How Kiefer Sutherland was reborn as an alt-country troubadour after 30 years in Hollywood

Kiefer Sutherland had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame by the time he decided to launch a recording career in 2016 with an album called "Down in a Hole." 

And as he thought about the prospect of sharing those songs on stage, he "made the terrible mistake," he says, of thinking acting had prepared him for the challenge.

In addition to his film and television work, he'd done live theater, from Broadway to Toronto's Royal Alex.

"I thought certainly that's gonna have to pay off," he recalls with a laugh. "I'm not gonna get nervous in front of the audience. The mistake was that as an actor, you've always got this wall between you and the audience. It’s called the character. I always make the joke, ‘On my best day, I'm not Jack Bauer.'”

Bauer is, of course, the role he played on "24," winning an Emmy, a Golden Globe, two Screen Actors Guild awards, two Satellite Awards and legions of new fans.

It wasn't uncommon for fans of the show to stop him on the street and tell him, "Oh my God, I love you."

What he came to understand about those interactions, Sutherland recalls, was, "They're not talking about you. They love the character. So there's a separation."

Introducing fans to Kiefer Sutherland 

After releasing an album, he says, "I found myself standing on stage singing very personal songs that were about me, about heartache or someone who passed away way too early in my life."

He'd spent 35 years, he says, guarding his privacy as best as possible.

"Now I find myself standing in front of 500 strangers having to explain that I lost someone in my early 20s that I loved very much and this is a way of me dealing with it. I wrote this song and it was partly my way to say hello to that person. That's a very vulnerable moment to be in."

Sutherland laughs, then says, "I hadn't thought about that at all until that moment. So it took a few shows to get used to it."

He figures he was maybe 15 concerts into that first tour when he felt comfortable enough to open up and share the inspiration for the song he wrote about the friend he lost.

"And the response was so generous that I started to open up about why I wrote some of these songs and what I was going through in my own life," he says. "There are aspects of myself that can be quite cynical. And the generosity that I've experienced from audiences around the world is not something I was prepared for. It really has been one of the nicest experiences I've ever had."

On relating to the audience's lives

Among the more personal moments he's shared at his shows is a song on his new album, "Reckless & Me," titled "Song For a Daughter."

"It's a song that I wrote after seeing a picture of my daughter that I hadn't seen for 20 years," he says. "I got very nostalgic and wrote something so that when I'm long dead and gone, she'll have something to tell her in my voice how much I love her. I play that for people and you have no idea what they might be going through. One show, a woman had lost her daughter in a car accident. And all of a sudden we had an understanding of each other that we certainly would not have had before I played that song."

He's really not that different from the people in the audience, as far as he can tell.

"We're all trying to get through this thing called life," he says.

That's not to say he doesn't get that his life may appear to be more charmed than most. The son of actors Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas, he's been famous since his breakthrough role, at 19, in Rob Reiner's "Stand By Me" – a breakthrough quickly followed by star-making turns in "The Lost Boys" and "Young Guns."

"I will tell you straight up I'm the luckiest guy I know," he says. "And I know some pretty lucky sons of bitches. I've been able to provide for my family without too much concern. I've been able to do what I've wanted to do for a living. People have been good to me my whole life. I can walk into a bar and no one wants to beat the crap out of me because I’m a successful actor. People have left me alone."

But life is life and no one gets through unscathed.

"You do lose people," he says. "There are times when you disappoint yourself. There are moments when you're unhappy about what you're doing. Life will knock you down a peg and kind of even out the playing field a bit. I write about those things."

'I've been playing music my whole life' 

Sutherland turned 50 two months after the release of his first album. But he's been a musician for much longer than he's been a famous actor. 

"I’ve been playing music my whole life," he says. "My mother started me on violin when I was about 4. By the time I was 7, I desperately wanted a guitar. We struck a deal. She said, 'If you play violin until you’re 10, I’ll get you a guitar.' So I played violin ‘til I was 10, she got me a guitar and, sadly, I never picked the violin back up. But the guitar went with me everywhere."

As an actor, that guitar became his best friend in the trailer.

"There are a lot of times that you can wait up to an hour or two for a big setup or a stunt to be set up," he says. "So I would find myself playing four to five hours a day."

In his 30s he went from learning songs to writing songs in earnest.

"I did some writing when I was in some bands when I was 15 and 16," he says. "But it was certainly never something very serious for me."

How the actor came to make a record

Even when he'd gotten to the point where he was writing songs he liked, he wasn't thinking of himself as a recording artist in the making.

"The whole impetus for putting together a record really came out of me wanting to record some songs to send to EMI or Sony or any of the publishing companies and see if any of their artists would be interested in doing them."

He made both albums with his friend Jude Cole.

"He’s an extraordinary musician and he really liked the way the songs were sounding," Sutherland says. "And I have to agree. He produced them beautifully. He was the one who convinced me to make a record and I'm grateful for that because the thing that I would never have understood that I would enjoy as much as I have is playing live."

In many ways, he says, the second record was informed by touring on the first one.

"I wanted some uptempo stuff for the set," he says. "So songs like 'Agave' or 'This Is How It’s Done' were started because I thought those would fit really nicely in the second half of the set. It kind of came together very simply. There was no big master plan. And here we are."

How music is a bit like acting

He does see a connection between acting and his music.

"The common denominator," he says, "is storytelling. You walk into any bar and there's two or three regulars that are the storytellers of that bar. You walk into a church and the priest with the biggest congregation is the greatest storyteller."

Sutherland was raised by storytellers. 

"My mother and father split when I was quite young," he says. "But my father is an amazing storyteller. And so is my mother. And funny. So I just loved listening to their stories, and as I was growing up loved telling stories that I thought were interesting and funny. That's what I love about acting. And songwriting and performing live is an extension of that."

Both of Sutherland's albums gravitate toward a country-flavored sound that most would file under Americana.

"I grew up listening to rock and roll, anything from Led Zeppelin and the Who to the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Elton John," he says. "If there was anything that was gonna start leading me in that direction, I think Tom Petty is probably my favorite songwriter. Bob Seger would be a very close second. The Eagles as well."

Then, he joined the rodeo. No, really.

"I was a team roper and got a big kind of jolt of exposure to country music," he says. 

"This was at a time when Randy Travis was kind of the big artist on the scene. And Alan Jackson, who I think is a really beautiful writer and also really inhabits what I consider to be the last vestige of traditional Americana country music."

What he likes about that type of music, Sutherland explains, is that it lends itself to telling stories.

"I can listen to any single Led Zeppelin song and not tell you specifically what it’s about," he says, with a laugh. "But when I listen to Johnny Cash 'A Boy Named Sue,’ there’s no confusing what he's singing about. He's telling you a story. And that appealed to me.

"What interested me as an actor telling stories was what really pulled me into that genre. And the songs that I wanted to write, the kind of stories I wanted to tell, that was the genre to be in."

Kiefer Sutherland

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 11. 

Where: Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix.

Admission: $43; $38 in advance.

Details: 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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