Man. This is hard. I was informed yesterday that my close friend and roommate passed away. I’m still not quite clear on all the details, and right now it doesn’t seem real. I met Ken after a stressful and tumultuous apartment search last year. He’d posted an ad for a place that sounded far too perfect to actually exist. I showed up at the spot on Hollywood and he calmly guided me through the apartment and gave me all the p’s and q’s. He was kind, but you could also tell he’d done this for a thousand other people that week. I wouldn’t call him defensive, but comparing that version of him to the version I quickly got to know is like night and day. Our morning coffee chat routine gave us months of friendship in a matter of weeks. We’d talk about the lives that led us to where we were, we’d talk about music, we’d talk about shows we liked, we’d talk about the state of the world, or we’d do dumb little bits that lasted way too long to an audience of only us. Coffee. The point is, he made my difficult moving situation bearable. He was a friend. He was always eager to help out. Unreasonably observant. Painfully empathetic. He could walk into any space by himself and befriend 20 people in 5 minutes. And then introduce them to the 20 people he’d met 5 minutes earlier. He was really really good at that. He brought people together and I’m incredibly grateful to know everybody he introduced me to. He was the kind of singer that made you feel the need to practice, or quit music altogether. It’s hard to imagine my apartment without Ken belting 90’s R&B from the shower. It’s dumb and a waste of energy to focus on this, but damn. That level of talent unexpressed... What a waste. What a tragedy for the rest of the world. I was always baffled as to why I was hearing him sing in our apartment and not at the LA Convention Center. He never expressed this frustration or complained, but I could feel it. ->