Conversations with Charlie Kogen

Today we’d like to introduce you to Charlie Kogen.

Hi Charlie, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My parents are great appreciators of music, and though neither of them can play more than a song or two on piano or guitar, they saw that I gravitated towards music and they signed me up for piano lessons. I began mostly by observing my teacher’s hands move along the keys and listening to the notes rather than reading what was written on the sheet music. In the process, I learned how to play by ear. I was also a decent singer from an early age, though as a young kid I would probably never have connected the two. I also learned some guitar around the same time, both by ear and through my piano teacher who also taught guitar, and I played violin in elementary school for a bit. After getting bored of classical pieces around the age of 9 or 10, someone got the idea to work some pop songs into the repertoire. But in keeping with the music I was hearing in the car or at home, they were older pop songs by artists like Billy Joel, Queen, and The Beatles. After learning the ins and outs of some of these songs, I began to get the bug to do something more with it.

Initially, when I started writing songs, it was to impress people. I tried to use complex chords, big words, precise rhymes. I was a precocious kid, and writing songs was an outlet for my precocity that people actually seemed to enjoy, unlike my penchant for telling people random facts that no one asked for. I must have known that I could express real feelings through music, but it wasn’t until I was 13 when I actually began to express them in the songs I wrote. Through my adolescence, I wrote songs about feeling inadequate, feeling alone, feeling excited, feeling regretful for things I’ve done. My life in high school was not that exciting, but I was in touch with my emotions and it allowed me to write more deeply and more honestly. At the same time, I also began to study jazz piano, which both expanded my horizons for musical complexity and gave me the space to explore simplicity in the songs I wrote on the side. Though I went to Stanford and did not study music, I continued to write songs, perform in various bands and ensembles, and I learned how to produce during the pandemic as well. A year out of college, I have released a few songs, scored some short films, gigged around LA, and played keyboards for several other acts, both on stage and in the studio!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Comparatively, my road has been smooth, though making any kind of art requires a bit of determination regardless of where you start in life. I had been pretty sure that I wanted to pursue music professionally since high school, but going to college was also very important to both my parents and me. In some ways, my biggest detour was going to college and not studying music. My parents did not care what my major was as long as I graduated, and I allowed myself to take a lot of classes across several different disciplines before deciding on a major. I wound up with a degree in international relations, and though it may not be the line of work that I am pursuing now, it gave me such a broad perspective and made me even more curious about the world than I was when I started, and I am really grateful for those experiences. That said, at times it could be a bit difficult knowing that everyone around me was likely going to pursue more conventionally stable careers in fields like finance or medicine or technology, while I was going to try something out where the fact that I even went to college probably wouldn’t even matter to most people.

Additionally, the pandemic interrupted my time in college; it was basically a detour within a detour. Though it stopped most people’s lives in their tracks, including mine, it gave me the time to actually learn how to produce my own music, and I could sit down and experiment with recording techniques. Now, I record most of my music by myself in a makeshift studio space that used to be a garage, and produce everything myself!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
As a full-time freelance musician, I am always working on a project, whether I’m writing and producing my own stuff, playing keyboards for someone else’s project, or scoring a short film. I am probably most proud of my own solo material, which I write, perform and produce. The songs I write and release under my own name often come from very personal places, and I also always try to create music that I myself would like to hear.

I think my solo music is unique in that it is influenced by older music in a way that goes beyond production or arrangement. I think there are structural elements to the music I make that are very different than most pop songs people write today. For instance, I write melody first and let the chords follow, rather than the other way around, and I really try to let my melodies go where they want to, even if it breaks up a steady progression. In some songs I write, sometimes I will forego a verse-chorus structure in favor of something more similar to Tin Pan Alley songs, where there are verses with a refrain either at the beginning or at the end, and a middle eight that takes the song in a totally different direction either lyrically or musically. As much as I am influenced by older music, my ultimate aspiration is to make the music I make feel timeless.

In my more collaborative musical pursuits, I strive to give a song or a score exactly what it needs without overdoing it. For instance, it can be easy to overdo a piano part for a song in the studio if you can play riffs and countermelodies, so often what sets musicians apart from each other in this regard is taste. What I will do at first is to play something sparse, but intentional and well-chosen. If I think it needs more, I’ll give it more, but most often in situations of musical problem-solving, I will look for a simple, but elegant musical solution, whether it’s a three-note melody or just finding the right effect for a synth.

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
I played Little League baseball as a kid, and though I probably wasn’t competitive enough as I got older, I was good enough to be able to play on a summer travel team for a few seasons. When we got old enough to pitch, they taught everyone on the teams the basics of pitching in the hopes of discovering that some kids were good at it. I was pretty dependable at first base, but I always wanted to pitch, because that’s what all of my left-handed sports heroes did. One blistering hot summer day, after exhausting some of their better options in previous innings, the coach called me to the mound, and I felt exalted. I don’t even remember if I pitched well the first time, but just the thrill of being called up to pitch is something I still think about to this day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.charliekogenmusic.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charliekogen
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1dYC94KDLDDVvKM20nTE5g

Image Credits
Nathan Warren Hayes
Cooper Reed