'I was really low': Kem's inspiring journey from despair to R&B stardom
Brian McCollumThere’s a spot on the Detroit riverfront, just behind the city’s main post office, where Kem experienced his life’s lowest moment and, in a certain regard, one of his highest.
These days, the singer and songwriter known on his driver’s license as Kim Owens is one of the biggest stars in adult urban music, an artist who has sold millions and played packed arenas with a distinctive brand of elegant, intimate R&B. Since 2003, he has been Detroit's leading flag-bearer on the modern roster of Motown Records.
But on July 23, 1990 — his 23rd birthday — Kem was homeless, addicted and grasping at one final thread of hope.
He found it that night gazing across the Detroit River, the twinkling lights of Windsor before him, the majestic Ambassador Bridge to his right. He stood humiliated and humbled. He stared and he meditated. And then he discarded his can of King Cobra malt liquor. Kem had taken his last sip of alcohol and his first step to enduring sobriety.
“Spiritually, physically and emotionally, it was probably the most demanding time in my life and addiction,” he recently told the Detroit Free Press in a sit-down at Birmingham’s posh Townsend Hotel. He paused to choke back tears. “I was really low. I had already been low, but now I was wondering what had happened to my life.”
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Kem’s remarkable journey, a literal rags-to-riches tale, is chronicled in his new memoir, “Share My Life” (Simon & Schuster), penned with noted music author David Ritz, best known as the official biographer for Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson and others. It includes a foreword by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
The book — tracing Kem’s early life in Nashville, Tennessee, his move to suburban Detroit at age 5, his teenage descent into addiction hell, his drive to sobriety and rise to musical success — is out Tuesday and also available in audio formats.
“I’ve gone from being a painfully shy kid bent on self-destruction to someone who performs original songs in front of an arena overflowing with appreciative fans,” as Kem says in the memoir.
A week before his 1990 riverside epiphany, he’d been booted from the Salvation Army up the street, where alcohol was forbidden. Kem had grown up in Pontiac and Southfield dreaming of a music career, enchanted by “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” on TV. Now he was sleeping outdoors and rooting through trash cans to eat.
That night, he bought a can of malt liquor at a Fort Street party store and walked to the river. He’d been kicked out of his parents’ house years ago and lately had been rambling from shelter to shelter.
He liked the Salvation Army because it had a piano where he could find brief solace. Now Kem had cost himself even that.
“This time, my downward spiral was so steep. I was bankrupt. I was 23. I didn’t have anything,” he said. “Which, in a situation like that, is actually the best place to be. Because that’s the place where we’re open to being helped and not resisting.”
Having made his choice to get clean, Kem found help in 12-step program and later at Marianne Williamson’s Church of Today in Warren, where he made key connections that would eventually boost his musical breakthrough.
It would be more than a decade until the world at large heard his music; for now, Kem had to learn how to live. He eventually landed a job as a banquet server at Dearborn’s Ritz-Carlton, the sort of place that fit his upscale aspirations. There he made more connections, including key encounters with R&B singer Al Jarreau and keyboardist George Duke.
It was a far cry from the world he’d inhabited since his teens, when he discovered the highs to be had from a medicine cabinet and, eventually, harder drugs and drink. He spent his senior year at Southfield High School in “an emotional, alcoholic fog,” as he says in the book.
Kem recently returned to his riverfront spot for a book-related photo shoot. On a gray late-winter morning, snow blanketed the ground as he made his way down in a peacock blue suit and sleek Dolce & Gabbana sneakers. This will always be an emotional site, he said.
He found himself gazing across the Detroit River once again, soaking in the gravity of the place where 33 years ago he decided to turn himself around.
“It’s all come full circle,” Kem said quietly.
The power of love
Last April, Kem’s warm, cultured voice fluttered across the Fox Theatre, his romantic ballads and bedroom burners straddling the lines of R&B and jazz. In his first homecoming concert since the pandemic, he commanded the stage as he played yet another sold-out Detroit venue — a couples-night kind of show that had the ladies reliably swooning.
“There is no love like Detroit love,” he told the crowd, which included fans who have been aboard since Kem was playing the Half Past Three club on Grand River and selling CDs out of his trunk.
Love is a topic Kem knows well, having explored its nooks, crannies, peaks and valleys in song for more than two decades. Starting with his 2003 Motown debut, “Kemistry,” he has released six albums while taking 14 singles to No. 1 on Billboard’s adult R&B chart. His latest project is his first live album, “Anniversary,” recorded last fall at Detroit’s Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre and set to hit digital platforms Friday.
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And love loomed large in November 2019, when Kem married Erica, his girlfriend of four years, at a ceremony in Maui. Today they keep a never-a-dull-moment household in suburban Atlanta with their five children, the youngest a 16-month-old son. Having settled in Georgia to be near his wife’s family, Kem said they’re considering a move back to Detroit.
Though music always has his attention, Kem’s energies right now are dominated by the book, a project he conceived more than a decade ago, confident he had a story that could resonate widely.
Kem linked up with Ritz in 2019 to begin work on “Share My Life,” a deep and involved process the singer ultimately called cathartic. Ritz saw his task as getting Kem out of his comfort zone to truly open up on sensitive topics: mental health, family dysfunction, sexual discovery.
“We both knew he had a great story. It’s a deep Detroit story, but a different one than anything I’d done before,” said the Los Angeles-based writer, citing his books with Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson. “This was a whole other part of Detroit that I knew nothing about: homelessness, the Salvation Army, Marianne Williamson’s church. It was new territory for me, and that’s always exciting.”
Ritz said he has been a fan of Kem since “Kemistry” — impressed by an artist he describes as a “new Al Jarreau” — and is proud to have co-written a book that’s “as candid as I’ve done with anyone.”
During their long conversations for “Share My Life,” the author admired Kem’s intelligence and analytical tendencies. But getting the singer to that candid place was another thing.
“The thing about Kem is, he’s very shy, and he kind of hides in silence,” said Ritz. “And that’s one of the themes of the book — the silences in the relationship between him and his mom, his dad, his household. He’s still very much that guy, but he was burning inside to tell this story.”
It included a deep dive into Kem’s early life, when he grew up the eldest of three kids in a striving but sometimes troubled household. Ritz spoke at length with the singer’s mother about her own battles with alcohol and eventual recovery.
“My mother told him things that, like dude, I never even knew,” Kem said. “They had conversations I never had with her about our family history and life at home. He was connecting a whole bunch of dots.”
“Share My Life” is also rich in details about Kem’s artistic evolution in metro Detroit, where he bought his first records as an 11-year-old (George Clinton’s “One Nation Under a Groove” and Prince’s “Soft and Wet") and later, like many locals of his generation, was introduced to a new musical universe thanks to eclectic WJLB-FM disc jockey Electrifying Mojo.
The book also chronicles Kem’s early stabs at recording his own stuff, working with collaborators such as John Penn and high school friend Brian O’Neal, and initially dabbling in a Minneapolis-inspired, New Jack Swing upbeat sound.
“But while we were doing that, I was off to the side writing these little quiet, romantic songs,” Kem said. “They would ask me, ‘Why are you always writing about, you know, love?’ Everything with me was a ballad. So I’ve been authentic to who I was.”
Kem was still finding his way in some respects (“I needed a stylist terribly,” he laughs), but that was the musical vibe that got Motown’s attention in 2003. It didn’t hurt that through his own hustle, Kem was by then blowing up in Detroit, moving CDs at a brisk pace and landing radio play.
“The kind of music I was making was not necessarily mainstream. It may have been considered to be a niche,” he said. “So that was the best route — to take the music I had created, giving away records in the streets and building it right here.”
Kem is set for a whirlwind week in New York as the book rolls out, including a Monday visit to ABC’s “Good Morning America,” a Tuesday appearance on “Tamron Hall,” slots on SiriusXM and more. He’ll be hitting the road in support of his “Anniversary” live album, including a Saturday show at Grand Rapids’ Van Andel Arena.
Such a life wasn’t unthinkable to 23-year-old Kem as he looked out at the Detroit River. Indeed, it’s precisely what he hoped for — and it’s why he remains grateful for a fateful night in July 1990.
“This story is part one,” he said. “It’s the story of my beginning to where I am now. And I’m not of the mindset that I’m done yet. There’s more to come.”
Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.