ABOUT THE ARTIST.
Instrumentation
Songs written and performed by Chris Anderson with a rotating cast making up the perpetually New Chris Anderson Band. Incorporates drums and or percussion, bass, electric guitar, steel guitar and dobro, mandolin and fiddle.

Biography
Colorado native Chris Anderson grew up listening to bluegrass and country music, Top 40 rock-and-roll and be-bop jazz (courtesy of his father, a jazz disc jockey and connosieur) and folk music. He began playing guitar, mandolin and piano with various folk, bluegrass and country bands, culminating in the founding in St. Louis, Missouri of the Dolphins in Disguise. The prototypical alt-country punk bluegrass outfit--a partnership with well-known visual and video artist Christian Huber-- became a cult favorite with the music community on the St. Louis/Columbia MO/Carbondale IL circuit, and were most in demand for playing at parties thrown by the more prominent and successful musicians in St. Louis. Dolphins in Disguise recorded four full-length cassette releases, which were recently compiled and released by the St. Louis label Truax. Following the Demise of the Dolphins, Anderson re-located to Chicago to found the Chris Anderson Band, a more urbane, more electric, and eclectic project that combined Anderson's orginals with a smattering of obscure early R & B covers. The band became very active in Chicago, but Anderson's divorce in the early 1990's led him to dissolve the band and abandon performing almost altogether to raise his three children as a single father. He continued to write, though, and, spurred by the release of five of his songs as part of a contemporary folk collaboration that included Violent Femme drummer Victor De Lorenzo ("Friends & Consequences" Lillie Records, 2004) , began perfoming publicly though sporadically. Following the release of 2004's pop-and-R & B-flavored EP "Love + Gravity, Anderson is currently appearing at various Chicagoland locations and working on a full-length CD. His performances, sometimes solo and sometimes backed by a rotating cast of stellar musicians, are loose affairs grounded by Anderson's moody songs, which are at times melancholy and dark-edged and other times almost giddy with life force. Built around simple, folkfunk grooves, they can build, especially with the full band, into improvisational, transcendental raves.

When did you realize that you wanted to be a performer?
In my home studio, I have an old photo of me at about 6 years old, flanked by my two younger sisters. I am holding a Yogi Bear toy guitar as if playing it and have a look of pure demented joy on my face. I think it goes back at least that far. I keep the photo there because demented joy is what I keep trying to get back to. That pure childhood ecstasy, when the music just flows through your heart..

When did you start playing guitar?
Well the Yogi guitar goes back a ways, but I got my first real guitar when I was about 11. This was fifth grade and I was in a band called the “Knights of Persuasion.” We did the Stones, Hendrix, some Beatles. We must have been something—we could barely play and our voices hadn’t changed yet. Somewhere there is home movie footage of us playing at a girls’ slumber party.

Did you take any lessons for any of the instruments you play?
I took guitar lessons, and had taken piano lessons, and I was in band in grade school and junior high, where I played the trumpet. I basically hated lessons and I really hated practicing exercises. But I always loved playing, even if I was just making noise. Still do!

Growing up, did you think your dad had the best job ever?
Make that jobs, plural! I think he has had maybe the best life ever. My Dad, Wayne Anderson, is an amazing guy who has lived a somewhat charmed life. He’s had an amazing variety of jobs. He grew up out west, dropped out of high school to be ski bum, worked as a cowboy and a fireman, got drafted and went off to World War Two. The War ended while he was on his way to Europe, so they made him a corporal and since he was a ski bum, they put him on the Army ski team, so he spent the rest of his tour in a chateau in the German Alps running goodwill ski races against demobilized German soldiers. At night he had a jazz show on Armed forces radio. He is a huge connoisseur of be-bop jazz, and I feel so lucky to have grown up hearing Miles Davis and John Coltrane on a daily basis. He came back, got a GED and college degree on the GI Bill, and went to work as newspaper reporter. In mid-life, he went back to graduate school and got a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and became a clinical psychologist. Now he is retired, living in Oregon, and at 78 years old, is a ski bum again. I can’t get hold of him between October and May, because he is always on the mountain. Not that he’s had it made—we lost my mom pretty early and pop has struggled with drinking at times. But he’s been in AA for ten years now and man he’s an inspiration to me.

My Mom, who passed away in 1988, was from Texas and her parents were from Arkansas and Kentucky, so I had a lot of exposure to country music, bluegrass, and old Appalachian stuff.

What were the names of the bands you played in when you started out?
I had a double musical life, because in my late teen years I really got into bluegrass. So I would play in these 70s cover bands doing Eagles and Cat Stevens and Grateful Dead stuff, but what I was really listening to and playing on the side was hard-core, shrill-ass bluegrass. I had started playing mandolin and wanted to play as brutally fast as Bill Monroe. So I was jamming with a bunch of bluegrass players on the side, going to folk festivals and workshops, just jamming.

Can you tell me more about Dolphins in Disguise?
The Dolphins were a turning point. I was in St. Louis, going to Washington University, when I ran across them at a bluegrass-jam-house party. They were a duo, Chris Huber and Jeff Andrew, and they seemed to be able to play all kinds of instruments—guitar, dobro, mandolin, clarinet, keyboards, drums—and they were doing all these great country-type tunes. Every time I asked them, ‘who does that song?’ they would say, ‘we wrote it.’ It sounds funny to say, but it had never really occurred to me up to that point that I could write my own songs.

That did it for me. Here I was, an English major, writing poetry and aspiring to be a novelist, but something was missing. I wanted that direct connection with an audience that live performance gives you. So I realized that I could use my words, tell a story, and connect with people and bring them together, and maybe help them deal with something in their lives. That was huge. So I started writing songs—or I should say---they began to write me in the sense that they do just arrive and start knocking and you’ve got to get off the couch and greet them and write them down and then try to find out what they’re about an, once you have them, they look for a purpose until you transmit them to other people.

The Dolphins were a very special band in the sense that—this was the late 70s, early 80s, and we were already doing the DIY thing. We wrote our own songs, booked our own gigs, made and sold our own recordings. We were fluid, everyone would switch instruments, that type of thing, and while we loved playing for people, we weren’t trying to make a “career,” we just wanted to share our songs. We became a big cult favorite in the St. Louis-Columbia MO—Carbondale college circuit. Barbara Cloyd, who is now a successful songwriter in Nashville, was a member for a while, as was a bass player named John Cross from a really well-known bluegrass family. We were punk, we were bluegrass, we rocked sometimes. It was strange and wonderful experience at that time, though it left me with chronic case of songwriting.

Is there any difference in the Chris Anderson Band to when you started it back before your divorce? If so, please explain.
Oh but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

The Chris Anderson Band circa 1985 was my first conscious attempt to “market” myself and a band. I did all of the booking, publicity, arranged the rehearsals, and tried to keep everybody—including my new wife and young kids—happy. Musically, it was a good time, with a crazy, very talented group of Chicago-area players, including Denny Rauen, Joey Drada, Joe Sinopoli and Pete Morrison of the Holy Goats. Lynn Van Matre, the Tribune music critic at the time, liked us and we started to get some momentum and attention, but then it kind of blew up because we were all about the same age and almost all of us were experiencing domestic turmoil. Indeed, I look at that list now and almost all of us ended up getting divorced within two years of each other; it wasn’t because of the band, it just happened that way.

The New Chris Anderson Band is the same in name only. Hell, it’s not really a band. All the players are different, although Joey Drada, an incredible and versatile guitarist, plays on my record “Love + Gravity.” Right now, when the full band gets together, it’s Magic Keith Marx on mandolin and harmonies, Joe Goodrich on electric guitar and lap steel, and a guy named Al Partridge on bass and sometimes Grant Neibergall on drums. We sometimes jam with the amazing young husband and wife rhythm section, Ken Butkus on drums and Tracy Kremer on bass. It’s also just evolved naturally from jamming together and sharing music rather than a self-conscious attempt to build and promote a band. I get bored playing solo, and love to have some people who like my songs bringing something else to them.

How old are your children now?
My daughter Kara is 25, my son Nigel is 21, and my son Dylan is 19. I would not trade the time I had raising them by myself for anything, although I suspect they might. I didn’t always know what I was doing. Men in our society are not necessarily socialized to organize a household. Let’s just say I learned a lot at my kids’ expense!. But we had some very good times too.

(If this is not too personal) After your divorce, did you try juggling your career and children? Or did you know that you would not be able to maintain both right away?
I think I knew it would be too much. It never really felt like a choice. The band fell apart and my marriage fell apart around the same time. I was working a day job and suddenly had all kinds of scheduling to do with my kids and school, etc., and it soon became evident that I would assume full-time custody of the kids, because my ex was becoming busy pursuing an acting career. So I just let it go. Not performing was kind of a relief. I kept playing at home and kept writing, although I didn’t write much at all for the first year. I was just devastated and trying to keep everything together.

What kinds of subjects do you write about (typically)?
I think it was James Taylor who said that you write songs about the insoluble problems in your life—the pain of separation, loss, love and autonomy. Since you can’t solve those kinds of problems, and the pain won’t go away, you write about it. It’s a way to redeem the shit that happens in life and turn it into something beautiful. By that I mean something that means something to someone else and maybe helps them deal with the same thing. So generally I write about whatever the main question or pain in my life is at that time. Not in a confessional way—I mean, that pain is the starting point, but I like to get some sort of movement from my situation to some greater meaning.

I write pretty unconsciously at first, usually starting with a progression or melody that creates a certain mood. I just let the words come in a stream, and they eventually sort of roll around the mood, the feel, and I come up with something—or not! Sometimes I don’t know exactly what a song is trying to say until I have sung it for a year or two. But, looking over it, it certainly seems that I am fixated on a few themes—the struggle for love, the tension between love and autonomy, death, God, letting go, hanging on.

The songs on “Love + Gravity” I realize now have a lot to do with those topic seen through the end of my marriage, although some of the actual songs were prompted by other relationships.

Can you elaborate on “Spooky folk-rock”?
I’m trying to get back to a real basic sound. “Love and Gravity” is my first real produced and arranged recording, and it definitely ended up with kind of a folk-pop groove. I love a phat beat, but I also love that backwoods high lonesome sound—it’s the Appalachian thing--you can hear it in African music as well—the raw, lonely, thrilling thing that mixes sadness and joy and love. So the stuff I’m working on now will be more spare, with some steel guitar and fiddle.

How do you manage to work out a rotating group of band mates?
It’s not easy, believe me. I love playing with different people and hearing how the songs change and enlarge with new players. But I would like to get into that band thing—a group that shares the vision as it were, and you become good friends and you have a big adventure going out and playing for people. But I’m not going to force it this time—just play and love the people you’re playing with and maybe at some point a full band will some together.

Do you have a preference when playing live? (solo or full band)
They are so different and I love and hate them both. I’m actually pretty shy, so I feel more secure when there’s a good band up there with me. It’s more fun with a band but more work in terms of rehearsal and logistics. So sometimes the simplicity of solo is refreshing, and the songs become more essential closer to poetry, rather than platforms for musical arrangement and dancing. But it’s scary too, because then I feel much more exposed.

What is your schedule like for the next 6 months?
I am currently doing some recording at home in preparation for a full-length CD with the working title “Yoga for Cowboys.” Right now I am working on arrangements and playing all the instruments—drums and bass too—myself. It’s a blast. I want to move toward a regular lineup and get these new songs together and recorded, and would like to start gigging behind it in the spring. We are booking some dates in December, and you can see my calendar at www.sonicbids.com/ChrisAnderson

Where would you like to see yourself in the next 2 years?
I would love to be playing steadily around the Chicago area. I currently am setting up an internet based record label to record stuff that I like. It’s such a joy to make music. When I’m playing and I feel I’m connecting with people, it’s then I feel most alive and true to myself. As long as I can do that, I’ll be relatively content.

Thank you very much!

Thank you!

Website
http://www.sonicbids.com/ChrisAnderson

Discography
"Friends & Consequences" Lillie Records, 2001
("Anthology of today's best contemporary folk"). Chris has five songs on the CD (Victor De Lorenzo from the Violent Femmes kicks in percussion and vocals on Chris's tunes), three performed by him, two by other artists. You can listen to song clips and buy the cd at www.cdbaby.com/friends/.

"Love + Gravity" Ugly Duckling Records 2004
Five song EP