Kier didn’t set out to be a comedian. His boyhood dream was to be a singer-songwriter; Jackson Browne, James Taylor, that kind of guy. He even went to college on a music scholarship and spent most of his time trying to write great songs not great comedy. "I was totally focused on music early on" he says, "but I must admit, seeing Steve Martin live and how he mixed comedy and music kind of got me thinking."
Solo music club work around the Southeast led to higher profile work in Aspen, Vail, Key West, the Virgin Islands and then concert openers for Don McLean, Roy Orbison, Randy Meisner of the Eagles, Reba McEntire, Leon Russell, and many others.
Around this same time he started playing a few colleges and within a couple years he was playing 80 to 100 college shows a year. "That's when the whole thing really kind of blew up for me." as he tells it, "One day I was 'Songwriter-Guy-who's-kinda-funny' and the next I was 'Comedian-Guy-doing-all-these-musical-impressions'! I don't know how it happened but pretty soon Comedy Guy had completely highjacked the show from Songwriter Guy... and I don't mind saying that Songwriter Guy was pissed!"
That didn't stop him from accepting the 1993 NACA Coffeehouse Entertainer of the Year Award (Nat. Assoc. of Campus Activities), voted on by all those college students he'd been making laugh for the past ten years.
Gradually the non-stop MusiComedyImpressions College Tour morphed into the non-stop MusiComedyImpressions Corporate Tour. So along with cruise ships, international military tours, and the ever-present comedy clubs always thrown in for good measure, Corporate America had embraced Kier in a big way.
As any good Journeyman, he's got a story to tell and in the last few years, in addition to his regular show, Kier has been featured as an inspirational speaker, presenting a mix of touching original music and life stories, along with comedy and impressions.
So Songwriter Guy clawed his way back up into the front seat with Comedian Guy and apparently they're both happy. Kier says, "I didn't exactly plan it this way when I started, but I'm having a blast. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world."