The Missing Chapter: McKay Stevens

In my effort to recapture the missing chapter of my life that I first wrote about here, I’d like to use my considerable clout to introduce all three four! of my readers to some amazingly talented, yet remarkably good-hearted artists you’ll want to keep an eye on, because I suspect they’re going places.

Last week, I confessed one of  my many deep character flaws: I struggle with country music. While I’m in the confession mode, here’s another: I just can’t get on the hip-hop bandwagon. I’ve tried to ease into it via hip-hop for beginners, when they slip a hip-hop break into the middle of a pop song, but it seldom clicks for me.

Then when we were doing our online video auditions for StarBiz, we got a link to a dimly lit video of these guys standing in a cave of some sort taking advantage of the cool acoustics to do an original hip-hop song. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t in your face. It just had this cool vibe that I couldn’t take my ears off of.

But I wasn’t sure if it would fly on BYUtv. We were doing a singing show for solo acts, and this was a group where the only singing, which was minimal, happened during the chorus and wasn’t even done by the lead guy. And did I mention the show was on BYUtv? Which is not exactly synonymous with hip-hop?

But Aaron and David dug it, so we reached out to the non-singing lead singer. His name was McKay Stevens, and it turns out that our non-singing lead singer was, by day, a professor at UVU. In fact, when I mentioned him at home, one of my daughters perked up and said she had taken a class from him, and that he was totally cool and all the girls had crushes on him. McKay, if you’re reading this, please don’t take this wrong, but I wondered if we were talking about the same guy. Because the guy in the video didn’t look like your typical heartthrob professor.

But after working with him for a few days on the set, I could totally get it. The guy is smart, perceptive, articulate, and nice.

He’s a self-confessed non-singer, but the lyrics he writes have this way of engulfing my mind so that while I’m processing what I just heard and being delighted by that, he’s already delivered the next thing for my mind to be delighted at, and my mind doesn’t catch up until somewhere in the middle of the pleasing chorus, “my life can’t get much better than this.”

I don’t think it gets much better than this.

He grew up on welfare in some of Southern California’s tougher neighborhoods, lost some family members along the way, and developed an affinity for skateboarding, urban art and urban music. The kind of life that can drag some people down. But in people like McKay, it seems to give them a perspective and an appreciation that is a good reminder. Thanks for the reminder, McKay.

Here’s a more produced video of the same song he submitted for his audition, 79th and Flight, named for one of his old stomping grounds in SoCal.

Right now, his band, The Vibrant Sound, is touring. You can catch up with where they are here. If they’re in your neighborhood, you should check them out. Enjoy, tell a friend, and keep an eye on McKay Stevens.