From Corporate Desk to Sold Out Shows!
Kovacs’s growing audiences agree, leaving his corporate career to follow his heart was the right move.
At the youngish age of 50, Kovacs left his career as a computer programmer/analyst at a large Canadian corporation to pursue full-time his passion for music.
But the words that got the musical ball rolling occurred many years earlier: “Congratulations ... you passed the audition!”
In March 1991, Kovacs was flown from Toronto to the island country of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf to perform for U.S. troops during Desert Storm.
He interrupted his jazz vocal studies at Humber College to be the lead singer for the newly formed rock/dance band Sister Moon. The band would play in the large two-hundred person bar of the Cunard Princess every night for the next five months ... close to 150 performances.
Tyler Viaene, Thomas Kovacs, Chris Taylor-Munro, John Carroll, and Sean Dimitrie together formed Sister Moon
The Princess was a 900-passenger luxury ship on which U.S. soldiers would spend three days of rest and recreation away from the desert. Soldiers were not allowed to drink alcohol in Saudi Arabia so understandably the ship's bar was their most popular destination. Performing for troops every night for five months was a tremendous influence in developing Kovacs as an entertainer. (He won first place in the 2009 Toastmasters District 60 Humorous Speech Contest with a speech about the experience.)
In 1996, Kovacs began a five year stint as the weekly house performer of a restaurant in the trendy Bloor West Village area of Toronto. He built upon the skills he learned on stage in the Persian Gulf by singing for audiences who wanted to leave their workweek behind for an evening of fun.
In 2001, he was invited to be the musician aboard an Adventure Canada expedition in the Arctic. In 2022, Adventure Canada won top spot in the USA TODAY 10Best Readers' Choice for Best Adventure Cruise Line for the fourth year in a row.
Since 2001, Kovacs has been the musician on board twenty-four Adventure Canada expeditions. He has traveled with guest passengers such as Margaret Atwood, Bill “Father Goose” Lishman, and Farley Mowat; expeditions that took his singing talents to Iceland, Greenland, the Northwest Passage, many Inuit communities in Nunavut, as well as to Baja California, the Galapagos Islands, and the Antarctic. He is scheduled to be onboard both High Arctic Explorer expeditions in 2022.
In January 2010, while still very much enjoying his career as a computer programmer/analyst, but with music fiercely pulling at his heart strings, he left his corporate desk to become a full-time musician. In July of that same year, he graduated from the online Berklee College of Music with a Songwriting Specialist Certificate.
In December 2013, Kovacs moved from his six-year home in the Caledon area back to downtown Toronto where he now lives with the lady of his life, Cara. That's when he’s not living in his car driving to and from shows in Barrie, Orangeville, Sauble Beach, Mississauga, Prince Edward County, Uxbridge, and Pickering!
Kovacs's heavy singing schedule eventually took a toll on his voice. On June 1st, 2016, he underwent surgery to remove two polyps from his vocal cords. He was extremely lucky to have one of the top otolaryngologists in Canada perform the operation; the very same doctor who in 2005 performed a similar operation on Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo. The polyps were successfully removed with no complications. For the several months following surgery, Kovacs dedicated himself to learning proper vocal technique so as to avoid injuring his cords again. Today, his voice is stronger than it has ever been.