Accomplished openly gay musician Levi Kreis has had quite an eventful career, including winning a Tony for his role in Million Dollar Quartet and expanded into movies with such films as 2001's Frailty. He recently talked with Windy City Times, saying (among other things) that he wasn't sure he wanted to continue as an independent artist until a friend convinced him otherwise.
Levi Kreis: So I reluctantly decided to put up the Kickstarter campaign and give it a shot—and my fans spoke. In the interim, it has brought me intimately closer to the people that have been supporting me for the past six years. Some of them even closer than I would have even imagined, as [12] of them became the inspiration [for the] songs on the album.
Windy City Times: I can't think of another project where an artist has reached out to their fan base like that.
LK: It cultivated a bond, I think. My fans have always been more like friends. They were the reason why I've been able to do this as my only job. That was the answer I needed, and that's why I ended up with a new album.
WCT: What's your process for creating songs?
LK: I love writing pop music. I love everything that is very easy to remember, very hooky and simplified. Upon first listen ya know it, ya love it, you're playing it again. With this new album, I've stayed true to the R&B world, I've just wrapped it in this (laughs) late-'70s/early-'80s disco-infused R&B.
I think a lot of the reason why is because I wanted to have a joyful album; something that depicts the joy and celebration I have right now in life. A lot of it has to do with being three years sober. A lot of it has to do with clearing out a lot of bullshit in my life. I haven't experienced this kind of positivity in my life before.
WCT: Is acting/musical theater something you want to do anymore?
LK: Absolutely. It took me the last year to find out where it fit in my life. I went back to where my first experiences in acting began. [A]fter that first movie [with director Max Myers], and then Frailty, that's where I realized that film is really what I loved.
Ironically, stage is where I kept getting a lot of work. And I loved it, too. It's an entirely different type of experience, so I can't negate one for the other. I'll probably always do both. But right now, definitely film is priority. I now think it all can live together quite nicely, but it did take me about the last year and a half to figure that out.
WCT: When you think about the old Hollywood stars, the actor had to know how to dance, how to perform on stage as well as film...
LK: I know and I love that you bring up that reference because that's always been the one thought that has helped me stop doubting who I was.
WCT: You grew up Christian, didn't you?
LK: A fundamental Baptist, born and raised.
WCT: Can you tell us about the spiritual journey you've undertaken?
LK: I think if I really subscribe to anything at this point in my life, the whole of it can be articulated by two words, which is self-love. I think that is the bottom line.
I look back on people like Louise Hay who has this really incredible book called You Can Heal Your Life. [It] basically says the things that show up in our physical body may have a correlation with something in our emotional body. I realized the emotional disease that was showing itself as Crohn's disease had a lot to do with the six years of reparative therapy I had to become straight—the Exodus International, the "healing of the homosexual"—all that stuff I had not forgiven, hadn't let go of [and] that I still felt anxious about.
Once I started to do a lot of work to let that go, I went off my medication, and I have not had a problem with Crohn's disease since. [The AIDS patients at Hay House] would meet and begin to rebuild their own ability, some of them to heal themselves, through the gift of self love. They said, "I am good enough. No matter if the government, the world, Anita Bryant, Ronald Reagan and everybody tells me that I'm an abomination to God, I am perfect just the way I am." I think there's an incredible power in that.
If there's any power I subscribe to at all at this point, it's simply knowing that you are a perfect expression of the divine, just as you are, period. The more you know that, the more you know that you're supported by a universe, because that universe needed to express itself as you—period. That's a real healing thing and I don't think it needs to get any deeper than that, actually. I'm really grateful to sort of shed the confines of religiosity and get down to a simple core that we are all here exactly as we are, for a reason. And to love it. To love it, love it, love it—to love me for everything that I am.
Levi Kreis will perform at Northalsted Market Days Saturday, Aug. 11, at 3:30 p.m. For more on Kreis, visit www.LeviKreis.com .
