Oak Arkansas.  Music kept me out of trouble in my teenage years, we had a lot of church.

Growing up in Kentucky meant plenty of running barefoot, exploring strip pits and shooting things up.  I like to remember those parts.  Far from self actualized, I attended the University of Kentucky on an Engineering scholarship and left with a degree in Finance plus an unfinished minor in Jazz Piano Performance.

With no aspiration for Finance, I had a room full of keyboards and vintage pianos, some mediocre guitar abilities, and notebooks full of songs I was terrified to sing.  Hiding behind keyboards was my style, although I resented my fearful hindrances.  I once walked out of a Ben Folds concert, let myself into a closed building with a piano, and played all night while screaming at the top of my lungs.  These outbreaks would continue in private for a long time.

I was working in a coffee shop the first night I met the aspirant artist, Ashley Addair.  She inspired me to finish college, write my earliest songs, and stop chain-smoking.  I played in bar bands and church, but still terrified to even sound check a microphone.  I think the keyboard player can remain the shy scientist.

Ashley and I got married in a fever.  My first job was as a loan company collection agent, a fresh college man who’d never considered employability. No internships, no networking, just music and Ashley.  Age 22.

I got my first shotgun pulled on me while repo-ing a pickup truck in a Western KY trailer park.  I learned to find people in strange places, which taught me a new version of my hometown.  Dirty, hungry kids lied to me about their mommy not being home.  I had to quit. I tried insurance with my dad, until one day Ashley packed the apartment and said she was moving to Nashville.  I was welcome to join, but we would not continue life in a small Kentucky town.

It was hard for me to leave what I had adjusted to accept as my career, and it was pronounced F’nance.  A tricky word for some, like my name, which is exactly backwards from “Finance.”   L’von is wrong. LEEvon is correct.

Before I had the chance to make a big star of myself, I had an unfortunate glass mishap at my restaurant of employment.  A growler of beer exploded in my hand and severed all the tendons.  We lived for six months on workers comp while I couldn’t fret a guitar or write my name.  Thank you, Nashville.

It seemed like a good idea about then for Ashley to finish school.  With renewed vigor, I became an insurance man for the New York Life Insurance Company and we moved to Knoxville for the University of Tennessee.  I didn’t know a soul there and never sold a policy for months.  I cold called, walked into businesses, and joined clubs.  I wore the same three suits, on repeat, couldn’t afford to dry clean them.  A briefcase full of crackers.  But I bought coffee for strangers all over town, until somebody more experienced convinced me that 100% commission was not my bag in Knoxville.

Then I was a banker.  I liked the elderly ladies who needed their checkbook balanced over a $3.66 discrepancy, they had beautiful handwriting.  Or loafing old men coming by to drink coffee, show me the coins and Civil War pistols kept in their Safety Deposit Box.  I had my Securities Licenses now, I was supposed to pitch a variable annuity.  Ashley and I found a foreclosed historic grocery store and started fixing it up.  We bought it for no money down, on stated/undocumented income, and I’d only had a salary job for six weeks.  It was 2006, and you could do that.

Soon enough there were foreclosures everywhere and the banking industry was making headlines.  It was 2007-8, which now goes by many names: the banking crisis, the financial crisis, the global financial crisis.  And I was right there, in the middle of an existential crisis.

EP 2008

I’d been volunteering to teach Financial Literacy courses around town.  I think it was guilt from collection threats I’d once made to those broke single moms, or maybe the overdraft fees the banks charged, unless they happened to come see me.  The bank pushed sales as hard as they could.  Then they started received phone calls from 50 year-old children of 80 year-old parents, wondering why I’d gotten dad confused about his retirement.  Did I realize how long dad had been retired?

Finally I resigned.  For a year I taught financial literacy through the University of Tennessee Extension.  I travelled around the state.  Ashley was in grad school to be a middle school teacher.  We were on track, and pretending to ourselves that everything made sense.  But for the life of us, that was precisely the problem.