An Outlier: Chris Dupont

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

An Outlier: Chris Dupont

Chris Dupont
Performs Friday at ASSEMBLE SOUND
with Greater Alexander and FLA (Frances Luke Accord)
7 PM
$15 (suggested donation)
INFO

Chris Dupont is just about to move in to a new house in Ypsilanti, but before he started packing, he picked up a parcel delivered to his doorstep recently. His latest album, Outlier, was dropped off, only this was vinyl.

“It’s a totally different feeling than holding a CD,” said Dupont. “It’s huge! It’s real! I have to be careful with it…”

Chris Dupont rose to baroque-pop prominence just after contemporary luminaries out in Washtenaw such as Matt Jones, Misty Lyn, or Chris Bathgate, but building his own neo-folk framework for his weary words of stock-taking, mirror-gazing, soul-surveying catharsis, inhabiting a musical architecture enriched by pianos, upright bass, soft jazz drums, syrupy guitars and ineffably memory-cueing atmospherics. Dupont, on Outliers, isn’t afraid to exorcise some eye-watering emotions… Or, maybe he was, but quickly got over it once he heard some emotionally resonant feedback from audiences.

Dupont is performing this Friday with the comparably affecting/heart-rending/goosebump-conjuring folk-scapes of Greater Alexander, and the humanistic, life-affirming folk-pop of Chicago-based Frances Luke Accord.

Leading up to the show, I had a chat with Chris…

“It’s a totally different feeling than holding a CD,” said Dupont. “It’s huge! It’s real! I have to be careful with it…”

Leading up to the show, I had a chat with Chris…

“When I put together these 10 songs, I treated each like they were their own thing. I wouldn’t decide if it was a good idea or bad idea or whether it fit together, a piano power ballad, or some dancier stuff, some ambient stuff, some really sad stuff… Almost every track, when I’d finish one, I’d say: “oh, this one is an outlier… Outlier all came by accident, and the common thread throughout the album, I felt, was more of a lyrical thing than a sound thing. Lots of people, you included, picked up on this theme of dealing with an abstract sense of stepping outside yourself, or this objective position, remote from yourself, of observing, rather than judging…”

Dupont’s always kind of teetered to, from, and around varying quadrants of folk, moving through different moods, tempos, timbres and motifs. I tell him to just consider himself an outlier of folk music, and he starts to relax and embrace it. “But, I can get envious of songwriters who are more prolific, like a Ryan Adams type, who must obviously just divorce himself from any nitpicking. When I write, whether a lyric or a guitar line, if it’s not memorable? If it doesn’t feel important or useful? I have a hard time sticking with it. I have a hard time creating art when I don’t have something to say that I feel is important.”

When he says “important,” you can read that as “…heavy.” Dupont often deals, musically, lyrically, poetically, with some tough emotional terrain that folks might not otherwise readily talk about, in any casual setting. Coming up from the west side of the state with a family history of clinical depression, he artfully engages with and unpacks stigmas of mental health through lyrical narratives. And, that said, anxiety is something he would know a lot about, considering he became in the late summer of 2014.

“It was terrifying,” said Dupont, about waiting for his son, Leo, to be born. “Cuz I know how badly I struggled with navigating the world around me, and things are even that much faster, today, rife with misinformation. But, still, from the moment he was born, he didn’t even come out crying, I just heard him start chattering…and I just sat there and smiled and cried. A lot of the record was about coming to grips with myself as I prepared for him to show up and when he did show up, I realized that I didn’t need to be all that prepared, at all. We had this tight bond, from the beginning. It healed all the angst I had going into the writing of those songs…”

When Dupont was back in school, studying music, he recalled a class that explored audience and artist relationship, inviting discussions on avant-garde and experimental music and whether one should be cognizant of whether a listener is having a good time listening to a piece…

“ I remember the song I was most afraid about was “Ease The Blow” cuz it’s just a really sad song and a completely true story. But, almost every time I play that song, someone will walk up to me and tell me their story. It’s a song that helped them heal. So, it dawns on me, during those exchanges, that its moments like those tha tmak eme feel like this is really worthwhile, that these lyrics have to be sung, because it can be for somebody else. To see that third work of expressing something for you somehow give voice to someone else for something they’ve been through. It’s amazing. I’ve got to think of the listener…”

From here, Dupont heads out on the biggest tour of his life, with Frances Luke Accord. It starts at Assemble, with Greater Alexander.