I have been a fan of Chris Garneau for a couple of years, a New York voice with a very creative edge, carrying on in the traditions of “The God of Rock & Roll” Lou Reed. In our interview with him a few years ago, we had very heavy conversations, with so much depth, and it was very memorable.
Chris Garneau is a New York Based multi instrumental vocalist. His work is anything outside of that cookie cutter sound. I found his music really deep, reflective, and crossing so many genres. Imagine Brian Eno conducting the bar band from Twin Peaks, with Leonard Cohen on vocals, and you are in the general idea of Chris Garneau’s music. We discussed his music, family relationships, farming, and strange poses in making videos. I also accidentally stumbled on some closure for some own personal grief I got to resolve, only because he was the flipside of it all.
Now Chris has more music for us, with just as much depth, just not as heavy. His newest song is called “Goldmine” and you get to hear it here first.
Chris was able to elaborate about ‘Goldmine” when he answered some questions about his new music.
“Goldmine” feels like a bold departure from your previous work. What inspired this shift in sound and energy?
Chris Garneau: The shift in sound and energy was really about my body waking up. When I wrote “Goldmine”, I had recently come out of a pretty dark moment. I had just started to feel free from this bad dynamic in my life and then met someone who really allowed space for that transformation to keep manifesting. I felt reoriented to my body and noticed that these negative thought patterns I had for a while were evaporating.
The shift was simultaneously mirrored in my work. I wrote “Goldmine” in a few hours. As always, the lyric went through some rounds of edits over a few weeks, but basically the song was written in a day which is a really rare thing for me.
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How do you balance vulnerability and confidence in your songwriting, especially with such a magnetic and bold track like this?
CG: Honesty is always going to be the foundation of work that has value. By nature, once you have an honest story laid down, it is vulnerable. Confidence is the harder thing to find because it can be fleeting. For me, feeling confident is a lot about how I feel in my body, and my relationship to my body has changed drastically in the last year. “Goldmine” was fun and exciting to make but, like anything good, it was also really hard.
And it should be hard. If there was no challenge, it probably wouldn’t have made me feel very good about myself, I don’t know… I’ve settled on mediocre things in the past that just allowed me to get on with life but didn’t necessarily propel me forward. That’s where the confidence comes in — when you know you outdid yourself. I think that comparing your current self to your past self, rather than comparing yourself to other people, is a much better way to measure progress, which I think is tied to confidence.
How does “Goldmine” set the tone for the new music coming this year? Should we expect more of this sultry, electrified energy?
CG: Writing and recording “Goldmine” has definitely set a precedent for me and this record. I was working on an entirely different set of songs before I wrote this one, and I scrapped all of it. It was tired. Sad. Shackled. It wasn’t that it was terrible work, but it just didn’t make me feel good and wasn’t what I wanted to put it out into the world. So this song set a tone and ignited the flame of a new album. So yes you can expect more of this energy, yes.
