Picture Costner in El Dorado -- as a musician

Most folks picture Kevin Costner in motion pictures. He has played a couple of baseball players (as well as the son of a baseball player), a crime buster, a prosecutor, a golfer, a futuristic web-footed anti hero and a cavalry officer-slash-wolf-dancer in an Oscar-winning movie he also directed.

This weekend, and for the duration of a current tour of the southwestern United States, Costner is playing music. He and his country-rock band, Modern West, are performing Friday at the El Dorado Municipal Auditorium in El Dorado.

Costner and old musical friend John Coinman put Modern West together in 2007 at the suggestion of Costner's wife, Christine. Costner insisted upon Coinman and another former band mate, Blair Forward. Coinman, an award-winning songwriter whose credits also include being the music supervisor on Dances With Wolves, could pick the rest of the band -- Teddy Morgan, lead guitarist and producer; Larry Cobb, percussion; Park Chisolm, vocals and guitar, who "covers all my mistakes," Costner says; and on this tour, Bobby Yang, who divides fiddle duties, depending on who's available, with Roddy Chong and Luke Bulla.

"I started this off wanting to make music with my friends; two of the guys in the band were in the first band I was ever in [Coinman and Forward]," Costner says. "And I just said, 'I want to make music wherever I'm making movies,' and I didn't know it would evolve into this.

"We've since played around the world. We played the Kremlin, we've played in South America. We've kept it in hand, [but] it could get out of hand. We're asked to go a lot of places; it's just that I have to revolve that around my family, and around movies. Being on the road, much as I enjoy it, it's not conducive to how I live my life."

The band has released four studio albums -- Untold Truth (2008), Turn It On (2010), From Where I Stand (2011) and Famous for Killing Each Other: Music From and Inspired by Hatfields & McCoys (2012).

On the band's website (kevincostnermodernwest.com), Costner explains that he'd been looking for a way "to connect with people in a more meaningful way than just the autograph ... that music could build a stronger, more personal moment for me. It would create the opportunity for a genuine exchange much greater than the movie, TV interview or magazine. It would be real, full of mistakes and without apology. But most of all there would be the chance to have some fun."

The majority of the band's repertory is compositions and lyrics by its members. For the El Dorado concert, most of the set list will be brand new.

"There's a new record that we haven't released, called Where the Music Takes You; there's quite a few ballads on it," Costner says. One of the reasons the album hasn't come out yet, he admits, is the difficulty he'd have promoting it.

"I never know actually how to do that," he says. "I'm not able to go out [on the road] 150 to 200 times a year; my life doesn't work that way."

Costner's star turn as Devil Anse Hatfield in a hit History Channel miniseries, Hatfields & McCoys -- which pulled in a surprise 14 million viewers and earned Costner Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards -- led him to translate the experience into the Famous for Killing Each Other album.

"It was not the soundtrack, but they liked the music so much, four of those [instrumental] cues were picked up for the soundtrack," he says. "Famous for Killing Each Other was kind of a concept record, all of the feelings I had while making that record, so the sound that came out of it, I was really taken with."

That has given him a taste for possibly creating soundtracks for his own movies. "I'm thinking about doing that for this Western I'm about to do in the spring," he says. "It's a real saga; it's something I've worked on a long time, about 10 hours of Western. I'm going to have a run at [doing the music], but the eye of the needle for me is very, very small, so if we don't hit it, I'm going to quickly go to an orchestrator.

"If we did as well with this Western as we did with Hatfields & McCoys, I would do it in a second. That's why I'm even entertaining it. But at the end of the day I have to make the decision -- is it good enough? And if it's not, it doesn't matter.

"That's the function I serve in the band. I decide what we'll play and what we won't. I decide what we record and what we don't. It's not a balancing act; I don't go, 'Well, I haven't had any for awhile, I think we need to do some of mine.' I've never worked that way. It's always been, hopefully, the cream gets to the top.

"There's no real giant master plan for this band. We just love playing our own music and we like doing it in front of people."

Weekend on 07/21/2016