Soldier of song
Former Ranger Keni Thomas climbs country charts; album out Tuesday
BY BRAD BARNES
Staff Writer Keni Thomas has got this brown T-shirt he wears these days, with the word "Nashville" stamped across the chest.
It's a shirt the singer-songwriter probably wouldn't have pulled on two years ago, unless he was going for irony. His records have always been more Mellencamp than Merle.
Look at this past week's Radio & Records country airplay chart, though, and you'll find a curious thing. There at No. 47 -- right between songs by SheDaisy and Dierks Bentley, and just a few down from Shania Twain and Randy Travis -- is a song called "Not Me," recorded by one Keni Thomas. The song features vocal support from country royalty Emmylou Harris and Vince Gill.
Come Tuesday, music lovers should be able to find the new album that spawned the song, Thomas' "Flags of Our Fathers," in country bins.
It's a deeply personal album. Some of its 10 songs are drawn from his days as a U.S. Army Ranger, including the harrowing Somalia firefight he survived.
The CD is also undeniably a country music record.
Looking back now, eight years into his music career, Columbus' Thomas can see where a lot of people and a number of events conspired to set him down the road to country music's capital city.
It was only recently that he started shuffling his boots that way on his own. Thomas remembers a phone call from a music industry rep a few years ago, after a song by his band Cornbread got favorable ink in a music trade magazine.
"I remember the very first guy who called was a manager from Nashville," Thomas, 39, says. "And I thought, Nashville ?"
He'd never considered pursuing a country music career. "It's just funny that somewhere down the road, I end up there," says Thomas, whose crisply cropped top and rigid posture hint at his military past.
"The beauty of putting mileage on your life is you can always look back and you can see, you know, where you were supposed to be," he says. "I mean, how many things had to happen to bump me on the road to Nashville?"
Getting airplay
The new direction seems to be working.
The song has been inching ever closer to country's Top 40 since mid-December. It's in rotation in Kansas City, Phoenix and Chattanooga, Tenn.
"We've got some real heavyweight stations where people are saying 'Good Lord almighty!' " says Brent Maher, Thomas' producer in Nashville.
One of those is Sacramento's KNCI-FM 105.1, where jocks played the song on their morning show, to good reaction. They spotlighted the single on their evening call-in vote feature, "Make It or Break It," where it received overwhelming listener support. Now the station spins the song several times a day.
"The song has a good solid message to it, and an interesting point of view," said Greg Cole, the station's assistant program director. "Keni has a unique story to tell."
Country radio stations in Columbus are playing the song just occasionally.
"We're playing him a couple times a week," said Miller Robson, program director with Rooster 106. "We're doing as much as we can. That's what we did with Brad Cotter, too."
The story's the same at Kissin' 99.3 FM. But Maher, for his part, is confident the airplay will come. "You just have to wait. You have to be patient," says the producer, who is wrapping up work on the video, which he'll market to country video stations CMT and GAC.
The album's high-caliber guest list should help draw attention to the project. In addition to Gill and Harris, Kenny Rogers, Michael McDonald, Blackhawk, and Thomas' buddy Shawn Mullins offer support vocals.
Success comes slowly
Patience.
That's what Thomas has been hearing for his eight years with Cornbread.
"He's not going to give up," says friend Buddy Nelms, whose Columbus nightclub, The Loft, provided Thomas his first stage.
"Any obstacle -- he'll go around it, or over it," Nelms says, "or schmooze it."
Cornbread's rootsy rock debuted at Columbus' 1996 Olympic events. For the next six years the band was a fixture at outdoor concerts at The Loft, and as an opening act for big-name entertainment at Riverfest and the bygone Uptown Jams.
Over time, the band evolved. It began as a truly collaborative effort from four Columbus musicians, but as original members left, Thomas began replacing them with solid players who didn't have much voice in band decisions or writing. Eventually, Cornbread simply meant Keni Thomas and his tight set of players, often based in Atlanta.
And success was coming slowly. The band created a bit of a buzz with a video filmed here in 1999. The next year, a single called "Mona Lisa's Smile" was well-received on college stations.
Thomas was already feeling torn between his pop sensibilities and country music's audience. In spring 1999, he remembers having to choose whether to open for a classic rock act or a country act at Riverfest.
"My choices were Blue Oyster Cult and Ty Herndon," he says, laughing.
He didn't even know who Ty Herndon was. "But I did know that, although I love me some 'Go! Go! Godzilla,' I just didn't feel like we were going to match very well with Blue Oyster Cult."
The response from Herndon's fans overwhelmed him. To this day, he's never sold so many CDs after one show.
Picking away
He watched as the definition of country music got ever broader. Garth Brooks, Shania Twain and Faith Hill were just a mandolin's pluck away from what he would've called pop music.
Still, he wasn't a country singer.
The band soldiered on, and two big breaks came in 2002. First, they scored the opening set for country bad boys Montgomery Gentry, who came out of their bus early to catch Cornbread's set and liked what they heard. Thomas hit it off with the duo, who would later make important introductions in Nashville.
Later that year, the band was chosen as the local band featured in the movie "Sweet Home Alabama," which starred Reese Witherspoon. The exposure was great, but Thomas was crushed when no Cornbread song ended up on the film's soundtrack.
He began spending half his weeks in Nashville, pairing up with other songwriters to hone his craft and mingle.
Among those he met was Maher, who was well-known on music row. One of the acts Maher had discovered was a set of mother-daughter singers by the name of Naomi and Wynonna Judd.
Maher liked Thomas' writing and signed him to a three-year publishing deal. But he was also intrigued by the charismatic songwriter's military backstory.
Thomas, too, found himself thinking about his days as a Ranger more and more. Last year, he again grew frustrated with his music career's slow progress. "I felt myself just falling into that Nashville machine -- 'Oh yeah, just give it some time.' Blah, blah, blah," Thomas says. "And it wasn't happening." At age 38 he was losing his patience.
He decided to pack up his cowboy boots and pull on his old combat boots. He accepted a job that would take him to Iraq as a security guard for a private company.
His bandmates and friends, including Nelms, tried to talk him out of it. It was dangerous, and his career was gaining momentum, they said. He told them it would just be for a few months.
A familiar ring
That's when the phone rang, and the voice on the other end was from someone who Thomas hadn't heard in about a year.
"Hey, Keni."
It was Jeff Struecker, who was a fellow sergeant trapped with him during that nightmarish firefight in Somalia -- the event detailed in Mark Bowden's "Black Hawk Down," and later in Ridley Scott's movie of the same name. Thomas' charisma and earnestness had made him a natural expert on Somalia for news networks like CNN. He'd even done some lecturing.
"Hey, Keni. I hear you were thinking about heading over there to Iraq," said Struecker, who's now a chaplain.
"Yeah," Thomas said.
"I'm going to tell you, you shouldn't go," Struecker said. Thomas stammered a bit.
"I mean, it's an important job," Struecker continued. "But whether you know it or not, you're kind of the voice of the Rangers right now. You've got these news shows you've been doing, your music -- you're out there playing -- you're doing your speeches. And your music means something to the guys."
Then Struecker drove his point home.
"I think you're in a position where you can do more good as a singer than with a rifle in the sand," the chaplain said. "Not everybody has an opportunity like this."
It was a fateful call.
Not only did Thomas realize that holding a microphone could be more important than holding a weapon. But also: "Within a month of me saying, 'OK, I'll stick it out,' Brent Maher comes to me and says, 'Man, I've got this idea for the record. Hear me out.' "
The album they had been working on was to be a raucous, high-energy affair. "A regular Cornbread-type record," Thomas says. "It was definitely the fun, country-rock John Cougar, on the edgy side of country."
Here and there, he'd written songs that dealt with his past. The most autobiographical was one called "Fight I Couldn't Win," in which Thomas wrote "I ran over to help my friend/I tried to keep the life inside of him/That's a fight I couldn't win."
Maher and Thomas originally thought the album might include the song, or maybe one of the other soldier-themed pieces. But Maher's idea now was that the album would have all of them.
"I don't think you're being overly patriotic. I don't think you're trying to take advantage or anything," Maher told him. "I just really think that it could fit on a record."
Eventually, he came to the realization that writing about those experiences was more honest than what he'd been writing.
"I'm a songwriter and a performer," he says. "And what means something to me -- I'm now able to get that message across."
Though Maher's clout is undoubtedly what drew many of the album's high-profile guests, the producer says Thomas' integrity and songwriting skill is what kept them involved.
Working with all those other artists might have also served to remind Thomas how open the definition of country music has become. Faith Hill took pop singer Angie Aparo's "Cry" to the top of the charts, and now there's the hip-hop inflections of Big & Rich.
Heck, even that Nashville T-shirt he wears has an emblem of two electric guitars with criss-crossed necks on it.
It's a shirt Thomas seems comfortable wearing.
Why Keni Thomas and Cornbread made this record: "It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon on the third of October, 1993 when someone in the hanger yelled out, ‘Get it on!’ A mission was coming down. It was time to gear up. And just like that; our lives were changed and bound forever."