Thank you for taking the time to have this interview with IMAAI.
Tell us about your music.
I see. Our music incorporates elements of various American roots music styles, including country, roots-rock, folk, bluegrass, R&B, and blues, resulting in a distinctive sound that sets us apart.
When did you start performing?
My dad played Robert played guitar and sang in various small bands when we lived in West Virginia, he taught me the ropes, and his influence in music was huge on me. When I first started in Nashville it was tough to keep the same guys in the band, everyone was busy, but we have a great group of guys now that are dedicated and love what they play.
What do you consider to be your hometown and how does that affect your music?
Grafton, West Virginia is not a country music town. It never really has been. It’s a rock and roll city. The eighties and nineties in this lakeside city were more like a continuous scene out of Fast Times At Ridgemont High than the country bumpkin, overly religious, constrictive backdrop of Footloose. Most of the youth in Grafton were listening to current alt-rock hits on the radio alongside classics like Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, Eric Clapton, and The Eagles. The restless mischief of Gen X reverberated through the teens of this quaint town.
Friday nights were where legends were made. The gridiron of the Grafton High School Bearcats was the stage where the rockstars of the Monday morning hallways were made. High fives all around for the effort the past weekend. An upward head nod that signaled a “job well done” to the recipient.
But after that game on Friday night, in the Claire Bee Fieldhouse, another legend was being made. Youth gathered in the gym for a sock hop. Shoes were strewn alongside the bleachers. The socks were a necessity so that the new floor of the gym wasn’t damaged by street shoes, including Chuck Taylors, chunky heels, Reebok Pumps and Air Jordans.
What was the draw? The crowd had come to hear their classmate and friend sing some covers with his brother and friend backing him up on drums and bass. At age 17, I already had the air of a professional musician in the making. Entertaining the crowd with covers of Mellencamp, The Beatles, Hootie, and The Blowfish, and too many others to count, the crowd could sense it: this guy was headed to Nashville.
The landscape of the 90s music scene, coupled with the influence of my father Robert, and his best friend, Greg Ice, helped me into the artist that I have become.
So where would one expect to find a West Virginia native who was baptized in rock and became a convert to a country infused with blues, country, and pop? Brazil, of course!
What performers have been your inspiration?
The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Pett, Steely Dan, CCR, Bog Seger and Joe Cocker.
What do you base your success on?
That is a very had question, but I would definitely say patience, loyal friendships, and dedication. Nashville is a tough town but I have survived and have had a blast all of these years.
What was your latest musical release?
“Circus” was released about two months ago, I wrote that song with Matt Rogers who is, well, I guess he’s no longer up and coming, since he just won a Grammy for Cody Johnson’s Til You Can’t. I gave him one of his first jobs. He moved around the same time as when I moved to Nashville and we started writing probably that far back. I wrote California High with him. Most of my songs were written with Matt and we were on a session together, at Sony and we were trying to think of a song. We were just kind of pitching back and forth ideas that we had, or whatever, and we weren’t getting anywhere. And there was this picture of a circus on the wall and we were just like, you know, there’s a lot of parallels to being a musician and being in the circus. And so that is how that song came about, you know, we just wrote about a picture we saw on the wall.
Jacob Bryant and I have been friends for a long time and we had the same management at one point. Jeff, our manager at the time, really liked that song and wanted to make it into more of a rock song because he’s not a big horn fan. And the only time we’ve recorded Circus is on the live, and we knew we wanted to do a studio version. Bringing Jacob in for this just made sense. We wanted to reach each other’s fans and have wanted to do this for a while. You can stream it on all of the major platforms!
Do you have any news to share?
I’m releasing everything because it just doesn’t matter anymore. For me, it’s more beneficial to release everything because you never know what might hit somebody or somewhere, you know? It’s like nobody’s doing that. I mean, you have to be in the top 1% to be able to put out a full-length record and that’s the truth. We are headed back to the recording studio in July and will have more music being released soon.
How can fans find you?
Website: www.chrisweaverband.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/ChrisWeaverBand/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/chrisweaverband/?hl=en
YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/ChrisWeaverBand
Lastly, please share some final words with the fans.
Here’s the thing and I don’t say this bragging: I’ve been really fortunate to write with some really killer writers who have had a lot of success. And so there are 40 really good songs that we’ve written and maybe 10 of them have been recorded to a place where I would just be like, “Yeah, that’s it”. It’s not gonna get better than that, at least not from my perspective. But, a lot of these songs, especially off of the Live and Brazil record, we’re gonna cut a lot of those tunes. World Ain’t Big Enough and Madrid have only been recorded live and don’t quite sound the way they need to sound.
I’m not really happy with a lot of the older recordings. I mean, especially Standing In Line because it was recorded 15 years ago and I had polyps back then. I was always sick or drunk or something and it just, yeah, some of those songs need to be redone as well.