The Story
Kenny McCormick IV has lived under more than one name. Kenny Holland. Jimmy Flinders. My Name Is Nobody. And now, finally, Kenny McCormick IV. Raised inside Mormon culture, Kenny grew up surrounded by music, faith, family, expectation and a very specific picture of who he was supposed to become. He performed young. He entered the machinery of the music industry. He appeared on American Idol. He built audiences, adopted identities, walked away from old ones and kept searching for the place where the music actually felt like his. Then the trail got stranger. Religion gave way to questions. Questions led toward altered states, medicine work, Sedona, new communities, new symbols and new ways of understanding the stories he had inherited. Along the way came Craig Rose, Start With I Love You, Shope Creek Wilderness, Camp Mary and a song called The Deer Trail. The song traces back to an emotional memory surfaced during a session with Dr. Gary: Kenny at eight years old, around the time of his baptism. That moment became music. The music became a video idea. And the video led Kenny to Shope Creek. But Kenny is not the only person arriving with questions. Dale Sanders enters the story from almost the opposite world: military service, nuclear-threat analysis, healthcare technology, federal agencies and decades spent evaluating systems through evidence, risk and consequence. Craig puts an unusual proposition in front of him: Would Dale consider backing Kenny’s music? It is a strange collision of worlds. An analytical skeptic. An ex-Mormon musician. A filmmaker. A mountain property. A room full of people who don’t normally belong together. And an artist preparing to release an album under his birth name for the first time. The Deer Trail is not ultimately asking whether Dale believes everything Kenny believes, or whether the audience should. It asks a more uncomfortable question: How much of ourselves do we trade away in order to belong? Family. Religion. Industry. Tribe. Success. Identity. And what happens when the trail you were handed no longer leads where you need to go? Kenny’s deer trail becomes the audience’s first entrance into Stay Curious. Because sometimes leaving the map doesn’t mean you are lost. Sometimes it is the first time the trail is actually yours.
Belonging — Who am I after I leave the identity I inherited?