Songs of hope, born of travel – Kevin Miso

When he was in a land where nobody spoke his language, Kevin Miso learned how to sing. Eight years ago, Miso was a college student spending a year abroad in Spain. He’d grown up in a musical family.  His father, Roland, grew up in Hawaii as a musician; his sister, Maile, had appeared on the television show Popstar and was a member of the band Eden’s Crush. There were always instruments around the family home.

But Miso had never really realized how essential music was to him until he was all alone in Spain. He had that lonely feeling that comes from not speaking your native tongue, and one day he stopped into a guitar shop. A guitar, he thought, would make him feel more like he was at home. The shop owner handed him a beautiful Paloma gypsy guitar.

“Look man,” Miso said. “I’m a student. I just want to play guitar in the park.”

“Tell you what,” the man said. “A hundred Euros.”

Miso, in disbelief, paid for the guitar. When he took it away and played it for the first time, he was astonished.

“It sounded great,” he recalled. “Just unreal. And I thought, you know what? I can play some songs, but I want to write songs. And I just started writing.”

He had a class schedule that basically allowed him to travel six days a week. He travelled Europe with his guitar, and wrote songs. He went from playing in the park to playing real gigs, including one in which he played just before a headliner in a large gymnasium. He brought the house down.

“Once I got that love on stage, I was like, ‘Wow, man…this is fun. I should keep it going,’” he said.

Everything was coming together. He returned to school at UC Santa Barbara and was out on a date with a girl he really wanted to impress. He was at a club and the guy who booked it had heard he played. The place had a regular gig open, and the man asked Miso to audition, on the spot.

“I thought, man, what if I suck?” Miso said. “But I had to do it. I had to man up.”

He won the gig, and the girl, and has never looked back since.

“It obviously worked, because we are married,” he said.

He moved to Hermosa Beach after college and bartended for six years. Then he took time off and traveled to Southeast Asia. Just as before, songs came to him while he was away. When he returned, a little more than two years ago, he quit his job and became a fulltime musician. He hit the local scene hard, sharpening his chops, and over the last two years has played 165 gigs a year.

Last year, producer Warren Huart – who has worked with The Fray, James Blunt, and Augustana – heard Miso and offered to help him make a record. The result is Miso’s newly released self-titled debut EP.

The EP contains the sound of an artist arriving. It’s crisp and forthrightly poppy, with a little reggae sway here and there, but there’s also something slyly coherent going on. Pascal once wrote that philosophy is man’s attempt to be at home everywhere; Miso sounds like a man at home within his music.

These are songs of abiding faith and love – not religious, and not necessarily romantic love, but of buoyancy, hope, and resilience. “For every ocean of love/there’s a mountain of hurt come along,” he sings on the song “Reason.” “But I do see forgiveness/as a way to move on/If our hope won’t falter/We’ll find our way home.” It’s inherently sunny music, and that is no small trick.

Miso credits his father’s Hawaiian disposition – “It’s Hawaiian style, ‘It’s cool, it’ll work out,’ really that mentality, even if you are failing,” Miso said  – as well has his Southern California upbringing.

“That is the whole idea, sunshine and ocean,” Miso said. “That is also just innately who I am. I’m Hawaiian and Irish, so I have that half-and-half duality thing, and I can’t really escape being born and raised in Southern California, going to UC Santa Barbara. You are going to get a sun-splashed Corona ad.”

Maybe a Corona ad of the soul; Miso’s music hits a spot. It’s an EP that marks a promising beginning. Miso recalled having a conversation with his friend Kevin Sousa a while back when something clicked. It resulted in the final song on the record, “Realize.”

“He said, ‘Hey man, who cares? Fail spectacularly,’” Miso said. “That is what ‘Realize’ is about, that admission, this is when you grow, that this is when you live. So many people try to live so perfectly that they are not alive. So, especially when you are young, try to learn your craft, but don’t try to be perfect – forget that, just live, and do.”

“This is the arrival, for sure,” Miso said. “Not a stepping stone, but it definitely puts my foot in the sand: this is what I am doing. This is who I am.”

Kevin Miso plays Saint Rocke Friday night. See www.kevinmiso.com for more info or www.saintrocke.com for tickets. ER

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