January 23, 2012

Chris Castle

by Jason D. 'Diesel' Hamad

Burning River Fireside Chats can kinda go anywhere. That’s the whole idea, after all, to get away from the pre-fab format, the canned questions and all the garbage that usually makes up the interview process. It’s all about chilling and seeing what comes out… with a microphone that just happens to be capturing it all.

Sometimes this seems to bemuse the subjects. They’re used to answering the same twenty-five questions in every interview, and sitting down for a session where there are no questions—at least no formal ones—they’re not quite sure what to make of it. Americana singer-songwriter Chris Castle was just the opposite. He had no problem ignoring the microphone and diving right into any subject we happened to land on, and that was a pretty broad range. It probably helped that we held the interview at a house concert and we’d already been hanging out for a couple of hours.

If you’re interested—like I am—in examining the personality of artists, pretty much every word that came out of the guy’s mouth the whole night was gold, four nines fine. But the 62-odd minutes where the recorder was running is a good slice of his thoughts. We’d start out at one spot, and he’d take off on some completely divergent path for minutes at a time, telling a great story that had little to do on the face of it with our original topic, branch off into another story and then maybe another after that, and then after all that roaming find his way back to the original path like he’d been walking the line the whole time. It may take a while to get from point a to point b when you’re travelling that way, but you sure do cover a lot of ground.

Of course, with someone who’s been writing songs professionally since age 15, we talked about songwriting at great detail. He discussed the Nashville formula style and how what he’s doing now is so different, and even revealed a few tricks of the trade. We talked about our coal-mining ancestors and how their musical tastes influenced our own. We talked about living as an artist and how it’s so different from the conventional model that your television tells you nightly is the “right” way to do things. We talked about the people he’s played with and his adventures in recording his new album. He even did a pretty damn great Garth Hudson impersonation. Along the way, we even mentioned his new album itself once or twice.

Hell, I’m not gonna lie: I found the whole thing fascinating. If you read this website because you’re interested in more than just some canned quotes and formulaic promotion, you will, too.