John Kim Faye is a Delaware-born, Philadelphia-based musician and author. He has been writing and performing music for most of his life and has recently written a memoir titled, The Yin and the Yang of It All: Rock ‘n’ Roll Memories from the Cusp as Told by a Mixed-Up, Mixed-Race Kid. Faye is also a retired Drexel songwriting professor and has since been working on producing new music.
Aileen Ryan: Before all, you are a musician first. That said, what was your artistic process while writing your memoir? How was it different from writing songs, how was it similar?
John Kim Faye: Obviously, I’ve been writing music for a lot longer than I wrote this book—so, they were two very different experiences in just about every way. Like with songwriting, you have at least the potential of very rapid gratification; whereas with writing a book, there’s virtually no chance. It was just a five-year leap of faith, really. But one of the things that I tried to do throughout the whole process of writing the book was to try to find any common ground with the songwriting process, so that I could at least feel like I kind of knew what I was doing.
AR: Do you have plans to write more?
JKF: Well, one thing that I think I’ve learned to do at this point in my life is never say never about anything. That said, I don’t have any immediate plans to write another book. I do have an interest in telling more of the stories that are just a little lighter. My main thing is, I really need to dive back into music. I’m currently recording a new album, which is my first one since 2016. I’m about eight songs into it and I’ve got a couple more that I’m going to do. I think once I get ten songs, I’m going start putting singles out at the beginning of next year [2024], and probably have an album release by then.
AR: What inspired you to write this book?
JKF: I think my mom’s passing, which as you know, her presence is such a large part of the book. I felt at that time that I had things inside me that I wanted to say, and some of those came out through a handful of songs. But I really felt like there was just something pulling at me—where I needed to talk about things in a broader perspective. I think one of the motivations I had for writing this book was that I think that my mother’s story is really interesting. I really only scratched the surface of it in my own book, but I felt like I had to memorialize her in a way that goes beyond what you read in an obituary. Putting this out and hearing the feedback from people who have read it—particularly those who may have either met my mom at some point, or just knew what she meant to me— has been such a huge thing for for me to be able to hear.
AR: What was the best and worst part of writing this memoir?
JKF: The worst part of it was at the beginning finding the time to write and hold myself accountable for what I was doing. I think it took about six months, after I announced on Facebook that I was writing a book. I was taking in a lot of other memoirs, trying to find my particular path and how I was going to get done. I was still teaching at Drexel at the time, and with the quarter system, it’s so intensive that for those ten weeks you can’t breathe—you can’t even think about doing anything else. The best part was that after leaving teaching during COVID, I finally got into the swing of things. After that point, I was on a roll in terms of getting momentum to write the book. By the end of 2021, I had a manuscript and then I hired an editor. After a year of that, it was finally published.
AR: Do you have any general advice for new writers, whether that be songwriters, or book writers?
JKF: I’m probably more equipped to give advice to songwriters, but I think it just rings true for both. Whatever you’re writing, you want it to come from a true place. I try very hard not to worry about how something I write is going to be received. I think once you sort of self-edit or self-censor yourself like that early on in your process, it kind of just defines the whole endeavor. As a songwriter, I tried to be brutally honest—and I think that is something that I consciously carried over into writing the book.
To learn more about John Kim Faye, you can visit his website. You can also purchase The Yin and the Yang of It All: Rock ‘n’ Roll Memories from the Cusp as Told by a Mixed-Up, Mixed-Race Kid here.
Aileen Ryan is a fourth-year student at Drexel University majoring in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics with minors in English and Environmental Studies. Aileen is pursuing a career in the social sciences in hopes to create a better world. In her free time, Aileen enjoys exploring the city with friends, reading, and watching movies with her cat, Bruce Wayne.