Katie Kuhn Found Peace Making Music in Utah

by Martin Renzhofer

The Salt Lake Tribune

Katie Kuhn's music bubbled to the surface at the same time she regained her faith. And since one feeds the other, it does not matter which came first.

Kuhn, a regular performer in northern Utah ski lodges, has turned her life 180- degrees since she quit working as a Chicago commodities broker in 1987. Now, Kuhn, who calls Park City home, plays her heart on the piano in a style she calls modern classical, a balance between New Age and ambient mood-setting.

"I went through rough times in the 1980's," said Kuhn, a reborn Catholic. "I had hard times emotionally and financially. I've let God work within me, and ever since then my life has changed." Kuhn believes the successes that have come her way are directly related to her rediscovered faith.

"It's amazing the way things have fallen into place."

Kuhn even argues that meeting her current piano teacher was more than happenstance. Kuhn, waiting for service in a Salt Lake City Kinko's, began a conversation with Bonnie McQuillan. McQuillan, it turned out, taught piano, including theory and improvisation, for more than 50 years.

"When we met, there was a magnet there," said McQuillan, who works with Kuhn's technique, the same way a golf pro seeks help to straighten a swing. "She has a lot of personal drive and ambition. She's like a big sponge; she absorbs it all." "When we first started," said Kuhn, "the music was flowing out of me so fast."

Kuhn's album, "Mandalay," is getting national airplay, and the musician recently won the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) Popular Music Award.

When this ski season is over, she is off to Argentina to work on a music video. The company producing the video may use her music to score a feature film.

"She's come a long way since 'Mandalay,'" McQuillan said. "Performers who are also teachable are very rare combinations. As a teacher, my biggest worry is people who say to Katie, 'Add this or that.' I don't want to take Katie out of Katie's music."

Raised in the Lake Forest area of Chicago, Kuhn attended the University of Wisconsin, after a lifetime of all-girl schooling. It was her first coeducational experience. "It was goodbye religion, goodbye everything," she said. "I was always getting into trouble. Only four of my 12 friends graduated." Kuhn majored in business and ran straight to the Chicago Board of Trade and a '70s jet-set lifestyle, with little time for piano practice.

Then tragedy struck. In 1986, a close friend was murdered, shot by his ex-mother-in-law during a custody battle. "I thought, if I died like [that], poof, did I live a good life? I started some soul searching."

Her friend's sudden death forced Kuhn to make some changes. She began to focus on music. She wanted to be a rock star. So, Kuhn and members of the short-lived punk/new wave band Onion People met in her apartment, which was once a 1930s Chicago speakeasy. In fact, an infamous bootlegger, Dion O'Bannon, murdered by Bugsy Siegel, called the same apartment home.

While part of Onion People, Kuhn wrote the thoughtful "Katie's Song," which is featured on "Mandalay." "I played it for the band, and they said, 'It's nice, but we're not playing that in our band.'" The Onion People may have held their noses, but the song won a couple of Chicagoland talent contests. "I thought it was a fluke," she said.

Eventually, Kuhn left Chicago and moved to Connecticut and later, Florida. "Mandalay" was named after a tiny Florida island where Kuhn lived for four years. In Florida, she supported herself by organizing corporate meetings. By 1989, she began performing at the corporate events she organized, playing what was swirling in her head.

She also began to paint and eventually painted the cover of "Mandalay."

In Chicago, "I went to an open mike night and played 'Katie's Song,'" she said. "Everyone started clapping. I didn't want to say, 'That's all I know.'" So she sat down and another song emerged, which eventually became "Listen to Your Heart." When she had a third song, a friend paid for three hours of studio time to record the three.

In 1992, Kuhn came to Snowbird to run a meeting for American Express.

"I had a feeling of inner peace when I checked into the hotel, she said. A friend who had moved to Alta suggested that she stay in Utah. "I walked into the Rustler and asked if they needed a piano player. I sat down and played, and they asked when I could start. "I came out here and within three months wrote enough songs for my first CD."

Kuhn's interest in her long-lost faith took place after she moved to Connecticut. A serious relationship had just ended, adding to the shock of her friend's murder. She met women who used their faith to work through their tough times. "It was a real catharsis," she said. "Small miracles began happening. It was quite an adventure." The adventure included moving to a ski resort as a piano player without any knowledge of skiing and only three songs to her name.

"My music is an outgrowth of faith. I have confirmation of that almost daily. I got a letter from a woman in Germany who said my music gives her peace.

"I didn't feel like that in commodities."  

Pianist Katie Kuhn keeps in tune in a new town

When pianist Katie Kuhn got her first regular-paying gig, she worked five nights a week stretching a repertoire of three songs.

Now, 11 years and five self-published CDs of “contemporary classical, inspirational music” later, Kuhn says she owes it all to God.

“My music is a gift,” said Kuhn, who now lives in the Oostburg area after spending a good deal of her earlier life moving from Chicago to Colorado to Utah and back again.

“I had been going through some hard times, and I never knew I had this talent until I realized my life was a mess. The only thing I had to do was to open my heart and surrender to God. The rest just happened.”

At 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 30, Kuhn will share this gift at a benefit concert for Campus Life Family Center, 6424 S. Business Dr., Sheboygan.

In her concerts, Kuhn talks of her journey from journalist to commodities trader to travel director to a musician that has kept the faith — quite literally — since she first took the stage.

Kuhn said her career began in 1991 after composing a song, “Katie’s Song,” which she played at an open mike night in Chicago. Kuhn said she got such an enthusiastic response she looked up, prayed, “God, you got me into this” and as started playing another song which she created on the spot.

Later, after taking a job performing five nights a week at a ski lodge in Alta, Utah, she scrambled to expand her repertoire of three songs.

“I just had to create new material every night. Every night I just played and more and more songs came out,” Kuhn said. “I think this music is coming from the heart, not something I’ve heard or read.”

Kuhn continues to credit God with her ongoing success. The sense of self-discovery is still a delight, she said.

“How everything came together — it was a total miracle,” Kuhn said. “When my mother first heard my CD “Mandalay,” she called me and asked, ‘When and where did you learn how to play the piano?’”

Kuhn recently released her fifth CD, “Once Upon a Time,” featuring nine new compositions, an amazing thing when she looks back. In her 10 years of promoting her music, she’s sold 18,000 CDs and been noticed by producers of music by Yanni and Windham Hill, she said.

Her CDs are distributed through Amazon.com, CDNow.com, Groove Records and more.

“A series of miracles just kept happening to me, and I just kept going deeper into my faith and reconnecting myself with the Catholic Church and meeting people from other religions,” Kuhn said. “I guess I was searching. When the music came and I got my faith back, I knew something big was going to happen. It’s been a struggle, but it seems like every time I’m struggling God provides. It’s neat the way it works.”

In February, Kuhn will perform in a benefit for the Sheboygan County Interfaith Council.

“It’s been a long year, so I’d like to get out there more and start doing more charity events,” Kuhn said. “It’s really healing music. It definitely doesn’t come from me. It comes from above, really. I just think people need to hear this music during this time and age and I feel like that’s my mission.”

Admission to the Campus Life concert is open free to the public. In lieu of ticket sales, cash donations will be warmly received for Campus Life’s work among area youth and the coming Ecuador mission trip. Campus Life is a local, interdenominational youth organization serving the area through programs, counseling.