Tom Kenny, the Voice Behind SpongeBob, on His 12-Piece Band the Hi-Seas: 'It's Not a Kids' Show'

George Napolitano

Tom Kenny is, for lack of a better word, a sponge.

Over the last four decades, he's worked as a comic, appeared as a voice actor in cartoons like The Powerpuff Girls, Adventure Time and Rocko's Modern Life, and — perhaps the most "koral" job of them all — has lived in a pineapple under the sea as the voice behind the iconic titular character in Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants. Even this year, he's played a key role in Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio as Benito Mussolini.

Kenny has learned quite a bit from each of his endeavors, but it's SpongeBob that has led him to a side gig — which he knows catches people off-guard. Kenny is the lead vocalist and self-proclaimed "guiding spirit" of a 12-piece "rock-n-soul" band: Tom Kenny & the Hi-Seas.

"[People] come up and they'll go, 'I've got to ask you. Love your band by the way. But my friend just looked up and said, I think that's the SpongeBob guy.' I love when that happens. Because they didn't come to see the band, they just happened in there and then they do the math and their brains explode," Kenny, 60, tells PEOPLE. "It's the weirdest thing in the world to grow up on SpongeBob and then randomly walk in a place, and there's this rock band on stage, and we're grooving."

George Napolitano

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Yes, the "SpongeBob guy" has a band with a brass section, vocalists The Damselles and the works, but he's no sponge out of water.

As a teen growing up in Syracuse, Kenny played in bands on and off, before using his voice to instead work the comedy circuit in Boston and eventually land roles on both Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon in the late '90s and early aughts. And it was the cheery sea creature that brought him closer to his love of music once more.

Just a few years into SpongeBob's near quarter-century run on television — after it premiered in 1999 — Kenny, late creator Stephen Hillenburg and others behind the series recruited a team of musicians to give the Bikini Bottom crew a fresh musical direction. Among them was Andy Paley, longtime collaborator of Brian Wilson, and a handful of other world-class musicians. Even Wilson himself sang backing vocals on what eventually became the show's 2006 album Best Day Ever.

"We said, 'Wow, we should play this stuff for mostly kids' events,'" Kenny recalls. "We played a lot of kids and charity events where it was just us doing SpongeBob music, doing cartoon music. And once in a while there were songs for Patrick and songs for Sandy. So [the other voice actors] would come up and sing their songs in front of these kids. And from there, we met these musicians. It's the stuff that we were screwing around with, just off in between takes backstage. We all like the same stuff. It's kind of New Orleans music and soul music and really a whole bunch of different stuff."

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From there, Kenny and gang formed the Hi-Seas, which he describes as a "Big Soul review" where everybody (not just SpongeBob himself) gets time in the spotlight. After all, Kenny isn't a bandleader by any means, and he insists he's instead a vocalist and "guiding spirit" behind the ensemble. But the voice of the group still manages to jump on top of bars and wail from time to time.

While Kenny doesn't recall the exact moment his touring ensemble was conceptualized, he does remember thinking that a 12-piece band was "not the greatest business model ever." Still, the group has managed to form a sound of its own, which Kenny describes as somewhere between Sam Cooke and Tom Jones, as the Hi-Seas continually find wacky ways to fuse genre — like turning a Patsy Cline track into a New Orleans-style jam.

Don't be confused, though. It might be SpongeBob's band per se, but it's not a SpongeBob band. Well, outside of them whipping "Best Day Ever" out every now and then at shows.

"It wasn't a plan of, 'We'll get the SpongeBob generation listening to Sam Cooke songs or 5 Royales records, Wilson Pickett, whatever.' But it did happen like that. There's crossover," Kenny says. "I want people to be really clear on what they're going to see when they come out to see Tom Kenny & the Hi-Seas. It's not a kids' show. We probably won't be doing SpongeBob songs. Once in a while, we're feeling it, we'll pull one out, and people go crazy. But really that's not what this band is for."

The Hi-Seas crowds aren't necessarily your average group of nematodes, since the group brings in all types of audiences, Kenny explains. Of course, there's "SpongeBob people," then there's their parents, and then there's the elderly concert-goers who Kenny says really bring the most energy of them all.

"They say, 'When I was a kid, SpongeBob was the only cartoon that my parents could stand to watch with me. We would watch it together.' And this band has elements of that," Kenny says. "They come out of Sponge curiosity and then wind up dancing around having a great time and becoming regulars."

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With keyboardist Dave "Mustang" Lang laying down arrangements these days for the Hi-Seas, Kenny can at least somehow manage to balance his work in SpongeBob, its two spin-offs — Camp Koral and the Patrick Star Show — and all the deep-sea movies that come to be a two-time Emmy-winning voice actor. He's also still a father, even with one of his kids having already left the nest. "Not a bad problem to have is that you've got a whole bunch of stuff that you love doing, and you're lucky enough to be given the opportunity to do it a fair amount," Kenny admits.

George Napolitano

The singing doesn't strain Kenny's voice, either, and he's gotten better at that, too. "It's like a boxer," he says of preserving his vocal chops. "The more matches you get in, the more you don't want to get your nose flattened. You're like, 'I better get hip to the sweet science of pugilism.' So, I feel like I know how to do stuff and know how to use it in a way now that I wouldn't have if I had been doing this band when I was a younger guy."

As the vocalist of his very own "rock-n-soul" band, and the voice of a character that's shaped generations of kids (and their memes), Kenny sees himself as the "busiest, most fairly unambitious person in the world." And he's OK with that these days, just as he's OK with exposing SpongeBob fans to the music he's loved for decades.

"I guess when I say unambitious, I don't mean that I'm just a slacker lay about like Patrick under his rock watching TV. No, not at all," he says. "I never had a world-domination plan. It's just if you could do something you like, just do as much of it as you can until somebody stops you."