“Your Voice,” the first song from Stephen Gritz King’s latest album, Conversations, doesn’t start with music, but a single female voice. “So there’s this saying, and this saying says that you’re only as sick as your secrets,” she says. “And for me, I was tired of being sick.”
A series of rich harmonies begins percolating behind the voice.
“I was tired of holding on to something that wasn’t mine to hold on to. So I had to do the one thing that scared me the most, and that was to open my mouth, use my voice,” the voice says. That’s when, after a deep breath, King enters with not one but two sax lines, moving together like a small choir. The music is searching, but offers solace, too. It’s restless and relaxing. Things can work out for you, it seems to say, but you have to try to make them work, too.
The voice that begins Conversations belongs to King’s wife Shaniqua, and King’s dialogue with her is at the heart of the album; it’s the gateway to his faith, his ability to get through hard times, and his renewed passion for cultivating his music. For King, they all go together.
“I want music to be my conversation with God,” King said. He’s not alone in framing his relationship to music in this way. In interviews with musicians of all faiths and no faith, players often describe that, when. they are playing at their best, the music feels like it’s coming from somewhere else, and they’re merely the conduit, the vessel, for it. With Conversations, King humbly takes his place among him, as he hopes to connect with everyone. “Even people who don’t believe in God — if you enjoy the stuff I’m playing, just know it’s not me, it’s something else,” he said. “Music is a gift, and He’s given me the gift.”
Conversations, written over the course of the pandemic, in some ways records how King’s faith has been strengthened and tested. Since 2020, “my family lost four people,” he said. His brother died in his sleep, from an enlarged heart, the family learned later. His godfather died from complications from a bone marrow transplant. A cousin died from Covid-19. “It was knock after knock, hit after hit,” King said.
But “I walk with God and my faith. My wife brought that back into me,” King said. “I was on the path to trying to get to God a little more” even before he reconnected with his now-wife Shaniqua in 2019. They had known each other in college, but were different people then. In 2019, he saw that she had changed — become “bold” and “determined” — and part of that was “leaning into God.”
As King’s faith and relationship with Shaniqua deepened, “music started taking a better turn as far as me becoming a better player. I’d been lazy, getting away with what I could get away with, as opposed to just doing the work,” in practicing diligently and honing his craft. “I was hoping I could become that player without putting in the work.” That has changed. “I want to start doing my part, using what I have,” he said.
Part of that has involved King sharpening his skills as a producer. “I wanted to let people know that I do it. I got into production late,” he explained. When he was younger — a student at Co-op High — “I thought that as a musician I was just supposed to play gigs.”
He released his first self-produced songs in 2016. “I just want to show people that I have ideas — I’m more than just a sax player,” he said. The Breakfast EP followed in 2018, and Morning Music in 2020. He was satisfied with his releases, but also understood them as simply a collection of songs, recordings he’d made that he thought sounded good.
Conversations, to King, thus feels like a leap forward, in that the songs together make a cohesive statement. “This is my first project with a theme. It blends, it goes, it feels like a body of work,” he said. That theme is brought to the fore in part by King sampling Shaniqua, a practicing therapist, at various times throughout the album. It’s not just what she says, but the way she has lived her life, that inspires King.
“I got to watch her build her practice, and build herself up, doing things and learning things without somebody having to tell her,” King said. “That was definitely a wake up call for what I need to start doing. When she’s speaking, she’s saying, ‘use your voice.’ That’s what she realized for herself.’”
It’s what King is realizing for himself, and hopes others realize, too. “Whatever your voice is, use it. This album is my voice, how I give back.”
Biographical details abound. The song “Matrimony” is depicting “the conversation I had in my head when I asked my wife to marry me.” The last song on the album, “A King’s Soliloquy,” is about his brother.
Aside from a bass assist from Trey Moore on one song, “The Other Side,” all the music is performed or programmed by King, and it partakes of a slow, lush vibe that is “where I’m at home,” King said. “We all have our sounds. As I conceive, and grow and learn mine, there’s a consistency in it.” He feels a sense of strength in defining his “home base,” he said. “Even if something feels or hits a little differently, I want people to know, ‘that’s Gritz’s sound.’”
But that sound, of course, originates somewhere else. “It’s our responsibility to not just let the gift go,” King said of continuing to push forward and become a better musician, and to learn to play at the edge of his abilities, to “just trust that when I get to those moments, God is going to take over.”
In his most focused moments of improvising, he said, he hears the phrase he’s about to play, fully formed in his head, before he plays it. It suggests the power of what can happen “when you just listen,” he said. “I’m hearing it because I’m listening. Even if I can’t play it in the moment, I know something else is there.”
And on the other end of the equation are, of course, listeners — family, friends, and strangers who may be new to King’s music. King hopes to be able to share it with as many as possible, and perhaps to help them as his music, his wife, and his faith have helped him.
“You never know who’s on the other side,” King said. “You never know who’s going to be inspired by it.”
Conversations is available through Stephen Gritz King’s Bandcamp page and through streaming services.
