A Musician's Life (abridged)
by Keith Randall
“ Some of my earliest memories involve music. My Mother and Father divorced when I was young and, for a time, my Sister and I would spend occassional weekends with our Father. He was a bass player and I remember going into smokey bars with him where he would prop me up on a bar stool as he set the stage for that evening's show. At some point someone put me on a drum throne and handed me a drum stick. That's probably when it all began for me. Shortly after that I started taking drum lessons at the now-closed Caruso's Music in Brookhaven, PA.
After several years of playing, my interest in the drums began to fade. When I was twelve my family moved from our home in Media, Pennsylvania to Swedesboro, New Jersey. They bought a 5 acre farmette and, finding myself feeling relatively isolated, I reconnected with my love of music. During those formative years I discovered Van Halen and it was Eddie Van Halen's music that influenced me to want to play the guitar. So, for my 15th birthday my Step-Pop bought me a used Ibanez electric guitar and a small Marshall amp. I’ve been making music pretty much ever since.
I played my first bar gig when I was 17. We were pretty awful but that did not discourage me from becoming a musician. Eventually I started a serious band with a kid named Jason Milley who lived the next town over and we kept at it until, eventually, we formed a group that was good enough to book regular gigs in local bars. Over time the bar gigs turned into nightclub performances. We started working with booking agents and we started getting bigger and better gigs until the business eventually drove a wedge between Jay and I. I ended up getting my own booking agent in the way of Anderson Entertainment and hit the road as a solo singer/acoustic guitar player.
For a couple of years, throughout the mid aughts, I was on the road most nights of the week. I performed throughout the Philadelphia and New Jersey areas as well as gigging in Maryland, Delaware, and New York. I especially enjoyed performing in Manhattan and, during the Summer seasons, the New Jersey shore. Before long I was performing as many as 14 shows over 13 days across four states. My agent started booking me further into the interior of Pennsylvania and I started performing back to back Friday and Saturday nights at the Cellblock, which was an old, stone prison which had been converted into a night club in Williamsport, PA.
Around that time I began contemplating a move out of New Jersey. I was spending so much time on the road that I started feeling disconnected from the life I had been living before I started travelling. For a brief moment I contemplated a move into Philadelphia proper, but in the end it was the beauty that I found in the mountains and valleys of Lycoming county that drew me to Williamport. Well, that and the influence of my now ex-Wife.
I parted ways with my booking agent once I moved to Williamsport. Anderson was located in New Jersey and my move had put me a couple of hours out of their sphere of influence. Once settled in I started focusing on making a name for myself in the area's music scene. From the outside it might not seem like much, but Williamsport is flush with music talent and has a great many venues which offer live music, especially on the weekends. During my first stint there, around 2006, I performed at just about every venue where music was available, while maintaining my weekend-long gigs at the Cellblock. I also started performing outside of the city, including at a bar and restaurant called Hull’s Landing. Randy Hull has always been a great supporter of live music. So much so that, twenty years later, I still occasionally book shows at his Muncy establishment.
In 2016 I started an unplugged-styled hard rock duo called the Lost Saints with my buddy, vocalist John Freas. We eventually grew the Saints into a full, five piece, electric band . After a couple of years of intense gigging the Saints ended up burning themselves out. As much as I prefer being a band leader, I occasionally enjoy disappearing into the anonymity of someone else's project. So, after the Saints folded, I spent some time as a side-man for other Williamsport area bands including the Jamaican Reggae band Myal Soul (Bass), the horn-based party band Trip the Light (Guitar), and hard rockers Audiobox (Guitar), all-the-while booking shows as a solo acoustic act. 2016 also marked the beginning of my dating my Wife, Sonya, who was working as a waitress at Hull’s when we met.
In 2018, after dating for roughly a year and a half, Sonya and I eloped to Nashville, Tennessee. When we returned home we thought it might be nice to relocate, so we bought a house in Delaware, not far from the Delco area of Pennsylvania where I was born and raised. It was around that time when I realized that Sonya was a talented musician in her own right. These talents came to light one day when, while sitting around a camp fire at her Parent's house, Sonya picked up a violin and started effortlessly playing it. I started arranging simple fiddle parts for her immediately after that and, before long, Sonya started joining me on stage during my solo performances.
We started “Keith & Sonya's Acoustic Roadshow” with the intention of making it a variety act… sort of a traveling open mic, if you will, while Sonya was getting used to her new role on the bright side of the stage. At first we played strictly Country and Southern Rock music, of which I had noticed a growing resurgence based on the works of artists like Chris Stapleton, Eric Church, and many others. While I was no stranger to performing Country music songs, the “Roadshow” was the first act where that genre would become my primary focus.
Sonya and I started travelling with our act and, wanting to cut the travel time between our two families, we moved once again. This time we moved to the small town of Annville, PA, which is located between the larger areas of Lebanon and Hershey. Unexpectedly, the day that we signed the deed to our new home was the same day that the country was effectively shut down due to the Covid epidemic. Confined in a new town, we were fortunate enough to have had a local venue stay open throughout the shutdown. That venue was called Ted's Bar and grill and we booked ourselves there as often as we could. Despite everything else coming to a halt, Sonya and I continued to tighten up our act in the company of the few people who would brave the pandemic.
Not being able to regularly leave the house and having built a small recording studio in our Annville home, I began writing for what would end up being two limited-edition, instrumental, records. During this time I was amazed to discover that Sonya was an excellent saxophone player. I had known that she owned a sax, but for some reason I had it in my head that she, maybe, wasn't very good at it. She had mentioned it so passively that I suppose I didn't take it very seriously. When Sonya finally decided to play the instrument in front of me I was in awe of how good she actually was. Seeing her potential, I started writing sax parts into my original compositions. Sonya's playing became the main voice of those two records and, to this day, I have yet to write or arrange any music which reaches the ceiling on her abilities.
Some of the compositions from those two records ended up getting rotation on independent radio stations in the Harrisburg and Williamsport areas and were nominated by the Central Pennsylvania Music Awards for the “best instrumental records” of their perspective years. Around the same time I also composed a few songs which found their way onto a series of holiday compilation records called “Joy to the Burg.” These records, released by Christian Churches United, were released over the Christmas holidays with their proceeds going towards aiding the homeless population in the Harrisburg area. Also in 2023, Sonya and I proudly made our debut on the cover of Pennsylvania Musician Magazine.
As the local music scene started to recover from the pandemic, Sonya and I began adopting different styles of music into our live sets. At her request, I started writing alto sax arrangements into our songs. Sonya is such a good saxophone player that eventually the sax replaced the violin completely and we pivoted from Country music to a Blue Eyed Soul and Rock & Roll format. Shortly before that transformation we also picked up a third band member, a percussion player named Sean Driscoll, and put together a respectable series of shows throughout the Harrisburg area. Sean would also sing and play the guitar during the shows, which added another element to our “Roadshow” theme. We ran this format, successfully, for a couple of years until Sonya and I decided it was time that we returned to Williamsport permanently. In 2025 the band was nominated by the Central Pennsylvania Music Awards for best duo/trio. The three of us made our last appearance on stage together at the Kettle Creek Music Festival in Cross Fork, PA, in August of '26.
That brings us to today and i'm as excited as i've ever been for our newest musical venture. When Sonya and I bought our new home, a cabin in the woods outside of Williamsport, the previous owners left behind a beautiful Wurlitzer upright piano. The piano was sorely in need of a tune up but was in otherwise great condition. We had it professionally tuned by the good folks at Robert M. Sides and, once I pulled up the bench and started playing, I felt an instant bond to the instrument. There's a strange, personal connection that musicians form with some instruments. It's hard to explain but what I can tell you is that, while I had spent time behind some keyboards before, this time it was different. This time it felt… permanent.
And so here we are. I’ve been at it, hours at a time, for a few months now. I feel like I'm growing every week and the piano has opened up my eyes to approaching music differently. I've got over a sets worth of brand new material already and have started charting sax arrangements to these songs for Sonya. We’ve rebranded as Date Night with Keith & Sonya and we have the first show of our new act scheduled to debut in February of 27'. I'm looking forward to performing again. Until then… ”
~Keith
