ABOUT KURT DEIMER
Everyone has dreams, but not many are bold enough to truly chase them. Kurt Deimer — the distinctively deep-voiced rock singer, scene-stealing horror actor, film producer, and ambitious businessman — almost took that path himself.
"A lot of people die from stress and anxiety because they’re forcing themselves to do a job they don’t want to do," he says. "I was a nervous, unhappy wreck when I got into the oil business in corporate America. But I knew right away I wasn’t a corporate guy. I just knew I didn’t want to work 30 years to make a certain amount of money. It just didn’t make sense to me.”
Luckily, Deimer followed his instincts—and now, in his 50s, he’s releasing his debut full-length album, the expansive and cinematic rock spectacle And So It Begins… that certainly draws on a wealth of life experience. The singer, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, was an artistic and inquisitive kid, taking piano lessons at age 7 and winding up as a first-chair percussionist at his middle school. Deimer started his first rock band at age 20 and wound up doing "a lot of partying" as a way to process intense anxiety.
"I did a lot shit I shouldn’t have done until I was 20," he says. "But I knew I was gonna end up dead. I was realistic enough to know we couldn’t have made it out of Cincinnati. You’ve gotta go with your gut and know what you’re capable of and not.”
So instead of taking a possibly doomed path to rock stardom, he went a more conventional route for an ambitious young man: graduating college and launching multiple start-ups — including the oil brand Starfire, a venture that inadvertently kick-started his acting career. The company’s signage wound up placed in the John Travolta action-drama Trading Paint, and Deimer negotiated himself a speaking role in the film, ultimately leading to a series of other roles, including a memorable spot as a gas station teller murdered by Michael Myers in the 2018 Halloween reboot.
Through his relationship with director-actor Kevin Wayne, he wound up making a crucial connection: songwriter Ben Trexel, who showed Deimer some of his demos and asked him to get back in the singing game. As a college English Literature major with an affinity for poetry, Deimer knew he had the lyrical chops. And together, they knocked out a string of songs that were the first seeds of what became And So It Begins…
There were plenty of other major signposts that fueled his musical drive: releasing an album under the name Bald Man, linking up with world-renowned mixing engineer & producer Chris Lord-Alge (Green Day, Bruce Springsteen, Guns N' Roses), launching his first tour by opening for Geoff Tate in 2021, continuing to build his acting résumé (including parts in the 2024 horror-comedy Scared to Death and the upcoming Hellbilly Hollow), and recruiting the expressive guitar work of Phil X (Bon Jovi), whose playing added another layer of sophistication to the diverse range of material on And So It Begins…”
Phil first entered Deimer’s orbit with a heavy cover of Pink Floyd’s classic "Have a Cigar." “When I heard his solo, I was like, 'Jesus,'" the singer recalls. "I kept giving him lyrics and vibes and how I thought songs should sound, and we just kept writing. The next one we did was 'Naive,' and then we did 'Only Time Will Tell,' and then 'Live or Die,' which we wrote when we were on tour together.”
The album covers a ton of stylistic ground — natural for a musician interested in everything from AC/DC to R.E.M. to Widespread Panic. It bounces from the thunderous hard rock riffs of "Naive" to the acerbic funk-metal of "Back of the School" to the "total Sunset Strip '80s vibe" of "Sunset Blvd" to the symphonic grandeur on his cover “Have a Cigar,” which masterfully fades into his take on The Doors single “Riders on the Storm” to close out the collection. One of the album’s most personal centerpieces is the thunderous "Live or Die," which chronicles a youth filled with fear — and his efforts to overcome it.
"Everybody’s got dreams, and if they don’t, they just want to exist," he says. "We live in a free country where we’re allowed to take risks, and I’m kind of a risk-taker.”
Deimer's winding journey and hard-hitting rock songs leave you with an overarching message of hope: It’s never too late to make shit happen.
