When Pat Ryan Key took the stage at OZ Smokehouse during Bikes Blues and BBQ this week, he was feeling incredibly grateful. And not only because his new single “Truth” was released that day. But because not that long ago, he went through a medical emergency with a prognosis that threatened to take away his ability to walk, talk and sing.

“I’ve been cancer free since 2019 and I’m just grateful to be here,” Key said. “At the end of the day, with that experience, an out-of-body near-death experience, thankfully I came through unscathed and because of that, I definitely do my best not to take it for granted.

“Now my initiative is just to pursue my art and share that with the world.”

Key’s musical reputation was built within the hard rock genre, but in recent years he’s come into the realm of R&B and felt that he’s developed his own unique sound.

“He has so many gifts he’s good at,” said wife Jill Key. “He’s lucky. He’s so creative … not just in his musical life but in his personal life. He’s creative at anything he does and passionate about it.”

His strength is “definitely his songwriting,” said father-in-law and fellow musician Al Halpin, who performs with Pat under the name PAL (Pat and Al). “As we’ve played together, he’s learned a lot and developed a nice sound and his own feel to the music.”

Halpin met Key after seeing him perform one night. He was initially was drawn to his originals.

“They sounded like something I’ve heard before,” Halpin recalled. “He listens to the same music I grew up with. His originals reflect old-school music, Motown, old Rhythm and Blues.

“His new stuff reflects on all the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s music.”

IT CAME NATURALLY

From Pat Ryan Key’s earliest memories, he has been immersed in music. His father has always been an avid music lover and fan most easily summed up as a human encyclopedia of music industry trivia for the last 80 years. As a result, anything music related became second nature for Pat too.

“I remember sitting in school I’d always be distracted because I’d have a melody floating around in my head,” Key said. Once, when he was in 9th grade, he started tapping out a drum solo on his school desk. “Once I got it out of my head, I realized the whole class was staring at me. The teacher said ‘Bravo, are you done?’

“It’s inherent, it’s in my spirit.”

Songwriting is something that comes easily and inexplicably for Key. The ones he found the most moving were songs that arrived to him seemingly out of thin air. He’s learned to chase the spirit when it moves him because, more often than not, if he doesn’t document it in the moment, he’ll forget it.

Key was 14 years old when he got a bass guitar. It was the height of new metal and alternative music, when he and so many others were listening to Stone Temple Pilots, Sound Garden, Deftones. The whole wave of music that Nirvana had triggered came to an end and “shifted into this more aggressive material,” Key said. “Naturally I was drawn to that.”

At the same time that he was learning to play music, Pat’s best friend lived just down the street and his father was a professional musician. He’d make excuses to go to his friend’s house because he had a drum set. Together they’d play drums and guitars, rather than being outside or playing video games like the rest of the kids their age.

Hanging out with friend Pat Callison and his other musician friends, Key got introduced to the music of Blink 182, Incubus and Rage Against the Machine, then they started jamming together.

“After school I’d get home and plug in my bass and start practicing, learning all the songs I loved,” he said. In 10th grade, Pat met Johny Ayala, who would become a good friend. “He would see me air drumming like a dork and said ‘I have a drum set,’” offering to let Key get some practice.

They played Nirvana constantly, which helped Pat develop his skills, as well as the coordination of limbs and timing needed to pull off the music. Back then Key absorbed the melodies, but never really paid attention to the lyrics. It made him more of a natural performer than anything.

Originally Pat had begun his musical journey on the trombone, which helped him learn how to read music and translate what he was seeing on the page to performing, but when it came to rock music, he found that the less he thought about it, the easier it came.

“It was this weird twist, almost like statistics,” Key said. “It was a different way of thinking about (it). I just started running with it.”

Pat went from bass to drums, but continued to encounter melodies in his mind. He picked up guitar, teaching himself that instrument, so he could get his ideas on paper.

BIRTH OF A SONGWRITER

Pat Ryan Key has been playing music for 20 years, but it’s only been more recently, ever since his graduation from the University of Arkansas, that he’s applied himself with the sense of pursuing music as a craft.

During Key’s first two years of college, he thought he was headed toward the sciences when a chemistry professor noticed his abilities and dubbed him a wizard. When Calculus II derailed that particular future, he pivoted to business instead.

“It taught me how to think for myself and apply myself and just be wise with my money and my time,” he said. “I don’t have any regrets.”

A series of circumstances led to Key beginning to record his own music, then he learned how to piece it together off the cuff, which he’s discovered is the best way for him. But when Pat was just beginning to produce his own music, he liked to have everything laid out, charted out.

“One of my favorite bands growing up, they showed a song of theirs placed on a whole chart with rows and columns and said ‘By this part of the song, you should introduce this element,’” Key recalled, speaking of Deftones. “My mind completely resonated with that. I geeked out on it.”

While oftentimes songwriters don’t always make the best performing artists or vice versa, Key feels lucky to be able to harness both sides of that musical coin and just have fun with it.

After college graduation, Pat moved in with a good friend who had just purchased some home recording equipment. When the friend and roommate’s work schedule got changed to second shift, Key suddenly had the time and access to a convenient way to record his music. His roommate taught him the basics, and that’s how he made his first EP, “A Rebel’s Chance” by i do declare.

Key’s friend Pat, who had introduced him to his first band a decade prior, joined the fold and worked on that hard rock album together. Even though all the players involved in its making weren’t a band, it was very much a team effort.

“We just had fun with it,” Key said. “I had no scope of what it would lead to, where I am today. We were just passing the time and enjoying ourselves.”

Still, the project took off fast. In retrospect, Pat said, they were too young and didn’t quite know what they had on their hands, until they won Best New Artist by the Northwest Arkansas Music Awards for the album and began performing all the time. It didn’t last, though. The group grew older and faced changes that took them on different paths.

They had creative differences and split up, deciding each to pursue their own projects. To keep the lights on, so to speak, Key began playing covers, which was a popular way to perform in the region at the time.

“That helped me gain more experience in how to be an entertainer, if you will, when you’re a one-man team,” Key said. “But it just didn’t feel right. I wanted to be playing my own music. I had this inherent drive and wanted to be the best at it. (Your own music) is yours, it’s your baby.”

As Pat was coming to this realization and beginning to figure it out, he found out that he had brain cancer.

At first it seemed like he was the only one who knew something was wrong, but he was sure something was off. His family helped him. They tried to dig into what was going on with him in hopes of understanding and find a solution. That was a year-long process.

“Long story short, I feel like it was a blessing in disguise,” Key said. “Because it did help me shift my priorities, to get me where I was naturally trying to move towards. That experience was kind of a bridge that helped me move from point A (performing covers) to point B (producing originals). That’s been my priority.”

Audiences will always know and love favorites like Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Call Me in the Breeze.

“I still love those songs, but there’s something about being able to share you own art that really moves me.”

UNEXPECTED DIAGNOSIS

It was while Pat was performing that he first noticed something was wrong. He would be singing and feeling the moment, and then right as the crowd would start getting responsive, Key would get a frog in his throat. The sounds going into the mic weren’t what he intended. At first he was embarrassed and wanted to figure out more so that his performances could go back to the way they used to be.

“I thought maybe it was something I was doing: not warming up properly etc.,” he said. “Progressively it developed into more extreme symptoms.”

Key started experiencing vertigo and having migraines — an extreme turnaround for someone who had never suffered from headaches, let alone migraines before. It was like going from zero to 100, he said. That’s when his primary care doctor ordered an MRI, but it would still be six more months before they discovered a tumor.

In the meantime, Pat ran into a family member he hadn’t seen in years. The cousin, who had always been a beauty, was unrecognizable. Key only knew it was her because he’d spotted her children. She had just undergone a second operation for a brain tumor. When he described what he was experiencing, she urged him not to put off figuring out what was going on.

At that point, the tumor was still undetectable by MRI, but then his symptoms ramped up.

“I looked like a lush drunk,” Key said. “Any step I would take, I’d be going three or four steps to the left or right. With that and the migraines, I couldn’t drive and it was affecting my sleep because I couldn’t lay down.”

The neurologist he was referred to didn’t have an appointment for several more months. His then-girlfriend Jill and his mom began working to help him get seen sooner.

To that point it felt like “the doctor was basically not taking him seriously,” Jill Key said. On one of their trips to the ER, Pat was told he’d just had neck spasms. “And the last thing you want to think is that someone has a brain tumor. I felt helpless. It didn’t seem like he was getting any answers.”

When a last minute cancellation got Pat in, the neurologist ordered an MRI immediately just based on seeing him walk.

They found the brain tumor from that scan, ordered at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. It was the size of a golf ball already and doctors recommended emergency surgery. The diagnosis was a form of brain cancer that’s extremely rare for adults and predominantly seen in children. The neurologist said there were less than 100 documented cases worldwide.

“All the odds were against me,” Key said. “They gave me a 50/50 chance to survive the operation. And said if I survive, it was one in a million that I would be the same again, that I would walk or talk, let alone play music.”

There was no preparing for that moment. Pat felt like his back was against the wall and that he just had to do it.

“I felt like a little tiny ant, all sense of control gone,” he said. “Just kind of at a complete loss.”

“It all just happened so fast after that,” Jill Key said. “He did not have time to think on it, to dwell.”

Key relied on the support of Jill and his family, who were all surrounding him when he got the news. They helped him get through it and showed him love throughout the whole process. He had surgery just two days later.

Pat survived the operation and when he woke up, Jill handed him a pair of drumsticks. He started playing them while in bed.

“I thought ‘Praise the Lord, I’ve still got it!’” he said. Nurses from around the hospital kept dropping into his room to visit him. Each one called him a miracle. “Everything was black and white from that moment on … Right then and there I understood you don’t have to get so deep in the weeds with life. Life is what you make it.”

EMBRACING LIFE

Now, Key said, he is just trying to be smart with the time he’s been given.

“To be wise and really enjoy life and not take anything for granted,” he said. “Because it is short and flashed before my eyes, just like that. Completely unexpected.”

Pat and Jill had gotten together in April 2016. They’d met at one of his shows, and then experienced the cancer diagnosis that Thanksgiving, when they’d only been together six months. A few months after his treatments, he proposed in Feb. 2017.

“He said he knew I was the one after going through all that,” Jill Key said.

Among the many things he’s grateful for is that music still comes to him naturally. Key still wakes up in the middle of the night after dreaming of a new song and will get up to write the lyrics down.

“Music’s all around me,” he said. “I try to rein it in.”

It was natural to transition to a sort of one-man-band after recovering from cancer, Key said. He had already met Al Halpin, who would soon become his father-in-law, and Al helped him find himself again. He’s also taught Pat a lot through the experience of playing music. The two have performed more than 400 shows together.

Since then, Key has turned to more soul-influenced music.

“My trademark is being a passionate vocalist,” he said. “That’s something I wanted to embrace in this new found life, if you will.”

Changing styles gives Pat the sense that he’s starting over a bit, musically. It too feels like a second chance and the prospect has excited him. Lately he’s been working with Neil Greenhaw at his studio in Bentonville to perfect his process of writing, composing and recording. Key’s amassed a little collection now, and “Truth” is his sixth song to come from that.

It’s also his first song to truly be a full family affair. His father kicked it off with giving Pat the first two stanzas and his wife made the pre-chorus.

Key doesn’t always know that he’s going to write a song that day. He’s learned to simply capitalize whenever inspiration strikes.

“He always tells me when the creativity hits you, whether it’s in the middle of the night or anytime, like this particular time when he whips over on the side of the highway and I’m asking ‘What’s happening? What’s wrong?’ he’ll say ‘I just got this song in my head, I need to catch the lyrics, sing and jot it down,” Jill Key said. “I wasn’t used to that at first, but now I’m used to that quirkiness that comes with being creative.”

Pat has found fulfillment with his own creative spirit and landed on his own sound. He feels like he’s achieved his own vibe.

“I continue to learn as I go,” he said. “That might be the secret to my success. It’s fresh. It’s still new for me.

“At this stage of my life, I really want to keep everything meaningful and let it have merit, integrity. That’s just what feels right.”