Ky-Mani Marley gets own groove from dad’s reggae roots

Hungry for reggae? Have a slice of Ky. As in Ky-Mani Marley, son of late reggae legend Bob Marley. An actor as well as musician, Ky-Mani is the second youngest of Bob Marley’s 11 children (biological and adopted). He recently chatted about his upbringing after his family moved from Jamaica to Miami when he was 9, his childhood resentments, how he backed into a music career and fleeting memories of his father, who died when Ky-Mani was 5 years old:

Question: At your concerts, do people expect you to be, in essence, a tribute performer for your father?
Answer: When I started, it did pose an issue. But if I repeated what my dad did, people wouldn’t appreciate me as an individual. They’d say, “He’s just trying to be like his father.” I’m an artist that likes variety. I make all kinds of music. My root is reggae, and funny enough, I don’t make a lot of reggae music. I have some acoustic, some soft rock, some hip-hop influences. And I pay tribute to my father. I always play a few of his songs.I’ve been at it so long that I think (audiences) finally are starting to accept me for me.

Q: You were so young when your father died. What are your memories of him?
A: It was when I lost a slingshot. He was standing in the doorway. We had an old wooden house, the steps were brick. I walked up to him and said, “Daddy, I lost my slingshot.” And I just remember him laughing. He looked down on me and he laughed, and I realized I wasn’t in trouble then and I walked away. For some reason, I guess God knows, I held onto that one memory.

Q: You were mostly raised in the United States. What was your childhood like here?
A: People hear the last name Marley and they assume we had it nice, but I was raised in the inner city of Miami, nine people in a small two-bedroom house, not a nice two-bedroom house. I got really bitter. I knew what my father meant to the world, and still when others are living nice and lovely, I was living like a pauper. Kids come around, like, “Oh, your father’s Bob Marley. Why you living in this raggedy-ass house?”But when I look back on it, I so appreciate that I went through that. It humbled me. I’m able to deal with all walks of life, from the gutter to the palace, and deal with them as humans. I didn’t have my head in the wrong place.

Q: Did you always want to follow your dad into music?
A: Growing up, even with the legacy, it was the furthest thing from my mind. I’m an athlete, that’s what I really love. My mother sent me to guitar lessons, and that was like torture. They were like the worst days of my life.

Q: How did that change?
A: In Jamaica, we only had one radio station. When I got to America, my mom bought me a boom box. I went to the first station I found, I didn’t know there was more than one. It was called Y-100. They played soft rock, but also Bon Jovi, the Rolling Stones, all that good stuff. For my first couple of years, that’s all I listened to. At one time, my favorite artist (laughs) was George Michael. I had a George Michael CD that I played for days on end. Then I came into hip-hop when I fell in love with Run-DMC’s “You Be Illin’.”

Q: When did you decide to go from music fan to musician?
A: My singing career started as a fluke, but it was destined. I had a friend who had a sound system and played at the clubs. He said, “Get a dub to them, let them hear a song.” And I said, “I don’t sing.” And he said, “So what, you’re a Marley.” I was playing around, recording a song, and one of my father’s ex-producers happened to come over and heard it. He said, “I like your tone.” I started doing that on weekends, writing music. And he said, “You sound the closest to your dad so far.”

Q: Were you offered a record contract?
A: Yes, but even then I wasn’t focused to say this is what I want to do. I almost took it as a joke, like, all right, let’s see where it goes. It’s like I was on a bus ride with no destination.

Q: What convinced you to take it more seriously?
A: When I wrote a song, “Dear Dad.” That was me wanting to know my father, having my one memory of my father and hanging on dearly to it.The first time a (DJ) friend of mine played it on the radio, he was taking calls. This guy said he was listening and he was on the I-95 and he had to pull off the road. He broke down in tears because that’s exactly how he felt. And there was one man who almost brought me to tears.

He said he had lost his father, who was the only person he had in life, and he was contemplating suicide. He’s bawling while he’s telling me this. He said he was on the ground, had the gun and for some reason something told him to press play on the CD player. He had no idea what was in there. And “Dear Dad” came on. He said the song saved his life.

When I began taking this seriously is when people told me my music moves them. So now I had to focus. It was no longer the bus ride. Now it’s the journey.

Source:Steve Bornfeld