Over the phone, Kevin Costner speaks with the kind of candor and soft-spoken intensity that has made him one of America's most respected and durable actors. But the 60-year-old Oscar-winning director of Dances With Wolves and star of Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Open Range and some 50 more movies is also a lifelong musician whose country-rock band, Kevin Costner & Modern West, is a far cry from an average actor's side project.
Besides winning an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor In a Miniseries or Movie for 2012's Hatfields & McCoys (which also won Outstanding Miniseries), Costner was one of the producers, while his band was also heavily involved in creating the music for the miniseries. It can be heard on their album Famous for Killing Each Other, a lengthy set of brooding Americana that has drawn favorable comparisons to some of T-Bone Burnett's productions.
Costner was raised in the Baptist church, where his grandmother was the piano player, which led to several years of classical piano training and eventual frustration; "no girl wanted to sit next to you when you played "Greensleeves," he says. Though he's careful not to label the kind of music he makes with Modern West, Costner says he was drawn to the kind of musical storytelling traditions of many musicians from Oklahoma (where his parents are from), as well as his love of history.
By the way, the closest Costner has come to playing a musician onscreen was in 2008's Swing Vote, where he plays the ultimate undecided voter who is also a member of a Willie Nelson cover band called the Half Nelsons. But in his twenties, he played in a band called Roving Boy that he reluctantly put on hold when his acting work started picking up.
"I thought, 'Gosh, do I really want to need this actor/musician thing that seems to be this raging debate?', Costner says. "It seems like music people can go be in movies, but God forbid an actor make music. So things were going really well for me in acting, I thought, "I don't really need this."
But he missed playing, and a few years ago his wife, Christine, found an old Roving Boy tape and asked Costner if he wanted to resume that side of his life. He admitted he did, so she brought him before his family to give him their blessing.
"She asked me a real fundamental question, which is, 'Are you happy doing it?'" recalls Costner. "The answer was yes, and she said, 'Do you think the people that are in front of you listening are happy?' I said, 'Yeah, I think so.' She said, 'What could be wrong with that?'
Costner called John Coinman, his old Roving Boy bandmate who had relocated to Tucson, and floated the idea past him; he signed on immediately. The two of them tracked down their old bass player, Blair Forward, and from their set about assembling the rest of the band, mostly through Coinman's various connections. Today the band is working on his fifth record and Costner says he considers Modern West -- who plays Stafford Centre tomorrow night -- as part of his extended family.
"I really depend on these guys," he says. "They all have to kind of cross a certain threshold with me, meaning they were going to have to be around my family and my children, so I had to figure out what kind of guys they were, because it's important to me how someone behaves around my children."
Modern West passed that test easily, though.
"They all love to rehearse, and I love to rehearse," Costner says. "It's very comfortable. It's never a problem getting them to play."
Story continues on the next page.
