William Kimball’s parents raised him to be a free spirit, so it was hardly surprising when he became a professional surfer and began touring the world.
But Kimball’s lifelong love of music has taken him on a new kind of tour: Kimball joined forces with another singing surfer, three time world champion Tom Curren, and their eight-stop Florida tour lands at the Speakeasy in Lake Worth on Wednesday.
As the story goes, in 1994, Kimball went to see Curren, one of his surfing heroes, perform in Pompano Beach. Whether he just jumped on stage or was invited is in dispute. What isn’t is this: Kimball closed the show with Curren, and boarded Curren’s tour bus the next day as a member of the band.
That kind of course correction would be impossible for many of us. But for Kimball, a kid who had tremendous personal freedom and unwavering support since childhood, the life of a modern day vagabond seemed perfectly natural.
“My father is the reason I am who I am,” Kimball said by phone from Orlando about his father, Terry Kimball of Jupiter. “He got me interested in surfing and diving at a young age, and he gave me my first guitar. He always encouraged me to follow the things I was passionate about. I was fortunate to have parents that said ‘Go for it.’”
His love of music came mostly from his mother, Nina Kimball of Juno Beach.
“My mom would always sing to the radio in the car,” Kimball said. “I used to lean forward from the backseat so I could hear her. Her voice was so good she could have had a career as a singer, but she put it all aside to bring up us kids.”
So it was natural that some of Kimball’s musical influences — Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel, Peter, Paul and Mary — come from that era when his mother chose what got played on the car radio. Later, Kimball would discover his own vocal heroes.
“I learned how to sing from The Police Outlandos d’Amour. I’d sing it over and over again. Then, Queen and Ozzy Osborne. A weird mix. But classical music inspired me too: Mozart, Haydn, Brahms.”
Growing up near the beach, Kimball fell in love with the ocean early. “We were 7 or 8 years old, out on our bikes riding around all day. We’d catch all our own food, crab and sand perch, and cook it outside. We’d camp out for the weekend.” He made up his first song — Fred the Frog on the Log — around that age, but he was 19 before he wrote his first serious song.
Kimball continued playing music, bouncing around stylistically from rock to rap to punk, but in private, he was writing songs he calls his “songs at the end of the bed.” They’re the songs he wrote for himself, to make sense of the things on his mind. Kimball never planned to sing those songs in public, but a friend heard them and convinced him to get them out there. So, Kimball, now 41, released Along for the Ride, in September, with 11 songs at the end of the bed. Now that they’re out, they seem to have their own momentum.
This summer, Kimball found himself in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., playing music in Carly Simon’s barn with Simon and Ben Taylor, Simon’s son with James Taylor. When Simon played Kimball’s song Sorry to him, he marveled at the legs his music had grown. Then, he got a call asking if they could use the title cut in the Sarah Jessica Parker movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It.
“Just another one of those things,” Kimball said. “It’s crazy. They got a hold of the CD and they liked the music.”
The music is homespun and sweet, acoustic and guitar-driven, lyrical and introspective. “I’ve had people say, I can’t quite call you country, but I can feel what’s being said, like a country song.”
The similarity is more that both Kimball and country music draw from the same pool: the folk/pop singer songwriters of the ‘60s and ‘70s — James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Elton John, Dan Fogelberg, even the Beatles.
“I start with a melody,” Kimball explains. “I’ll play the music and all of the sudden I’ll hear something and I’ll just sing whatever comes out. It’s like painting with a brush that’s just doing its own thing. I’m fortunate enough to have an open channel I can tune into, and these words, I don’t know where they come from, just come. They’re personal and they’re from me, but they’re not about me.”
Kimball is nothing if not modest, so he finds it out of character to talk about himself, but otherwise the life of a musician suits him. But some things take a little getting used to. “The craziest thing about it might be that people want my autograph!”
If you go:
Tom Curren with special guest William Kimball
When: 10 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 23
Where: Speakeasy Lounge, 129 N. Federal Hwy, Lake Worth
Info: (561) 791-6242; speakeasylakeworth.com.
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