The Kiefer Sutherland Band
With Austin Plaine.
At Brighton Music Hall,
May 20 at 9 p.m. Tickets: $20.
617-779-0140, www.crossroadspresents.
com/brighton-music-hall
Contrary to most reports, Kiefer Sutherland is not finished with the TV show “24.’’ No, he won’t be playing Jack Bauer again, but he is returning as executive producer on the spinoff show “24: Legacy’’ this fall. And there are other projects. He’s starring in the upcoming ABC series “Designated Survivor’’ as a low-level cabinet member who suddenly becomes president. And he’s on tour fronting the Kiefer Sutherland Band, promoting “Down in a Hole,’’ their debut country/country-rock album of mostly Sutherland-written originals, tentatively set for an early-summer release. They play Brighton Music Hall on May 20.
Being involved in music is nothing new for the 49-year-old actor. Growing up in Toronto, he was taking violin lessons at 4, convinced his mom to let him get a guitar when he was 10, joined his first band when he was 12, and in 2002, cofounded, with his singer-songwriter friend Jude Cole, the recording studio-record label-publishing company Ironworks. Sutherland left Ironworks in 2009, but it’s the label that “Down in a Hole’’ calls home. He spoke about his musical side by phone during a tour stop in Cleveland.
Q. What was your first guitar?
A. It was a Washburn acoustic, and its action was just awful. But it made my hands really strong, really fast. I remember the first day I could actually do a barre chord on it, there was massive celebration in my house. But I desperately wanted an electric guitar. I remember taking a bunch of Christmas presents I’d gotten, and bringing them to the pawn shop district in Toronto. I came out with something like 163 bucks, and the first electric guitar I got was a Gibson Sonex.
Q. Has doing all of this been a longtime dream that you couldn’t get to because of your acting career?
A. I would think of it more as a fantasy as opposed to something I ever thought I would do. My acting career never got in the way of anything. I mean, if I wanted to do music, I could have at any given time. When I had Ironworks, with Jude, a lot of great artists were coming through, whether it was Rocco DeLucca or Ron Sexsmith or Billy Boy on Poison. And they didn’t always come in with 10 songs they wanted to do; they all wrote in the studio. So I got to watch the different styles in which they wrote, and I would just pick stuff up, then I would try to apply some of it. I found writing music to be really cathartic, because I was writing about some really personal stuff that maybe I hadn’t even talked to some of my best friends about, but I could put it in a song. I got kind of prolific there for a minute, I had a couple of songs that I really liked, and I wanted Jude to record them [as demos] to see if some other artist would be interested in recording them. But Jude suggested that maybe I should make an album. I said no, never gonna happen. Then Jude very wisely took me to a bar, bought me a couple drinks, and all of a sudden it seemed like it was a better idea.
Q. So are you planning to balance music and acting careers?
A. I love the way my songs sound right now, and I’d like to go play them in little bars and clubs. I’m not trying to sell a million records and I’m not trying to sell out stadiums. We played some dates in California and the Midwest to try it out, and in the middle of that I shot the pilot for “Designated Survivor.’’ What’s been interesting for me is that playing live and telling stories about the songs informed what I was going to do with the show. My interest in acting is to tell a story, and my interest in performing live is to tell stories. But I’d never done it in that way before, so it was interesting to see how it had an effect on me as an actor.
Q. What was going through your head on the first night of the tour in Milwaukee?
A. At the very first show I ever played, down in Long Beach, my hand was shaking so bad I could barely play guitar. I’ve played almost a hundred shows since then, so that’s gone away. But when you’re playing the same 15 bars over and over again, you basically know everybody in the audience. So there was something exciting about getting to Milwaukee. They’d never heard the songs before, we didn’t know what their reaction was going to be, and we were met with an audience that, well, you couldn’t ask for better. You know, if a television show or a film does well, that’s happened to me before. But if a concert goes really well, there’s an excitement about that that I have to say feels really new, and I’m really grateful for every time it happens.
The Kiefer Sutherland Band
With Austin Plaine. At Brighton Music Hall, May 20 at 9 p.m. Tickets: $20. 617-779-0140, www.crossroadspresents.com/brighton-music-hall
Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.
