Two of the most-played songs in American rock were written by the same man, and he is not the one singing them. Kerry Livgren wrote ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ and ‘Dust in the Wind’ for Kansas, and in 1980 he made a solo album on which he sings almost nothing.

The short version

Livgren was the primary songwriter and lead guitarist of Kansas, and also played keyboards. His first solo record, Seeds of Change, was recorded in February and March 1980 and released the same year, with six different guest lead vocalists across seven tracks. He stayed with Kansas through 1983, then formed the band AD, and has recorded intermittently under his own name since.

The man who wrote the two songs everyone knows

Kansas is the American progressive rock band that broke through commercially where most of its contemporaries did not, and Livgren wrote the songs that did it. ‘Carry On Wayward Son’ reached number 11 in the United States and ‘Dust in the Wind’ reached number 6, the band’s highest-charting single. He played guitar, sharing that job with Rich Williams, and keyboards, and the combination is what gives Kansas its particular texture: a rock guitarist writing music that needs a synthesizer and a violin to be finished. Almost everything the band is remembered for came from his pen.

A solo album made in the gaps of a Kansas session

In early 1980 Kansas were making Audio-Visions, and in the downtime around those sessions Livgren made a record of his own at Axis Sound Studio. He wrote every note and every word of it, played guitars, bass, piano, organ, clavinet, Fender Rhodes, synthesizers and percussion, and had Brad Aaron both produce and engineer it. It was conceived as an explicitly Christian album aimed at a gospel audience rather than at rock radio — which is why, as the critic Geoff Barton has pointed out in Prog, the mainstream rock press barely noticed it existed.

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Six singers, three drummers, one writer

The distinctive thing about Seeds of Change is that its writer barely sings on it. Ronnie James Dio takes two tracks, ‘Mask of the Great Deceiver’ and ‘To Live for the King’. Steve Walsh, Livgren’s own singer in Kansas, takes one. David Pack of Ambrosia sings the eight-and-a-half-minute closer. Jeff Pollard opens the record, Davy Moire takes another, and Livgren shares one with Mylon LeFevre. The rhythm section rotates the same way: Barriemore Barlow of Jethro Tull drums on four tracks, Phil Ehart of Kansas on two, John Thompson on one, with Robby Steinhardt bringing the Kansas violin to the finale.

AD, and what came after Kansas

Livgren stayed with Kansas for two more albums, Vinyl Confessions in 1982 and Drastic Measures in 1983, and left shortly afterwards. He then recorded Time Line for CBS with Dave Hope, Warren Ham, Michael Gleason and Dennis Holt, released in 1984, and that grouping became the band AD, which toured from 1983 to 1986 and released Art of the State in 1985 and Reconstructions the year after before folding for financial reasons. His first wholly instrumental solo record, One of Several Possible Musiks, followed in 1989. Sources disagree on the year of the second AD album, and this page gives the earlier of the two.

Album by album

One solo album is covered here. Tap the title for its guide.

Why one album and not five

A word about scope. Livgren’s recorded output under his own name and with AD runs well beyond a single record, and this section covers Seeds of Change alone because that is the album with a claim on progressive rock listeners rather than on the contemporary Christian market he spent most of the following decade in. The rest of the catalogue is real and some of it is good; it simply belongs to a different shelf. Anyone wanting the whole picture should treat this page as one chapter of a career whose main body is Kansas.

Where to start

There is one album here, so the question is really where it sits. Come to Seeds of Change after Leftoverture and Point of Know Return rather than before them: it is the record that makes sense once you already know what Livgren’s writing sounds like inside a band, because the whole interest is in hearing it outside one. If you want the fastest way in, the two tracks Ronnie James Dio sings are unlike anything else in either man’s catalogue.

Why they still matter

Livgren matters because he is the counter-example to the idea that American progressive rock could not sell. Kansas put a band with a violin and a synthesizer into the American top ten and onto rock radio for a decade, and he wrote the songs that got them there. His solo album matters for a smaller and stranger reason: it is a rare chance to hear a major writer’s material stripped of the band that made it famous, sung by six people who had nothing to do with it. Very few writers of his standing have left that kind of document behind.

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