Chris Garneau

Our subject before last was a straight artist who wrote and recorded a song of significance to gay culture. Our last subject was a duo, half-gay, half-straight. Today's subject is all gay, and his name is Chris Garneau.

Garneau, born in 1982, a native of Boston, lived with his family in Paris during grade school, and later New Jersey before moving to New York City. He discovered a love of music at a young age while learning to play piano. After high school, Garneau briefly attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, but left after completing one term and moved to Brooklyn. There he began writing music and playing live shows at small venues in the East Village and Lower East Side of Manhattan.

In New York he became friendly with Xiu Xiu member Caralee McElroy, who soon introduced him to queer artist Jamie Stewart, Xiu Xiu's founder. Stewart introduced Garneau to the management of Absolutely Kosher Records, and already in 2006 he was recording an album for them, called Music for Tourists.

Although Garneau was openly gay, he was rather confused at the time as to how he wanted this to be presented to the public. In his words: "Absolutely Kosher [the record company] asked me "How do you want to deal with press and publicity for being gay? Do you want it to be not mentioned at all, do you want to be out if people ask, do you want to be really forthright?" At that point I wasn’t exactly sure. My feeling then was that I didn’t want to be the gay piano-playing "fagitor" from Williamsburg who has a new album, Music for Tourists. If anybody asks, or if gay press wants to run this feature or that, I thought, "Let’s do it." I don’t feel terribly political. I’m making music and I happen to be gay, and that’s what’s happening. If you want to hear about it, fine, and if you don’t, that’s fine, too."

Music for Tourists was simply orchestrated, which suited Garneau's voice, a caressing, confessional voice in the tradition of Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith, as well as the songs' style, mostly introspective ballads sung with conviction and a degree of angst. The opening track was Castle Time:

Then came Black and Blue:

Relief was promoted and had an official music video:

... And this is So Far:

The following year he released an EP called C-Sides. From it, here's Blackout:

His next album, El Radio (2009), was a definite step forward. The melodies were richer, the orchestrations more complicated and the lyrics more mature. In Chris' own words:

"I’ve sort of made a decision to take a focus off myself. It started happening naturally and when I realized that’s what I was doing I enhanced it more, and I just really have been writing about other people and thing that were happening in the world and other peoples’ stories. What started happening in the last few years is I would hear these stories and they would become immediately inspiring."

"Dirty Night Clowns was written about the crazy story, with a sad twist, of this guy who was a midget and who was dressed up as a clown and was breaking into peoples’ homes and molesting their children. There was personal story with it for a friend of mine, I entertained the idea of creating this character and addressing the issues that come with sexual abuse and particularly pedophilia, all of that crazy stuff. It was a chance to play on things that are real and really disturbing and sad, but also giving a different path with romantic characters."

He goes on: "The same is true of No More Pirates, which refers to the people that we generally don’t like. The pirates I refer to are the people who abuse human rights, from politicians to militant fighters and warriors."

My favorite song is Fireflies, a mystical cabaret-styled song that is apparently linked to Garneau's perception of the gay experience.

Another winner in this album is Hands On The Radio:

In 2011, his cover of Elliott Smith's Between the Bars, which was the closing track of his debut album, was featured in Pedro Almodóvar's film The Skin I Live In:

His last album (so far) was released in 2013 and was titled Winter Games. Once again, let's hear about the album from Chris himself:

"Mancala is an ancient African game of memory. When I started writing the songs on this record, I asked several close friends and family to send me their earliest memories of winter. To many, it felt like an exercise in memory or a game. I have always had an obsession with the winter season. I was specifically interested in people's relationships to other humans who surrounded them at younger ages and how those relationships were possibly affected by winter, cold, darkness, etc. The memories I received served as inspiration for some of the first songs I wrote on this record."

Winter Song #1 is the memory from my friend who suffered sexual abuse from her sibling growing up, though always had a tendency toward defending him in front of her parents, as he was her older brother. Winter played an extreme and particular role in her story of abuse and also of her family's ultimate denial of truth.

Winter Song #2 was also inspired by a close friend and mentor to Garneau and is about loneliness in childhood. Here's a live version of the song:

Our Man is about betrayal and overcoming betrayal and abandonment:

Finally for today, Reindeer is about misogyny and the patriarchal society:

Chris is now living in upstate New York. Here he is, talking about the move: "I was nearing 10 years in Brooklyn when I left. I guess I got pretty burnt out and felt that maybe, even though I felt like New York City was somewhere I had to be at one time, it really wasn't serving much of a purpose for me anymore, personally or artistically."

"I always had a really hard time throwing food away when I lived in the city. I always wanted to compost and didn't know how. Spending my morning giving kitchen scraps away to my goats and chickens is much more appealing than walking down a dirty city block to spend $5 on a cup of coffee from some shitty hipster coffee shop. My days now are long, and life goes by slowly. I enjoy this. I don't like the idea of life passing you by so quickly. I had a constant thought in my head that everything I was doing while living in the city was for something bigger and better, eventually. What I realized when I moved to the country is that the bigger and better thing was always there; I just had to choose it."

"When I first moved upstate, I found a cottage on a private farm, and I became its caretaker. This is where I started recording. I lived on 40 acres and raised animals pretty much alone, except when my boyfriend came up on weekends. It functioned much like a sanctuary and care farm. I found that being out of my normal surroundings to create work was a much more profitable experience and became one that was also more experimental. I recorded noise and played instruments in new ways. I started to engineer things very differently and learned a lot about how to create work on a more technical side, as well. That and being around animals, which is all I ever really want."

If you're happy, we're happy for you too, Chris. I just hope you'll release some new music soon!