The Moments: Sandi Kimmel
by Steve Steinberg
I’ve long understood that my journey is about sharing my journey and I do that through
my music.” Temecula resident Sandi Kimmel wrote this statement to describe what she
and her music have evolved into over the years. During a recent interview she shared
the moments that defined her identity as a musician and her music as a powerful tool for
healing and joy.
By age five Kimmel was singing all the songs from any musical her family would call out
on car trips. Her “watershed” moment came at age 9 when her family went to dinner at a
Long Island restaurant, The Spice of Life. “It was a really eclectic, funky restaurant in a
yellow house. They had a woman go from table to table and she would play folk songs
and I was mesmerized! Something ignited in me,” says Kimmel. From this experience
she realized what one woman could do with music, though it would be awhile before
she would go it alone. As she tells it, “Not long after, me, my brother, my best friend and
another friend would sit in the backyard singing old folk songs, and we had the nerve to
go to The Spice of Life and asked if we can do entertaining. The owner was very nice
and gave us a Saturday afternoon because there weren’t very many people there! But
they gave us tips and that was cool.”
Kimmel began playing guitar at age eleven after seeing and hearing camp counselors
play for the campers on rainy days. “I wanted to be up there playing with them,” she
says, “so I borrowed a guitar and on the second rainy day I was up there watching them
play and trying to play along.” As she learned the chords and played along she realized
she had a gift for music, so she started writing songs. With a laugh she says, “I thought,
if Simon and Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell can do it, then why can’t I?” Her first song was
about a crush she had. More songs would follow. Protest songs. Pop songs. Folk songs.
And there were the songs of teenage angst. “Music was a place to channel intense
emotions, and the feel of the vibration of the guitar against me was so comforting,”
Kimmel says about her first experiences with the healing power of her music. “Things
weren’t great at home,” she remembers, “I was writing these songs of the darkness and
the pain, and they were my salvation.”
In her 20’s, Kimmel rediscovered her childhood love of musical theater after attending a
performance of Sweeney Todd. “My jaw dropped,” she says of this awakening moment,
“seeing that you could be intelligent in your lyric writing opened up a new world for me.”
She was accepted into the renowned BMI Musical Theater Workshop. During this time
she wrote two musicals, but was confronted with the reality of needing to earn money
and make a living. So, she began what would be the beginning of a long career in public
relations. She describes these years as “boring”, “unsatisfying” and “stressful”. She all
but abandoned music, and though she felt it calling to her, “I wanted to write musicals,”
she chose her corporate career over music.
What happened next would put her on the musical path she continues on today. As she
recalls it, “A friend invited me to a party and there was a piano player there. So this
coworker really wants me to sing a song and the third time around the piano player is
playing “Satin Doll”. I know that song so I go over and it is just me and the piano player,
and something happened to the party. Suddenly, people gathered around the piano and
everybody started singing! At one point I went into the bathroom and I looked in the
mirror and I saw my face had really changed. There was a light in it I hadn’t seen in a
long time. It was like the curtain to my mind opened and I knew I had to get out of the
corporate world. And I never looked back.” Reflecting on that moment now, Kimmel
believes that the music healed her and understands that music is her calling. “I honestly
did not get it until that night,” she says, “before that I did not have the confidence to put
my stake in the ground.”
In the more than 15 years since her musical healing, Kimmel has produced four albums
of songs about her journey, personal healing and expressions of joy. Each album
reflects on a period of her life, but she sings for everyone to listen, learn, heal and feel.
Her recently released album, Soul Feathers, came about when a friend of a friend
introduced her to Thomas Barquee, who is a famed performer and producer of sacred
music often associated with yoga. He brought a new sound to Kimmel’s compositions
and deepened the listener’s experience. Everything came full circle for Kimmel as
recording Soul Feathers wrapped up, and Barquee approached her with the idea of
collaborating on a musical. “He did not know anything of my background in musical
theater,” she says with a gleam in her eye, “How fun that I might get to do this again with
Thomas!”
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