People ask me how I came up with the idea for Vox Lumiere and the answer is… underwear. Vox Lumiere was born while searching through a Big Lots store for the cheapest package of Fruit of the Looms I could find.

I was living in New York, writing commercials and TV music by day and doing gorilla theater by night. Gorilla theater? Basically, my friends and I would find these crazy, little, CHEAP theater spaces (theater space is a very generous description) and we would think up an idea, and write and produce full blown little musicals for about… $1.37.) We’d beg, borrow or steal whatever we needed and, like Mickey and Judy, “put on a show”! Hell, if we broke even, we thought it was a huge success (some things never change, huh?).

Anyway, between making the world a safer place through advertising, and writing and producing our insane little shows, who has time for laundry!? So, as I was hustling my way down 57th Street one afternoon, I spotted a sign for the Big Lots store (you know, the kind of stores where you can buy a crate of toasters for $11.95). Knowing that the current state of the pair of underwear on my person, was “the last”, and if laundry was on the horizon (which it wasn’t) they were not going to last much longer, I ducked in and started searching for the Jockey’s.

As luck / fate would have it, as I made my way to the back of the store, my eye caught a sign that read, “Silent Movies $1.00.” It stopped me in my tracks.

Why? Good question. I’m a composer and a songwriter. An odd skill set. And I never get to do both in the same movie. So, I had this idea percolating in my brain about developing themes for films, and when it was appropriate, writing lyrics for the themes that would all work to enhance the storytelling of a film and increase the emotional impact of the experience.

I also knew that no director in their right mind was going to let me experiment with this in their film. So, I had pretty well scrapped the idea until I saw that sign that read, “Silent Movies $1.00″

I thought, “Well, they are silent movies, and they’re old, so all these people are probably dead. So, who can get mad at me?” I took the last 5 bucks in my pocket and went home with 5 silent movie VHS tapes (young people see Wikipedia for an explanation of VHS Tape).

When I got home, I popped Metropolis into my VCR, and my jaw dropped. I was completely blown away by what I saw. The movie was amazing, and absolutely perfect for my “experiment”.

And, how did Vox Lumiere go from Big Lots dream to the big stage?

I told my friends what I was working on, and kept talking about how I wanted to perform this “rock concert story” live on stage. Then one day I got a phone call from a film festival asking if I’d like to come to France and perform my “show” in The Avignon Opera House.

I know. Random, right? And, of course I said yes, but I really had no idea if it was even going to work. Well, it did, and they invited us back the next year to do our NEW show (that I had not even written yet!)

This kind of weird stuff kept happening. Phone calls from friends of friends or from people that had seen us perform, called with invitations to perform. It was fun. A complete lark. Finally, after a few years of this my lovely wife Victoria said, “Maybe you should pay attention to this.”

So, that’s what we’ve been doing.

See, I told you. Underwear is a much better story title than (snore) History. So, to re-cap.

Underwear = Need
Need = Art
Art = Vox Lumiere.

Thanks for reading! ~ Kevin