Concert preview: Kiefer Sutherland, country musician, is no acting role

Kiefer Sutherland is hardly the first actor to scratch a creative itch by recording and releasing an album.

Not many of them actually follow up by going around the country in a tour bus to play a few dozen shows for a couple hundred people a night, though.

Sutherland will be at the Urban Lounge in Salt Lake City this Tuesday, performing songs from his 2016 country album, "Down In A Hole."

Presuming his finances are not such that he needs the merch sales to make a living, what exactly is his motivation for doing that?

"We played 75 to 85 dates last year. It became one of the most exciting things I've ever had an opportunity to do. It required me opening up in a way that I haven't done before — explaining where I was when I wrote this song, and between the audience and I, we might have this one thing in common. I just enjoyed it immensely," Sutherland said in a conference-call interview. "Certainly at the beginning, I doubt that anything ever made me that scared. For a variety of reasons, things happened, and it ended up becoming a whole new way for me to tell a story about something. That really is the driving force behind what excites me in working as an actor, as well. There was something about the excitement and the newness of it, and in many ways it's transferred over to the acting, as well. … It's kind of re-energized me in a creative way."

Sutherland wasn't always a country music fan. He cited Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Tom Petty, and The Band as early musical loves. But he got a big taste of country back in the 1990s when he was dabbling in professional rodeo as a calf-roper and team-roper. He and two other men would jump in a truck and drive to events in California, Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas, even sometimes into Utah.

And they always had country on the radio.

"We're driving sometimes six, seven, eight hours a day, so I was listening to it all the time," he said. "And that's when I really started getting into Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson. The reason why those people stood out to me was just their songwriting. They told linear stories that weren't plain, but there was a simplicity to them. They were so direct, and it became a style of writing that I really, really respected and really understood, and I found great symbiosis with those songs and connected to them."

In between shooting his latest TV series, "Designated Survivor," Sutherland would retreat to his trailer and write, either lyrics in a notepad or notes on an acoustic guitar. He said his original intent was just to come up with something decent enough to pitch to an established musician to perhaps record. He brought a few demos to a friend in the music business, looking for an opinion on whether he'd hit the mark.

The friend liked the way they sounded in Sutherland's low, gravelly growl well enough that he told the actor he should record them himself.

Taking himself out of his comfort zone proved an enticing and appealing challenge.

"I'm excited about the fact that I feel I've got so much still to learn," he said. "… I have a process as an actor that's really quite evolved. [But] musically, everything feels really fresh and new and exciting, because it is — really new. I have so much to learn, and that's a really exciting prospect for me."

For the 11-track album, Sutherland primarily drew upon his life for the subject matter.

The only purely fictional narrative is "Shirley Jean," a tale of a condemned man writing a letter to his love the night before his execution. For the rest, he wanted stories that were authentic.

"I've spent a lifetime playing characters. When I started writing, and when I started writing a lot more, the things I would draw on were the personal experiences I had been through. Like anybody else, they were very general things: loss of love, finding love. I, unfortunately over the course of my life, have lost some friends way too early, so I wrote about that. … It was just what was in front of me. Maybe I'm not evolved enough as a writer to spend a lot of time trying to craft or create a story. I've never kept a diary in my life, so this ended up maybe becoming that for me."

The next challenge was getting out there to play songs in front of audiences.

Sutherland reasoned that it would be no big deal, that his decades spent as an entertainer and a public figure would have him prepared to perform.

Then reality — and nerves — took over.

"I thought I was gonna be able to use 30 years of experience as an actor — certainly that was gonna help me out onstage. And I was wrong," he said. "The one part of that component that I left out in my thinking about was, in my 30 years as an actor, I was a character; and when I go onstage, the songs are very personal, in my mind. I leave myself in a more open position than I ever have before. So [the experiences] ended up being very different for me."

When Sutherland finishes this tour, he'll go back to shooting more "Designated Survivor." But in the meantime, he's writing again.

He said he's already written five or six songs for the next record — "I write about personal experiences of my family, so I don't know how appreciative they're gonna be of that!" — which he hopes will be out by spring 2018.

And he fully intends to tour for that record, as well.

"The experience of playing the live shows and the touring ended up being the thing I loved the most. You have to understand, I really loved writing the record and I really loved making the record, but the touring kind of woke something up in me," Sutherland said. "So if something matters to you, you just figure out a way to do it. … It's hard to explain, but I feel so lucky to have this opportunity."

ewalden@sltrib.com

Twitter: @esotericwalden

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Kiefer Sutherland

With Rick Brantley

When • Tuesday, 8 p.m.

Where • Urban Lounge, 241 S. 500 East

Tickets • $25; Ticketfly