In December 2005, the L.A. based music duo Chris and Thomas won the Independent Music Award for Best Song in the Americana category. The winning song, Take these thoughts delighted the panel of judges, which included music luminaries Norah Jones, Bill Wyman, Melissa Etheridge and Joe Perry amongst others.
With sounds gathered from the landscapes of the American southwest, and influenced by the Celtic Bardic traditions; the duo’s music could just as easily find its home in the English countryside. Combining American roots instrumentation with rustic melodies and heartfelt narratives, the songs are filled with the duo’s distinctive vocal harmonies. Their music harkens back to the qualities of Nick Drake, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and the Beatles.
Chris and Thomas met for the first time at a train station in Northern England. They were two of 40 musicians who had been chosen from around the world to study at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. LIPA is a small and unique arts institute founded in 1995 by Sir Paul McCartney.
After completing their Liverpool training, Chris and Thomas moved to Los Angeles in 2003. There they began writing their songs together in earnest and made their debut at the Hotel Café as the opening act for singer/songwriter Alexi Murdoch. Their unique and intimate live-performance style ensured that Chris and Thomas quickly made a name for themselves on the L.A. club circuit. The duo admits that they play their music, “Like some modern-day Carter Family huddled around just one condenser microphone.”
Since their student days at LIPA a lot has happened. Nic Harcourt, taste-meister extraordinaire, of the No.1 syndicated radio show in the US, Morning Becomes Eclectic (KCRW 89.9 in L.A.) has played their self-released EP Vista Street Sessions continuously on his daily show. Harcourt also features Chris and Thomas on his national two-hour-best Sunday evening show, Sounds Eclectic.
As their popularity has grown, more and more radio stations have added Chris and Thomas to their play lists: Not only in the US, but also in Europe and the UK. Chris and Thomas were recently signed with a major management company in Los Angeles. And following an intensive hibernation period in the recording studio with producer/ engineer Mark Howard (of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and U2 fame) Chris and Thomas have now finished their first album. The UK release and tour is scheduled for July with a subsequent release in the US.
As part of their UK album launch and July 2006 tour, Arts Hub UK contacted Chris and Thomas to find out more about their style, creative partnership, inspirations and influences.
Asked if their meeting felt like a “music-partnership-at-first-sight” Chris recalls; “We met in Liverpool. Our first musical endeavours were all instrumental…And were always visually driven…Our first collaboration happened after four years of friendship… a song for 2 guitars to go with an urban cowboy black and white film on the streets of Liverpool which rolled along only in our imaginations. The next was a film we actually made about a pair of old 60’s sneakers that cross England from the top to the bottom until the shoes finally meet the sea.”
And needless to say, like all true collaborations (Lennon and McCartney, et al) the duo, like all duos before and since, have had their share of ups and downs: “It’s like being married. We’re dear old friends who also share the same musical passions who have also shared several living spaces… We now have our own places… But, it was like being married: Girlfriends got annoyed, good friends thought it was pretty funny. The…upside was and is, good music, good food and the feeling of family away from home.”
Asked to share their conflict-resolution process Chris and Thomas respond; “By shouting and stomping around and breaking chairs. After that there’s usually a moment of quiet while we calm down in different rooms and then we’ll talk like human beings and laugh about all the s**t we’ve come through so far and write a song about it.” Sounds perfectly true.
Chris and Thomas both began to play and write their own music as children, drawn by the mystery and pleasures of the creative process. Thomas recalls, “… I think I was twelve when I wrote my first song with English lyrics. It was – and still is one of the best feelings in the world to write a song.” Chris agrees wholeheartedly; “…I was about 11 years old. I had this cheesy Casio “synthesiser” and thought it was the best thing in the world …ever. I started writing songs about things I had no idea about like how ‘love comes and love goes, where love stops nobody knows’.”
Chris cites the early and profound influence of his English cousin John Rourke, (who visited his family in the US) as the catalyst for his artistic journey; “He came with a cheap acoustic guitar that he’d gotten somewhere on his American travels and told us all about this gorgeous girl that he’d met along the way. He was his own man. I thought how brave he seemed to not care about what people thought of him … He sent a tape of his songs from his London flat… I started learning the chords and wrote down all the words and played those songs until they eventually turned into my own. They were songs about simple things like seasons changing and more difficult things like losing his mother when he was a boy. They always had a tinge of melancholy and a greater tinge of hope. For me, this was a magic space where I could indulge in my own mystery and it served as means of both escape and self-realisation. I knew this would always be a big part of my life, professionally or not. I still had enough of my father’s New York in me and my mother’s Liverpool in me to know about the bigger world and so all his stories and songs gave me a way to envision a way into that bigger world.”
Reflecting on the process of creating songs, or as Thomas put it – “Hearing bits of a song.” “…Song writing is all about…telling stories… An overall lyrical concept is important and ideally you turn the song on its head – but in the end I feel you hear bits of a song. Sometimes you don’t exactly know what it means but it doesn’t matter because it sounds great and you can interpret your own meaning… The song writing for me always has been a huge challenge. You start out writing crappy songs, (of course you think they are masterpieces) then you maybe start to notice that there’s more to a great song than just the inspiration: Work. Well I guess it’s fun-work – ideally.”
Asked about the issue of inspiration and collaboration, Thomas says: “I write the songs for myself in the first place, but of course when you are young and girls react the way they do when you play or write a song for them, it’s hard to resist that kind of inspiration (and don’t let anybody fool you!) Then you get a little older and you really try to dig deeper…Always searching for that perfect melody…hopefully – eventually a timeless great song, that entirely fulfills you when you play or hear it. That’s it. It’s like giving birth (not that I ever have given birth) but I imagine it to be very scarey, uncertain at first but then- extremely fulfilling. I think song writing can be quite addictive – you complete one song and you wanna write the next one. You wanna get that buzz again. And you’re obsessed with it. It’s like it stings you and you gotta work it through until it’s perfect. There’s no turning back.”
Inspiration comes in many guises for Chris and Thomas. Both of them share an eclectic and wide-ranging love of music, literature and the nomadic urge to travel.
“People-wise we have many heroes…Musically: The Beatles, Elvis, Kieren Kane, Kevin Welch, JJ Cale, Nick Drake, Simon and Garfunkel, John Martyn (in the 70’s), Mississippi, John Hurt, Bob Dylan, Thelonious monk, all the old blues guys, Debussy, Philip Glass, The Comedian Harmonists, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Stravinsky, music from Bulgaria and all over Africa, and way too many others to list…Great writers of fiction also invade our minds… Landscapes… You can’t beat the power and beauty of a swim in the ocean… It’s the source of all things…In terms of mystery the desert is an amazing place and we spent a lot of our time during the writing of Vista Street Sessions in Joshua Tree. It’s a fantastic escape from the city life…L.A. is a great city for that reason. In an hour and a half you can be in the mountains, in the ocean or in the desert. We’re glad to be here. “
Chris and Thomas cheerfully share the mother-load when it comes to the song writing; “…It’s always 50/50. We write the lyrics and music together. A few lines here and there by either of us and it’s not unlike wandering through the dark waiting for your pupils to dilate and eventually you get used to the dark and can make out shapes and eventually are pretty much able to see clearly. Then you both begin to discover things that you didn’t notice were there around you the whole time. Then it all gets very exciting and we interrupt each other a lot saying “Oh! And now this” and, “Yes now we can say that…” and “Cool man, that works. I like that. I think we’ve got it.”
Both artists feel that their work challenges them to look at the world and themselves intently and to learn, “To be at peace with oneself so you can be calm enough to engage from an authentic place with the world outside… It’s where the inside meets the outside at large.”
Regarding the thematic and stylistic concerns of the upcoming debut album, Chris and Thomas believe that the new work centres around…” Having that strong pull for the nomadic life…of travel where all the best adventures can happen. Simultaneously there is that almost equalled desire for connection with others, which one might call home. There’s also a lot to do with transforming obstacles into the things that make us a little more aware of the mysteries within and around us. Stylistically it’s still pretty stripped down, as that’s (we think) the beauty of what we do. It’s what makes a lot of the fun for us. There will be some more instrumentation on the upcoming record, however, but only at places where it really counts.”
Upon broaching the dreaded “Mighty Wind” issue, and comparisons along those line, both Chris and Thomas take a philosophical view. “Well you can notify your cheeky editor that we have “A Mighty Wind” meter at the house that tells us when things are getting a little too hoakey… Ooops! That reminds us, we need to replace the batteries! ”
So what do Chris and Thomas hope for musically and personally, as the next couple of years unfold? “Travelling all over the world where we would be welcomed into peoples homes and fed divine foods and given the love of beautiful maidens and we would have many love-children all over the planet (who we would take very good care of because we would be so wildly successful) so that wherever we went would feel like home. Then we could be travelling nomads who are at the same time always at home. Gosh, is that a little too honest. Okay then. Give us a while and we’ll get back to you on that.”
Asking if their musical genre/s have undergone changes Chris and Thomas respond; “Not entirely sure what our genre is. Some people put us into Americana, which we just won some pretty big Award for… But we don’t really consider genres. We play the kind of music we play for a number of reasons. It’s pretty compact. You don’t need to lug around any amplifiers. It’s more about having room to appreciate the things around us if that makes any sense. It’s one of the reasons why our music is so quiet at times. Plus, historically speaking, most of the great popular songs were originally arranged on an acoustic guitar or a piano. More than anything else we just leave the songs where we find them despite any thought of genre; guess we just try to leave as much of the essence intact as possible. The harmonies are pretty instant. I guess the harmonies might draw us into a genre thing… It just feels really good sonically to have a harmony between us. That being said we already have an album’s worth of nothing but instrumental film music. Ohhh…but they have harmonies too, just no actual words.”
Enthusiastic and excited about their upcoming UK tour, Chris and Thomas recall, “We had a travelling cooking show with our good friend Julian Gillespie, called “Cook Au Van.” It had cult success. It was an old gas board van that we turned into a five- star restaurant and travelling art gallery. The food was great, the art that came in and out of it was great but the parties were the greatest. Cook Au Van may be following us on part of our UK tour, which is the cooking show’s home base. “
So Chris and Thomas are heading our way with their unique and soulful style and their delightful sense of humour. Be sure to check their website for updates and additions to their UK itinerary.
What the music reviewers have said:
“One of my favorite Indie releases of the year.”
Nic Harcourt L.A. radio
“…I think they’re gorgeous (musically that is!) “
Lomond Folk Festival
“…Sounds wonderful…”
Matt Wilkinson, BBC Radio
2006 UK Summer Tour Dates: 16th July until 14th August 2006
Below is the preliminary UK Touring list:
July
Sun 16 Larmer Tree Larmer Tree Music Festival
Fri 21 Southport, Southport Arts Centre
Sat 22 Sessiwn fawr, Sesiwn Fawr Dolgellau Festival
Thurs 27 Hebden Bridge, Trades Club
Fri 28 Westbury-On-Severn, Dean Arts
Sat 29 Newtown, Cafe Loco, TheStation
Sun 30 Blackburn, Mellor Brook Community Centre
Mon 31 Croydon, Croydon Folk Song Club
August
Tues 1 Hoy, Leigh-on-sea, Hoy at Anchor Folk Club
Weds 2 Newcastle-Under-Lyme, New Vic Theatre
Sat 5 Wickham, Wickham Festival
Mon 7 Glasgow, Brel
Tues 8 Edinburgh, Acoustic Music Centre
Weds 9 Inverness, Eden Court Theatre
Thurs 10 Kirkaldy, Kirkcaldy Acoustic Music Club
Fri 11 Aberdeen, The Lemon Tree Arts Centre
Sat 12 Penicuik Penicuik Arts Trust
Sun 13 Edinburgh Acoustic Music Centre
Additional information and tour updates please visit: www.chrisandthomas.com
