This Charming Man Issue #40

Chris Garneau gets serious about being selfless

By Katie Hasty
Published: August 1st, 2009 | 12:00am

As Chris Garneau began touring in support of his 2006 debut Music for Tourists, he was told often by his fans that his music makes them cry.

“It happens so frequently, I just end up feeling like it’s a super normal response,” he concedes. “[Crying] is a compliment, but there’s something about that that’s unsettling to me. I am appreciative of that response, but you know when you’re watching a movie that’s not good but it still makes you cry? If I made someone cry, I hope it’s for the right reasons.”

There seem to be plenty of good reasons to have an emotional response to Garneau’s delicate pop tunes. First there’s his diminutive voice, which always seems to teeter on the edge of cracking. There’s the simple, structural piano melodies, and string arrangements that mercurially soar and descend with mood.

Then there are the lyrics.

Music for Tourists, released via Absolutely Kosher, was insular, a brooding and sometimes manic exorcism of demons, a personal response to very personal strife. It contained the lyric, ”Red wine’s been a good friend of mine.”

That record came five years after a 19-year-old Garneau moved to Brooklyn, after having attempted music school for two months in Massachusetts. “I didn’t have a plan. ‘Come to New York, work in a restaurant and figure out your life’ kind of thing. I was so fucked for so long. I wasn’t doing a very good job at being a person. I got fired from jobs a few times in a row. I had a boyfriend at the time and we were really messed up together. I accomplished nothing,” he says. “That period made for good writing material, I guess. That’s why [the album] comes off as so dramatic and tragic. And naïve.”

He began writing El Radio, almost as soon as he finished recording Music for Tourists.”I have made a ruckus / And I made it for you,” he sings on “The Leaving Song,” the first track on the new set. With, perhaps, some level of irony, the line is delivered carefully, over a slow swelling of strings like a dewy-eyed closing credits score.

In fact, the whole rest of the set unravels like a soundtrack, from confessions to apologies, triumphs to condemnations. Children’s choirs, glockenspiels, horn sections, unusual percussion lines, and dream-like harmonies burst skillfully around his more fully conceived pieces. There’s even a pair of interstitial “little piano songs,” like curtain music, and a reprise of one track, “No More Pirates.”

Garneau says the departure in subject matter, the most marked difference between El Radio and his previous set, came partly as a direct result of the death of his grandmother in 2006. “People’s grandmothers die, but it was really shocking and was the first family for me that had left and was gone forever. My mom was dealing with the loss of her mother. I had this thing when I wasn’t thinking about myself anymore. What happened to me was I realized that things weren’t always happening to me,” he explains. “The first record was starring me and only me.”

In the fall of 2006, Garneau and his friend Saul Simon-MacWilliams headed to a cabin in New Hampshire, a property Garneau’s family has owned for several generations, and began recording his non-self-centric set. Included is “Hands on the Radio,” a track written about the women who were murdered and disappeared in Juarez, Mexico. “Cats and Kids” touchingly references his grandma while “Fireflies” is a flurry of abstract characters in a mystical view. “I can’t even write about myself anymore, I don’t want to,” he says. “I heard someone the other night introduce her song as her breakup song. Like, ‘I don’t want to hear your breakup song. I don’t want people to hear mine.’”