Introduction
I’m not very good at remembering names anymore. Sometime around 2009 we sat across the table from some Nasvhille guy at a diner. By we I mean my band, A Minor Bird. I’m about to text the guys to see if they remember his name*. I remember the cold tile and warm ambiance. Anyway, I was sitting there trying to understand what in the world this dude was talking about. I didn’t really know what to do when the industry took notice. I think he was trying to tell us how to succeed, but it wasn’t getting through. I think I started telling him my idealistic musical dreams and he said something like
“You have this naivety and it’s a good thing. Keep it.”
I don’t think I knew what he meant. Maybe he meant innocent? I don’t think I’m either, but I do know I’ve never really been interested or even had the capacity to bend my musical inclinations to what might sell better.
Early years (1989-2004)
Nashville based singer songwriter, Kevin Embleton hails from all over. Born in the Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1989 after a short stint in Ohio, Embleton moved to the country of Turkey at age seven in 1996 and remained there until his fifteenth birthday in 2004. One of five siblings, Embleton grew up in an artistic and musical family. His Father introduced him and his older brother to guitar and violin, respectively at ages 5 and 7. A few years into their musical journey their father gave them a challenge— to practice 100 days in a row, with no exceptions, for half an hour every day. The reward? A crisp one hundred dollar bill.
Shortly after his first paid gig and one hundred dollars richer, Embleton noticed his older brother writing songs. Drawn to the idea of processing life through poetry and song, Embleton began writing songs at age 12. With limited access to Western music while overseas, Embleton soaked up the few CDs and cassettes he had…The OC Supertones, Newsboys, Steven Curtis Chapman, Audio Adrenaline, Five Iron Frenzy, Switchfoot, and of course Relient K. These early influences shaped the way Kevin Embleton writes and thinks about music to this day, his senses tuned in to depth and emotion at all times.
Nashville based singer songwriter, Kevin Embleton hails from all over. Born in the Albuquerque, New Mexico and after a short stint in Ohio, Embleton moved to the country of Turkey at age seven in 1996 and remained there until his fifteenth birthday in 2004. One of five siblings, Embleton grew up in an artistic and musical family. His Father introduced him and his older brother to guitar and violin, respectively at ages 5 and 7. A few years into their musical journey their father gave them a challenge— to practice 100 days in a row, with no exceptions, for half an hour every day. The reward? A crisp one hundred dollar bill.
Shortly after that first paid gig and one hundred dollars richer, Embleton noticed his older brother writing songs. Drawn to the idea of processing life through poetry and song, Embleton began writing songs at age 12. With limited access to Western music while overseas, Embleton soaked up the few CDs and cassettes he had…The OC Supertones, Newsboys, Steven Curtis Chapman, Audio Adrenaline, Five Iron Frenzy, Switchfoot, and of course Relient K. These early influences shaped the way Kevin Embleton writes and thinks about music to this day, his senses tuned in to depth and emotion at all times.
After moving back to the United States, the Embleton family settled in Northeast Ohio in a small town an hour south of Cleveland. During high school Embleton played guitar and sang BGVs in a hardcore band called. Yearning to keep writing his own music, Embleton started a folk/pop side project with his band mate Jakub Vanyo called, fleefromreason. After spending several choir trips workshopping songs in front of girls, Embleton and Vanyo cut an EP overnight in their friend’s basement and began playing shows.
These high school efforts, short-lived, were formative experiences for Embleton as he headed off to study music and theology at Malone College in 2007, later Malone University. In his freshman year Embleton wrote and produced his debut LP as Kevin Embleton, Somewhere Far Away (2008) in his dorm room on GarageBand. After printing and selling two hundred copies at shows around town, Embleton was approached by best friend, Nate Netti (drums) to start a band. A few conversations later and after adding friends John King (guitar/vocals) and David Judy (bass), their band A Minor Bird was born in the summer of 2008.
Named after a Robert Frost poem, A Minor Bird captured Embleton’s passion to communicate poetic and emotive lyrics, most often about the mystery of God, through hard hitting indie rock and folk. Spending most of their first year writing and rehearsing, A Minor Bird finally played their first show in the spring of 2009 at a sold out show on campus. Nine months later, the band debuted their concept EP, Where The River Breaks Free. After touring the Midwest and as far south as Nashville for a few years, the band called it quits in 2012.
Embleton married his college sweetheart that same year and continued writing in secret, hoping to find a new path for his music. After releasing a few singles and trying a few different monikers, Embleton had finished writing an album’s worth of songs. He gathered a rag tag crew from his college hometown in Canton, Ohio and began rehearsing in early 2014. Late that year the team tracked Kevin Embleton’s debut LP, It Did Me Well this time as just “Embleton,” live in a living room from Canton, Ohio. Floored by influences like Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, Dawes, Blake Mills, and Ryan Adams, the hometown collective released IDMW in the spring of 2015, to little acclaim. With several alt country anthems to boot, Embleton still only managed to tour the record sparsely. The sound was such a departure from anything Embleton had done up to that point, and though he remembers it as one of his favorite projects to date, the record remains one of his least successful projects.
In summer of 2015, Embleton moved to San Francisco with his wife to continue pursuing music and ministry on the west coast. Though the four years they spent a n SF were wrought with health struggles for Kevin, specifically on his vocal cords, Embleton managed to release more music, play shows, and even open up a tiny recording studio in the Tenderloin district, which he called Slow Heart.
In 2019, Embleton relocated back to Northeast Ohio, this time to Akron, right before the world shut down. Burnt out from the time out west, and still recovering from vocal issues, Embleton worked a video editing job at a local healthcare company. Again, he couldn’t keep away from music and recorded a few songs with Nate Netti for their side project, All My Heart. At the beginning of 2021, Embleton finally went full time into music, mostly producing in his home studio for other artists and traveling to Nashville when possible to begin meeting new artists and writing.
Late in 2021, depressed and unsure what to do with the catalogue of songs he built up in the previous ten years, Embleton scratched everything to start a fresh songwriting journey called the 30 Song Challenge. For seven weeks, Embleton wrote, recorded, and created a blog for a brand new song every day. Rejuvenated, Embleton embarked on a house show tour in 2022 and released a few of his new songs as singles. Later that year, 12 of the 30 new songs would become his 3rd LP Heavy On Me, which be released in fall of 2022.
After moving to a bigger Akron area recording studio in 2022, Embleton’s work dried up amidst the post-p@ndemic rece$sion. Unsure what to do, Embleton worked a side job and continued taking trips to Nashville, while also playing strategic shows that year, including Alive Festival 2023.
In fall of 2023, Embleton moved to Nashville with his family permanently to work as an artist, songwriter, and producer. He resides in the Franklin area with his wife and two children and is currently working on a record and touring opportunities for 2024.
*one of the guys just texted me back and said his name was Van Hohe. I think he was a booking agent. I thought his name might have been Kelly.
Links:
Canton Repository Write-up, 2010 (A Minor Bird)
Canton Repository Write-up, 2012 (A Minor Bird)
Canton Repository Write-up, 2015 (Embleton)