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If it took Ken Domash a tad longer than most to find his voice, blame it on his second grade teacher.  “We were in music class,” he says, “and I remember vividly her telling me to stop singing—to be quiet and go to the back of the room. That was it. I stopped. And for most of my life, I never sang, not even in church.”

With his new album Countrified, Domash (pronounced DA - MOSH) makes up spectacularly for those lost years.  The St. Louis native wrote all 12 songs, infusing them with his distinctive country rock signature.  Each one bears the imprint of experience, of love pursued and found, disappointments suffered and endured, of learning to separate the trivial from the eternal and opening oneself to life’s ubiquitous but often undervalued delights.  It’s all here.

The one upside of his having been turned away from music so abruptly was that is set young Domash on the path toward his career as an Architect. He has spent the past 14 running his own firm and managing his staff - while working with the quiet medium of shapes, forms and color.

So how did music come calling?

“Seven years ago,” says Domash, “our neighbor invited me and my wife to their daughter’s wedding.   We didn’t know the daughter so we assumed it was going to be a really big wedding.  When we arrived at the church we found it to be very small and intimate ceramony.  Then two ladies got up with their guitars and sang like angels.  It was the most beautiful wedding production I’d ever heard.”

Afterward, the wedding party adjourned to a posh St. Louis restaurant for the reception.  “It turned out that the groom’s family was from Ireland,” Domash continues, “and the two ladies singing were his sisters.  It was usually a very quiet restaurant, but these people just took out their guitars and started singing.  Eventually, the groom’s mother looked at me and said, ‘Kenny, sing us a song.’  I told her no, but she kept insisting.  Finally I sang an Elvis song.  She said, ‘You sing really well.’  The next morning, on my way to work, I went to a music shop and bought a guitar.  It had been slightly damaged, but it sounded great, and I haven’t put it down since...

Domash began singing—first occasionally, then regularly—at a local pub as a solo act.  Gradually he built an audience of Domash enthusiasts.  In February 2009, he sang them a song he’d written for an acquaintance who had just died of leukemia.  It was called “Spinning Around.” “When I finished,” Domash recalls, “they asked me to play it again.  By then, one guy was weeping, and I was almost in tears myself.  It was one of those moments.  They all looked at me, and one of them said, “You need to go record that song.’  Within a month, I was in Nashville.”  Inspired by that first recording session, Domash returned to Nashville in June 2009 to record the first six songs of the album that would become Countrified. He completed the project in November.

And his life’s been a mad dash ever since.

“I’ve been doing radio tours about every third week,” he says, estimating that he’s visited around 50 stations.  “It’s awesome.  Sometimes I even get the radio personalities to perform with me.  And some have played practically my whole album.” He also does a weekly live show at a St. Louis wine house.  All this while still helming his design company. Apparently subscribing to Tom T. Hall’s dictum that “country is all in your mind, ” Domash freely admits that he’s never backgrounded himself specifically in country music.  His influences are all over the map. “When I started, I’d play some Nirvana songs to learn the drop D tuning.  Or I’d play Nickelback because it was current and on the radio.  Sometimes I’d do ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ because there was a train that came by where I was playing.  The first song I learned to play was ‘House Of The Rising Sun,’ and I’d play my kids to sleep with it.  I do Kid Rock’s ‘All Summer Long’ and a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd because I really like that sound.  But it took my producer, David Bechtel, to tell me what I was musically.  He said, “You’ve got the country in you, and you don’t even know it.” Domash’s musical achievements have long since outstripped his sunniest expectations.  But he’s set another goal, one not as crass as selling a million albums or singing on Letterman.  “I’ll count myself successful,” he says, “if my songs are heard by people to the point that they become a part of their DNA.”

It would also be nice if a certain music teacher revised her opinion of him