Meet Christopher Kenji | Pop-Rock Artist & Award-Winning Fashion Model

We had the good fortune of connecting with Christopher Kenji and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Christopher, what inspires you?

I think in general, I’m inspired by anything that makes me feel something. I guess that probably sounds pretty vague, but for me, it’s really that simple. It could really be anything but lately, it’s been dreams. I somehow keep writing songs in my dreams. I don’t know how or why but it’s been happening.

The weird part is that I rarely ever have dreams. Most of the time when my head hits the pillow at night, everything just goes black and I basically just die on my bed for a few hours and wake up with no recollection of anything at all except for the existential dread of having to see the light of another day (just kidding… kinda). Maybe once every month or two, I’ll wake up and be like, “Oh sh*t, I had a dream last night”.

I wrote “Break You” and “Never Enough” in my dreams as well as a new song of mine that I haven’t released yet —super excited about that one. I remember specifically with “Break You” though, I woke up the next morning with it stuck in my head. In my dream, I was like standing on top of a beaten up red Cadillac Deville with my guitar in an abandoned parking lot at night while singing my song, “Break You” —which, in my brain, I didn’t think anything of until about a minute later when I was like, “Wait… I don’t think I’ve written that song yet”. I then immediately opened my Voice Memos app on my phone and recorded me singing it. As they say, the rest was history!

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community? How did you get to where you are today?

My art/music is really just my life’s story. All the good, the bad and the ugly —it’s me, the experiences I’ve lived through, the world I’ve seen, the people I’ve met, the things that have left an impact on me, the lessons I’ve learned as well as the unique culmination of all the artists that came before me whom I’ve taken inspiration from over the course of my life to make the art that I make today. Someday when I die, I’ll be gone forever but the life I lived, the things I felt, the words I sang and the person I was will all still live on through my art. Hopefully people will still be able to connect with my life and hopefully it makes them feel less alone in this world. I guess it’s my way of living forever and somehow still being able to provide value to this world even when I’m not physically here to do so anymore.

But I guess, to answer your question more specifically about my journey of how I got to where I am today; well, it’s been a lot of hard-work, a stupid amount of passion, a decent amount of luck and too much crazy sh*t to fully remember. It feels like I had to live so many different lifetimes to get here and it feels like I’m still another one or two away from where I truly want to be. Anyway, I guess we have to start all the way back at the first lifetime (a.k.a the first decade or so of my music journey) ––which was just all about guitar and literally nothing else. There were no thoughts about being a singer/frontman, being my own solo artist, being a producer and mix engineer, being a fashion model, being my own brand or anything even like that. It was all just one word: guitar.

I guess guitar, and music in general, just always made sense to me when other things didn’t. I started playing at a young age and it was just all I really wanted to do, so I’d do it for like 6 hours a day. My dad was always telling me that if he was able to play guitar, in his mind, being able to play the “Stairway To Heaven” guitar solo would be the ultimate accomplishment. He said that no one in his high school was able to play it except for this one guy who was the best musician in the whole school and everyone idolized him ––so, when I was about 10 or 11 years old, I looked up the “Stairway To Heaven” guitar solo tablature online and spent that whole day learning it. I remember playing it for him at the end of the day and him being completely mind-blown. He was like, “We have to somehow get you playing in front of people.”

I realize that I’ve never really publicly talked about any of the next part of my guitar journey in fear of coming off too vain or something but I mean, it all really did happen so I guess there’s no reason to pretend like it didn’t. Anyway, in an effort to find a way for me to play in front of people, my dad took a long web surf on the good ol’ early 2000’s internet and found this program called BandWorks ––which essentially took kids and put them together in bands with other kids of the same age group. I was initially put in a band with a few kids my age but after the first day, they called my dad and told him that I was way too advanced for any of the bands with kids my age, so instead, they were going to put me in a band with all teenagers. When I got there, I was still too advanced but there was nowhere higher for me to be placed in the program, so the band instructor just had me help him teach the teenagers their parts. A year or so after I did that program, I moved onto a different program where I was put in a band with all adults as a 13 year old. I’m not sure if they’d ever done that before because when we performed in San Francisco, security had no idea what to do with me since I was way too young to be allowed inside of a nightclub. It was a whole situation (that I’m not even sure was actually legal) ––anyway, they decided on having security personally escort me on stage to perform and then immediately escort me back onto the street the second I was done performing. After that, I kept continuing to find myself in kind of surreal, “movie-like” situations.

When I was 14 years old, I auditioned and got into a highly-regarded performing arts high school, where at the end of my freshman year, I was awarded the “Best Guitarist Award” beating out every guitarist in the entire program ––including all of the seniors. I was never trained in jazz or really listened to jazz music but I auditioned and got accepted into the #1 top jazz band in the program and was taken to compete at jazz festivals all over the west coast where I personally received multiple awards including one at the prestigious Monterey Jazz Festival. At this point, I had my eyes set on my dream school, Berklee College of Music. I contacted Berklee and sent them some videos of me playing guitar, to which they granted me a scholarship to attend their Berklee Five-Week Program over the summer. I then flew out to Boston and spent five weeks on campus at Berklee with hundreds of other musicians from all over the world. At the end of the five weeks, we were all allowed to audition for a scholarship to Berklee (this was the biggest make-or-break moment). I knew there was a very slim chance of me getting a scholarship because not only were there prodigies from all over the globe but guitar was also, by far, the most competitive category out of any other instrument due to the insanely overwhelming amount of guitar applicants auditioning ––but I gave it my best shot.

On the last day of the Five-Week Program, they had this huge show at the Berklee Performance Center where they had, to this day, some of the most talented musicians I’ve ever seen in my entire life perform for us. After the performances, they showed on the huge screen, one by one, all of the names of the Berklee scholarship winners. Each one was some name that I couldn’t pronounce from some foreign country that I couldn’t pronounce and in my head I was just like, “Okay, there’s no possible way on God’s green earth that my name is going to show up on that screen.” I had forgotten that I was not just up against Americans but I was up against the entire world. People literally flew across the entire world to go to this Berklee Five-Week Program all to take a shot at this prize. I don’t think I even saw one other US citizen’s name pop up on that screen until, all of a sudden, I saw mine. I’ll never forget that moment until the day I die. I kind of lost focus because I really didn’t think that I had any chance of making it and wasn’t even looking at the screen until, out of nowhere, my roommate at the program started yelling and shaking me. I was like, “What?” ––and then I looked up to see my name plastered across that huge screen in front of those hundreds of people. I truly couldn’t believe it. I had gotten a scholarship to the school of my dreams before I was even technically allowed to apply.

My entire life ever since I was a little kid, even before most kids even think about the idea of college, I already knew I wanted to go to Berklee. It was like the greatest moment of my entire life but then, I couldn’t really celebrate at all because when I got back to my dorm building, literally everyone was either crying or trying really hard not to cry because no one made it. There were at least a hundred kids in that building and I only saw ONE other person who made it ––and this was a building of some of the most talented musicians I had ever met in my life. That really put things into perspective for me but also gave me such huge imposter syndrome. I was like, “How did I trick them into thinking I was THAT good?” It was almost like the universe had set my guitar journey on easy mode. As I look back on it all now, it’s actually f***ing crazy how much I just plowed through everything without any real rejection or struggle as far as guitar went. I mean growing up, I struggled a lot academically, girls voted me the ugliest boy in my 7th grade class and I was bullied a lot by the guys (which is probably why I didn’t hang out with anyone and just played guitar all day) ––so I definitely faced rejection but specifically for guitar, it really just seemed like it was the one thing in my world that people agreed on: “He’s good at guitar”.

At this point, I was so used to everyone just thinking that I was the best but I was in for a rude awakening. I was now with the best of the best of the best which made me, by default, kind of average. I had also gotten comfortable. While I’d been enjoying my whole senior year of high school relatively stress free and had shifted my focus more to learning how to sing rather than on trying to get even better at guitar, everyone else around me, including my guitarist roommate from the Berklee Five-Week Program who didn’t get in initially, came back with a vengeance. Up to this point, I really never saw any of this as a competition. I really didn’t. Even with my past successes, I was always just focused on myself and how I could be my best. However, at the same time, I never knew how it felt to be not the best. I remember jamming with my old roommate again that next year and it was like I was playing with a whole different guitarist ––like a super version of himself that I couldn’t fully keep up with. My other friend was also now on the road touring the country with a Grammy-nominated artist and putting in that real-life experience eating, sleeping and breathing guitar ––I felt like he was beginning to surpass me in many ways as well. I was really happy for both of them and was so inspired by all the new, out-of-this-world talent I was seeing at Berklee every day but it also made me feel like, for the first time in my life, that I wasn’t that special anymore.

It made me ask myself a lot of questions like, “Why do I even do music?” It seemed like the most obvious question to ever think to ask myself but really, I didn’t know ––also, “What’s even my goal? Is it to be the best guitar player in the whole world out of anyone who ever lived?” I was like, “Well no, I mean that’s ridiculous and obviously impossible.” “Okay but then if that’s the case, why do you care if people are better than you?” ––and then I realized that this was beginning to have nothing to even do with music and, instead, everything to do with my own self-worth as a person. I realized that I just always wanted to feel special and that in school, growing up, I didn’t feel like I was inherently special. I was never one of the cool kids, or one of the smart kids, or one of the attractive kids, or one of the confident kids whom others respected. The main thing that I felt like I had was that I was the best at guitar and that made me feel like I was special ––but then now, when something like that gets taken away from you, what do you have left? I knew that I had a lot of good qualities but guitar for me was really such a foundational pillar. Anyway, I knew that there was something deeper than just that though. I asked myself, “Before I ever even touched a guitar, why was I so drawn to music in the first place?” I thought about all the music that I really truly enjoyed listening to and all of my favorite bands from my childhood and realized that most of the time, it’s not like they were technically the best singers ever or the most virtuosic instrumentalists but their music itself was f***ing awesome and meaningful and it made me FEEL something. Then, I really thought about all of those musicians at my school who were lightyears ahead of me with so much more discipline to be better than I’d ever be at guitar, or also the students my age that were already signing record deals and dropping out of Berklee to become famous, and I realized that, despite all of that, there were very, very few times where I heard someone just simply sing a song that they wrote that actually made me FEEL something.

That right there was when I realized that that’s the only thing that truly matters. What do melodies and rhythms matter if they don’t make you FEEL something? What does a musician’s success and status mean to you if their music doesn’t make you FEEL something? What is the point of playing guitar 6 hours a day your entire childhood and then getting into Berklee to pursue music for the rest of your life if the music that you make doesn’t make people FEEL something? Hell, most of the people that made my favorite music ever probably didn’t even go to college, let alone music school. To get back to the question you asked long before I went on this gigantic tangent though: what sets me apart? I am me and that sets me apart. I don’t try to be different or do things that set me apart. I set myself apart. I make music from the heart that I FEEL and that is authentically me. Like I said, my guitar journey was just my first lifetime/stepping stone that led me to where I am today. I never really talked much about any of that publicly, so I thought I’d share it here. There’s definitely not enough room in this interview for me to go into the many other lifetimes I had to live between then and now to get to where I am today but anyway, I’m gonna stop myself now before I blab on for eternity.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?

I’d say, if I had some time to just go hang out with a friend and enjoy the week, I’d probably get us some day-passes to a really nice gym in LA (somewhere at least better than LA Fitness) and hit a really nice morning workout. After that, I’d probably take us to get some breakfast burritos from Great White in Larchmont Village. After that, I’d go grab my guitar, get a 12 pack of Clausthaler non-alcoholic beers (now that I’m a sober boy) and head to Hermosa Beach. It would be so nice to just go swim in the ocean for a day and just enjoy the sun/be away from my phone and all the daily noise of life. After that, it would be fun to bust out a beach jam sesh and drink the Clausthalers. Once we had our fill of being out in the sun and stuff, I’d probably blast 90’s rock all the way home in the car. We’d probably want to chill out after that ––I’d make us some mean protein shakes/cook us some food and get cleaned up. One of my favorite late night spots in LA is Bar 1200 at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood ––probably get some friends to meet up with us there and have a good night.

The next day, if it were up to me, I’d probably just get us the f**k out of LA and book an Airbnb in Joshua Tree. We could take a little road trip out there, drop all of our stuff off at the Airbnb and then go out and explore Joshua Tree National Park. I’d probably bring my camera + speaker and we could take some sick ass photos in the desert. After that, we could go back to the Airbnb and chill in the hot tub and then go watch Nacho Libre or something. That sounds like a great time. Anyway, I’ve only been living in LA for about 6 months, so I still don’t know all the spots but that’s what I would do if it were up to me I suppose!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?

Website: https://www.christopherkenji.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christopherkenji

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/christopherkenji

Image Credits
Richard Shiu, Jensen Junn, Ronald Fulcher, Garrick Wong, Justice Obazee