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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…
“ 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…”
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…
“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.
More samplings:
Links:https://chrisdupont.bandcamp.com/
https://greateralexander.bandcamp.com/
https://franceslukeaccordkandote.bandcamp.com/
Show info
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