Kenny worked at EarthRoamer. He was a finish sprayer — and the word "skilled" doesn't quite cover it. Finish is the work that shows. It's the last thing someone sees when they look at what you built. Kenny's work was clean, controlled, and patient in the way that the best of it always is. He understood what the surface needed and he gave it that. Not more, not less.
Outside of work, he built drums. He sourced the materials himself, shaped them himself, assembled them in his basement. These weren't hobby projects — they were real instruments with real sound, and musicians who played them brought them to the stage at Red Rocks. Those drums were made by a person who understood what he was building and why it mattered.
That was Kenny's dream: to make the finest instruments. To build a life around artistry and craft. He was working toward it in the hours between a job that took everything he had.
He could paint like an artist. His finish work was something to watch.
He worked at EarthRoamer alongside Thomas Hoffmann, who started Kenny Drums Foundation. The shop was demanding — the kind of place where the things being built actually mattered. But everyone was overworked. The woodworkers, the finish team, the electricians, the plumbers. The pace was relentless. Pay was good enough to keep people in, but the cost of that pace was being paid in a different currency — one that doesn't show up on a paycheck.
Then Kenny's father died. Then his marriage ended. He was already carrying the load that overwork imposes, and then the weight of his personal life was added to it. It became too much. Kenny took his own life.
He was a kind person. He was a fun person. He was someone who made exceptional things and deserved to keep making them.
Why his name is on this foundation
The Kenny Drums Foundation is not named after him as a monument. It's named after him because the problem that contributed to his death is still happening — in manufacturing shops across the country, every day. Workers who are too good at their jobs to quit, pushed past the pace their craft requires, in environments that have no standard for what psychological health even looks like.
The drums in the name are the beat of his heart as it carries on in our lives. They're also the rhythm that manufacturing needs to return to — the pace that honors the time and skill that craft actually requires. You can't rush a properly sprayed finish. You can't hurry a hand-fit joint. When production pressure overrides that reality, people pay the price.
Kenny paid it.
The foundation exists to build the standard that should have been there already: a framework for psychological health and safety in manufacturing environments, independent certification that facilities can earn, and education that gives workers, managers, and owners the language and tools to do this differently.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7.