Lonnie Park shares musician’s journey through pandemic

Lonnie Park is a Grammy-nominated artist, musician, composer, producer and author based in Freeville, and his experience from 2020 and most of 2021 shows just how much the pandemic has affected area musicians.

Park spent the first 18 years of his life in Freeville, with much of his school days spent at the Brooktondale Baptist School and his Sundays spent at the Dryden Baptist Church.

With his family being rather conservative, Park was taught growing up that “contemporary music and secular music and music with drums was all evil and the devil and this terrible thing to be feared,” he said. Even so, Park was immediately drawn to music and enjoyed singing in church and playing piano.

“I just was naturally attracted to music,” he said. “My whole family played and sang at home and in church. And eventually, as a teenager, I met a really good friend at church who was a musician — I think that might have been 13, 14 when we started doing music together — and he kind of showed me the ropes of music. That was Kevin Hicks, who still lives in the area as well.”

Hicks helped show Park that playing music could be more than just a fun hobby — it could be a profession.

“I remember when the light bulb came on,” Park said. “I was probably 17 years old when I decided that, ‘Hey, I think I’d like to be a musician.’ And, of course, at that point, I was still coming out of ‘rock and roll is evil’ and I had no idea [about] most of pop culture and pop music and rock music.”

Park transferred to Dryden High School for his senior year, where he joined a band with Hicks. Not long after graduation, he started to pursue music professionally, and that journey took him all around the world.

A big moment for Park came in 2013. In 2012, he completed an album with a man from Singapore, something he described as “just another album.”

“I put my heart and soul into it, but once it was done, it was done and then moving on to the next thing,” he said. “And I got a call about a year after I did the album with him. And he said, ‘Hey, you remember that record we did?’ ‘Of course, yeah.’ ‘Well, it just got nominated for a Grammy.’”

That Grammy nomination set off a trail of dominos that only boosted his career. Being nominated meant he got to meet many like-minded producers from around the world, giving him the opportunity to later collaborate with them.

“So, that phone call kind of sparked a big buyer. And it has been an amazing ride since that’s led all the way up till now,” he said.

Park currently works in many music genres including metal, country, hip-hop, folk and gospel. In addition to being the frontman for the band Ricky Kej World Ensemble, Park collaborates regularly with other musicians, including The Police’s Stewart Copeland and members of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Black Sabbath and others.

“Every time these things happen, I smile thinking, ‘how did they let this kid from little ol’ Freeville, NY, in the room?’” Park said.

Park said that his favorite part of his career is the creative process, which is why he likes working with lots of different artists.

“You see the song take life, take direction,” he said. “Then, as you’re adding your instrumentation and your vocals and your harmonies and all the production elements, it kind of becomes what it wants to be and grows into the song, and then at the very end, you just release it to the world. Once it’s released, for me, the fun’s over. But from the point where you’re starting to create it to watching it grow on into what it’s going to be, that’s my favorite.”

Even as his career continues to take him to all sorts of places, Park never forgets his history in Freeville and Dryden. Since his exposure to music started with hymns at his church in Dryden, any variety came from learning harmonies, a skill that later became an asset in his adult life.

Living in a relatively small town taught him that, since everybody knows everybody, “it’s best just to be as good of a neighbor as you can be.” And even though music can be a difficult business to thrive in, those social skills worked to his advantage in the long run.

“You get into a cutthroat business, like the music business, which is brutal, and people will cut your legs off to get in front of you,” he said. “And if you apply those same principles, you may fall behind today, but you’ll be a marathon runner instead of some of the sprinters in the industry. So, for me, treating everybody like a neighbor all the way through has really helped me to have some sustainability in my own career.”

And it’s that small-town feel that has continuously pulled Park back to Freeville, no matter how often or far he travels. So, it was no surprise that he was back in Freeville, up on Mount Pleasant Road, leading up to and throughout the pandemic.

The last five years of Park’s career have been filled with a combination of producing music in his home studio and performing. Park recently produced an album with bandmate Ricky Kej and Copeland, and before the pandemic hit, Kej and Park were playing together regularly around the world.

Their pending tour schedule was supposed to take Park and Kej to places like South Africa and Finland, but the pandemic cut that schedule short.

“[We] were on this momentum of getting on a plane and flying 15 hours and doing a giant show and then flying somewhere else and doing a giant show and then coming back and producing some music and trying to get it done before you get on a plane again,” Park said. “And then all of a sudden, it just stopped.”

Park had learned long ago that the music business requires quick adaptation, so Park used the pandemic as an opportunity to spend more time in the studio, collaborating with people he had wanted to work with for a long time but hadn’t had the chance to until that point.

“And all of a sudden, you’re doing records with guys that are also stuck at home,” he said. “And now, with the technology, we do all of it remotely. So, working with a guy like Stewart Copeland, or some of these other guys I’ve worked with over the last year since the year and a half since the pandemic, it’s been quite a ride and quite a pleasure.”

While 2021 has brought significant improvements to the state, the same cannot be said for other places Park has visited or hopes to visit in the future, like India, for which Park recently held a charity event to help feed those in the transgender community facing extreme food insecurity due to the pandemic.

“They can’t even imagine a concert happening there for a long time because they’re still dealing with so many deaths and so many economic disasters just trying to find food and medicine, shelter and all that,” he said.

While the pandemic has undoubtedly changed his industry for years to come, Park doesn’t plan to stop any time soon.

“I’ll continue to create music and be writing music, producing with many artists from around the world,” he said. “Whatever keeps coming my way, I’ll keep doing. I have more than I can handle. So, there’s plenty in the pipeline. And I just hope I can keep up until things open back up and we can start getting back out there, getting the other half of [my] living, making touring money.”

Visit lonniepark.com or Park’s page on Facebook for more information on his career.