INTERVIEW + PHOTOS: ANDREW MCENANEY
Andrew McEnaney: Yo. What’s up?
Chris LaRocca: Yo brother. Just chillin’. Drinking coffee. You?
Andrew: In San Antonio, playing a show at the Aztec tonight.
Chris: Sick. Was the last show yesterday?
Andrew: Yeah, we have three Texas in a row. We had Dallas, which was good, last night we were in Houston, which was good and today’s San Antonio. We have a day off tomorrow in El Paso and then Phoenix, Vegas, California and then home.
Chris: Wow, quick little ripper.
Andrew: A quick little ripper! What are your plans today?
Chris: Leaving here within the hour to go to my parents house for lunch.
Andrew: Fun, well before you go let’s talk about what’s been going on. What’s the moves? How’s this next project going since we last spoke?
Chris: I’ve finished recording, creating and collaborating… so the music part is finished. I’m at the point of getting into that next phase of mixing, mastering and what the project is going to feel like and look like visually. Definitely moving into the next phase of planning, all while getting ready to move out of my place. I feel like it’s an interesting time to be getting into that. It’s kind of like out of the creation and into, I don’t want to say the easy part—but the less intensive part… but then my life is getting into the crazy part, so it’s a weird juxtaposition.
Andrew: Definitely a lot going on. You find someone to mix it?
Chris: Honestly, I’ve gone through six engineers. I had a first guy from Texas—or Nashville, I can’t remember where he was from, and it just wasn’t the vibe. Then I had a guy from Toronto who did a couple revisions, and I still felt it wasn’t it. Then I ended up just getting my stems mastered to give it a shot myself. That was cool but I felt like it could be better, so I went back and thought I should probably get it mixed properly. At that pointI sent those three options to a few people asking which they liked better. When I sent it to Creglia and my friend Noah in Toronto, they both wanted to try and mix. Both their mixes were amazing. They nailed the song, but I was wondering how the whole project was going to sound mixed like this. This guy from New York, Al Carlson, does some cool stuff, so he’s gonna try something. Ultimately, I’m gonna have to make a decision and I’ve spent a lot of money trying to figure it out. So to answer the question, no I have not found someone to mix it yet that I’m fully sure of.
Andrew: Well it should turn out good. I don’t remember you ever trying this many people to mix a project before.
Chris: For sure. In the past I’ve been more removed from this process. This time around, since I’ve made so much of it myself, I’m just being really critical.
Andrew: You’ve been the sole creator and maybe a little bit more guarded of who you’re bringing into the creative process, why are you going that route versus previous projects where you’ve had others so involved in the creation?
Chris:The projects under my name haven’t really hit that next level, and I had to start asking why? Maybe in my mind it’s because I hadn’t put 100% of myself into my music. It’s been a split between me and other people. There’ve been a lot of other people’s fingerprints on it. When I look back, especially the last album I put out, I don’t think it really moves the needle for me. I think this is something more authentic and more my own. And I think that I haven’t really tried that since I did “Sex Tape,” you know. It was the first project I ever did fully by myself. Although that was a different time, it was pre-streaming, and it caught the attention of people because it was so unique and authentic. So I kind of felt like I had to come back to something where my fingerprint is the heaviest one on it.
Each song has a very deep story behind it. Nothing is surface level, they’re all deep and personal to me and drawing from a real moment or experience that happened within the last year. At that point it’s like, okay, who’s going to handle this story? It’s going to be me and I’m gonna have people come in like characters entering a plot here and there musically, but at the end of the day it’s my story.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s beautiful. What are some of the themes through these songs?
Chris: Well, the project is called “Dog Years.” It is technically seven songs that are supposed to reflect the idea of a dog year being seven years in our one. It ended up being eight songs, but one of the songs is going to be a standalone single outside of the project. Everything I wrote for this project is about this last year of my life. From January of 2023 to January 2024—what happened and how I felt. So the themes are all one year of growth and how at this age, it really feels like one year can change you so much, and you live seven years in one year. Each song is a very pinpointed moment. “Ladybug,” one of the songs on the project, was about when I realized that the woman I’m with is the girl I want to spend the rest of my life with. She’s someone that I will fight for and I was able to realize the strength of that relationship. There’s a song called “Laundry Day” that’s about a pinpointed moment I had at a laundromat with Aysha, where we had a very profound moment; she was feeling emotional about things in her life and things back home, and we had a very deep talk about it. The song, “Last Pair of Boots in Town” is about Bisante. I was looking at what he was going through and seeing how much he was suffering, and realizing I got to this age where heartbreak hurts so much more. When you get to an older age in your life and something falls apart, it feels so much harder to pick up the pieces, find someone again and move on.
Andrew: Yeah. I feel like that’s something everyone can relate with. Is there any musical influence that you drew from for this? Not just thematically but even musically or lyrically?
Chris: Yeah, I think musically, I really had to ask myself, what do I love to listen to? And why have I avoided pulling influence from that? I feel, especially in Toronto, it’s such a quick moving musical environment. There’s so much happening and you see what’s working and think, hey, I gotta try that but this year I was like, yeah, I don’t want to try anything that’s working. I want to try music I’ve loved and has spoken to me and determine how I can reinvent it to convey how I feel. Take the feeling, filter it my way and put it back on a platter for other people to appreciate. So musically, I came back to the music that I’ve listened to my whole life. I think one of the first ones that led me on the path was The Band because since I was a kid, my dad would play “The Weight,” “Up on Cripple Creek” and all those other songs. There were other projects in that time period like Steely Dan’s Aja. The same kind of legendary stuff you feel like you can’t touch, but you can kind of reinterpret it for now. Hall and Oates, Abandoned Luncheonette was a big one, too. When I tried to look at more modern things that I loved, I came back to, like, Grizzly Bear— Veckatimest and Shields—both those albums are huge, Dirty Projectors album Bitte Orca. It’s a masterpiece. It’s just a perfect album. Bon Iver, the first project For Emma, Forever Ago and also 22, A Million. As much as I’ve always loved Bon Iver from For Emma days—he’s one of the best artists of our time—this one came to me later on. Beyond that, there’s this woman named Gillian Welch. Her lyrics are so simple, but they’re perfect. There’s this guy named Westerman who has a project that came out recently called An Inbuilt Fault—some really weird stuff, that’s really cool. He has a specific song called “Confirmation” that, to me, is one of the best songs ever made. The lyrics on that were so simple but universal. Do you know MJ Lenderman?
Andrew: No.
Chris: Okay, he has an album called Boat Songs that I heard just before I started writing this stuff. I think he’s honestly one of the best lyricists and songwriters alive right now. He has a song called “Hangover Game” and it’s about like Michael Jordan… there’s that moment where Jordan couldn’t make a game because he said he had food poisoning, but everyone thought it was a hangover. He writes a song about it and it’s just perfect. It’s funny and it’s real and it’s serious all at the same time.
Andrew: Wow. It sounds like there’s a bit of everything in there.
Chris: There is, but they all have a common thread—they’re all great songwriters. I think that in the past I’ve overproduced to compromise for an underwritten song, so I feel like this time, if I write a great song, I don’t have to do the craziest production tricks and pull all the stops, because the song is there and if you can just play it on a guitar, you’ve already got something great.
Andrew: Nice. Simpler is way more difficult and from what I’ve heard of the music, there is a difference from your past music. It’s worth noting that you also do produce, it wasn’t like you were just handing that stuff over to a producer to put a suit and tie on your songwriting. I think on this one, you still maintain your integrity while still having really great songs.
Chris: I think so. One thing I really tried to do was to avoid synthetic stuff. There’s really not many synths on this project. The majority of it is real drums, real guitars, real basses, real pedal steel. A lot of what’s being used are organic moments and recording things kind of less professionally, I guess.
Andrew: I love that. The production approach feels cohesive with the lyrical approach. Everything about it feels really you, which is a beautiful way to be going into your… what record? How many have you made so far?
Chris: Technically this would be my third EP. On paper, I’ve only done one album but if we’re talking projects under this name, this would be the fourth.
Andrew: And yet it still feels like the first, right. It feels like you’re starting again.
Chris: This to me is the first one. The other ones were great but it was a lot of soul searching. When I think back, the first one was the best one because I was the least influenced by everything. The second one, as much as I love that one, was super influenced by what was happening in Toronto at the time, which was Daniel Caesar, Charlotte Day Wilson, Sean Leon… there was this Toronto movement that was happening. And then the last album, I signed a deal and felt like I had to do things that I normally wouldn’t do. I was thinking more pop-centric. So yeah, this one does feel like the first one, because it’s the first time I don’t give a shit about anything that’s happening around me.
Andrew: Okay let’s talk about your move coming up. Getting out of Toronto…
Chris: I am excited. I’ve lived alone for six years and I feel like that has started to reflect in my life. It’s easy to get lazy and unmotivated. It’s just me here with all my things set up and I can either sit here, stare at them and have no inspiration, and nothing to do… or I can fall into this trap of working unhealthily long. it just gets lonely. I think I’m at a point in my life when I feel this loneliness, I try to find ways to help. I’ll get out of my house and go do something, which is great but at the same time it’s all kind of a distraction for a deeper thing. I feel like moving in with Aysha, my partner is going to help because I don’t want her to see me dying on the couch for eight hours at a time. Part of me also thinks that I’ve sucked all the inspiration out of this place.
Andrew: You’ve been there for a long time.
Chris: Yeah. I love it, I just feel that when I sit down here, it doesn’t feel like I’m at the studio anymore. Just feels like I’m in my house… and it just feels like I don’t really know where to pull the inspiration from at times. A new spot is going to help a lot and being a bit outside of the city and closer to nature is going to be nice.
Andrew: It’s interesting to me that this new project feels the most you yet at the same time, you’ve really exhausted your home studio and it almost feels like you’ve wrung it out for all it’s worth. So it’s kind of beautiful that you’re moving out of the apartment that you made all this music in and it feels to me that you got what you needed out of it for this specific project. I think that you moving out of it correlates with sealing the deal on this new musical direction.
Chris: Yeah, most of the songs were written from January to April and at that point it was hard to write.I was trying to get one or two more songs and I was having a hard time. The rest of the songs were written at Kilo, a studio outside of my house, and one was written in LA when I went there in July. The songs I wrote outside of the house are definitely some of the most unique and some of my favourite ones.
Andrew: Music-wise, what are you excited about being up there?
Chris: I’m excited to finally have my studio in its own room and not in my bedroom. I can’t even open my drawers in here. I’m also excited to hear silence… my window in the room where I make music faces Young Street—constant traffic, honking, people screaming. Sometimes it’s made its way into the recording, which is cool. On “Laundry Day,” there’s this car horn that ends up being key, but usually it’s not cool.. The music I’m making now feels more in line with the environment I’m moving to as opposed to where I’m living now.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s going to be interesting because when I think about your music now, I think visually about where you’re moving. Watch, you’re going to go up there and you’re going to start making pop smashes. [laughs]
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah… start making house music… [laughs]
Andrew: I feel like the whole process of this record has been almost a preliminary experience for what comes when you go up there and let’s see how that influences what comes next.
Chris: Yeah. It’s going to be a palate cleanser. The only things I’m really holding on to are my musical belongings, my clothes and some little knick knacks… and my dog, obviously. I think I need that in my life because I’m such a fucking person of habit and I can get so locked into consistency and I hate change. Every day I’m scared about it.
Andrew: Being scared is definitely a sign and I know a lot of people who use that type of gut feeling to lean into something more. For example, if I’m out taking photos and I see someone I’m really interested in; if I’m terrified to approach to ask for a portrait, I’ve tried to teach myself to lean into it more, because that means that I really want it.
Chris: It’s exactly that. It’s scary to move on but life’s about experiencing and doing things. Being safe and comfortable isn’t always the best place to be.
Andrew: It’s funny because what you just described in terms of where you’re living, how you can’t be comfortable forever and needing to challenge yourself, it’s the exact same thing from where your music career is at.
Chris: Yeah. It’s true. Wow.
Andrew: You can’t continuously do the same thing and not challenge yourself. You have to do things that are uncomfortable. You have to clear space. There are so many parallels and it is easy to fall into a comfortable scenario where you just pull from the same experiences but that’s not where progress is made.
Chris: That’s scarily true. I think that if I am on this path I have to follow it… getting out of here. I feel like everything the universe is telling me you’re already making these changes so might as well go full on.
Andrew: So when the project comes out, will you be at your new place?
Chris: No, I don’t know where I’ll be, that’s the craziest thing. When the first song comes out, I’ll probably be up north, which will be interesting. The maximum time I can spend up there is like six months, and I don’t think this project will come out until the end of summer or fall of next year…. So I have no idea where in the world I’ll be when it comes out. I’ve also had so many disappointing moments here when I was releasing music… anytime I put out a song here there’s a sense of anxiety because I’ve had so many letdowns here—I’m going to stay up till midnight, chainsmoking cigarettes on the balcony, wait till the song comes out, probably get depressed, go lay on my couch and watch some fucking murder documentary on Netflix to make myself feel better, watching someone else’s problems. Then pass out and wake up… and hope that I don’t wake up kind of thing. So I think that when I move to a new place, at least I can find a new routine and a new emotion to attach to it, if that happens, you know?
Andrew: Um, what else have we got here? We didn’t really talk about the food stuff, but I think that just goes with what’s outside your place, your current environment and what you’re used to doing here.
Chris: Like any neighbourhood, you fall in love with it. And it’s like that place specifically. Gamberoni has been a constant—it’s been here for decades probably. It was originally right below me and then moved across the street. I’ve experienced it in so many different iterations; when it was like a hole in the wall, like a classic kind of place and then when they opened up and got a little more, I don’t know, fancy, you could say. It brings me back to my childhood because it’s great food and family, friends in a way. The guy’s friends with my dad. I actually hadn’t eaten there in a while, so to have eaten there with you just a month or two ahead of leaving feels suitable, like I bookended my time here since it was one of the first places that I ate at when I first moved here. I was out of groceries and went to Gamberoni. Wow. To have it right before the move just felt right.
Andrew: It’s cool because they moved and changed.
Chris: Yeah they did, they did. An interesting parallel, I know. I think they struggled with the move at first, but they just made it work. They’re still there.
Andrew: That’s fucking sick. And you know what? You’re gonna make it work and you will still be here in a new form.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I’m gonna make it work. I’m moving fucking across the street… kind of. Yeah, there’s gonna be some challenges, but if I can be anything like fucking Gamberoni…
Andrew: You’ll be serving up the hottest spaghetti in town.
Chris: The spiciest meatballs. [laughs]
Andrew: That’s it. I think that’s a great ending point right there.