AudioGust Talks to Fanbase Music Magazine About His Latest Single, Producing His Own Tracks And Working With Liz Rodrigues & More

Interviewed by Duzzy Clayton

Intro

Chris Evans, otherwise known as AudioGust is an awesome musician who recently came onto my radar, being a wizard in both making and producing music, I caught up with him to talk about his new single How You Been, as well as enjoying recording and producing his music. Enjoy the read as we get to know this amazing all-rounder of a musician 

Interview

 

Hi Chris, welcome to Fanbase Music Magazine, You are also known as AudioGust, can you tell where that name came from?

I would love to go by my regular name, but there are way too many well-known Chris Evans’ in the world so I needed to come up with a name for myself as a producer and artist. This is a little geeky, but I was thinking about what singing and music are about at a fundamental level. All sound travels through air as waves so I thought of singing as little gusts of sound, and from that came AudioGust.

Where are you from and what got you into music?

I’ve lived near Seattle in the United States for the past 25 years. Seattle has a great history as the home of grunge music (and before that, the home of Jimi Hendrix). I’ve loved music for as long as I remember but a couple of the key moments for me was starting a band back in grade school because it looked like it would be a lot of fun, which it was. We were, of course, terrible when we started out but over time we all developed and got a lot better. I left that when I went to college at the University of Michigan and was very surprised to discover that my dorm building had a student-run recording studio in it. I spent a lot of time in that studio and learned all about recording techniques and working with other musicians and many of those skills are still useful as I create my music today — though there are a lot more computers involved now.

How would you describe your genre and sound?

I always find genres tricky, but my AudioGust releases all fall somewhere along the Alternative Rock, Pop Rock, and Indie Rock spectrum. When it comes to writing songs, the first instrument I usually pick up is a guitar and one of the most important elements is the drums as I am definitely rhythm/groove-focused.

What instruments do you play?

I play guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. And voice, I guess, since that’s an instrument. The guitar was my first instrument. Then I started playing bass in bands because there were always too many guitar players. I love playing bass, particularly with a great drummer where we can create a great foundation for a song.

Are you a solo musician, or do you jam with a band or other musicians?

In the studio, it’s just me these days though I have been fortunate to work with some great singers on some of my more recent releases. I’ve played in bands in the past and I would love to again, but getting a band together and keeping them together, is a lot of extra work and energy that I don’t have at the moment. When I’m writing, though, I always try to keep it so that a good band could perform the songs live so there’s certainly some desire in the back of my mind.

 

 

Can you list some of your previous work and music?

I guess that depends on the timeframe. I’ve released 29 songs on the streaming services over the past year or so. The includes my debut album “Walk With Me”, two EPs, and a bunch of singles. My most recent EP, “Love and Pain” is a collection of songs that I co-wrote with a great group of songwriters. All of the songs are sung by women that I wrote with. I love all of those songs and there’s a bit of diversity in their styles which was nice to explore.  

I was in a band called the Honeyspots that released an album back in the late 90s, we were a 3 piece group that took a lot of inspiration from Ben Folds Five at the time. We were topping the Power Pop charts on MP3.com — back when that was a thing.

Okay let’s talk about your latest amazing track,  ‘How You Been’, what is the song about?

Between those college bands and my more recent work, there were a few decades when I was a software engineer. I had a very successful career doing that and I worked on a lot of projects that would be the dream job for a lot of other engineers, but after a while, it just wasn’t my dream job anymore. I started thinking more and more about the music that I had kinda walked away from and wondered if I could get that going again. “How You Been?” is about that realization and the start of trying to bring that dream back to life, reconnecting with the people and the instruments that were part of that life. When we wrote it, I was originally thinking the song was being delivered to some of the people I was in bands with. As we got to the end of writing it, we realized it also could be about the guitars themselves that I played then, which I still have and use.

You co-wrote the track with Liz Rodrigues who worked with some big names such as Celene Dion, Eminem, and Pit Bull to mention a few, what was it like writing with her and how did you two meet?

Liz is wonderful. She is a mentor at The Songwriting Academy and I had a session with her when I was still part of their year-long program and we hit it off. When I was looking for a co-writer for this song, she was available so I jumped at the chance to write with her. Liz is a great singer and topliner so she helped bring a different melodic style to this song. I recorded our writing session and I would go back to listen to how she would sing certain phrases to figure out which of those would work when I sang it. Having worked with Eminem, she had some experience with rapid-fire lyrics and the chorus in “How You Been?” is pretty quick. Not in a Hip Hop way, but still, the lyrics need to work to make it possible to sing it that quickly and it took a few extra sessions to get them all right. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

You do your recordings and producing which is amazing, what was the process like for this single, and can you talk us through the recording process?

For “How You Been?”, I started with what I call a song seed. Sometimes I just sit down and write some backing music for a song, but don’t worry about the melody or lyrics yet.  Then I save those and for some collaborations, we just start from a seed and see where it goes. I had just created the seed that became “How You Been?” a few days before my first call with Liz and she liked the feel of that one too so it was the starting point for the song. We wrote the chorus and the verses, then I added a bridge section — which is always one of my favorite parts of a song — once we knew what the feel was and what music would be leading into it. Since I had the seed, it was pretty quick to record the vocals over the seed part but then there was a lot of playing around with different elements in the song and trying other keys, tempos, and feels until we landed on our final version, which is actually a blend of two versions. After the bridge, the song breaks into double time and that was from a Pop Punk version of the song that I had tried. I loved that version so it was fun to bring it into the final.  I also tried an acoustic version that was really cool, so I released that also as the “B Side” of the single. Same melody and everything, but the instrumentation is completely changed for a very different feel, but the same message.

 

 

Will you be releasing more music soon and what can you tell us about that?

Definitely! I set the goal for this year to release at least one song per month and I am still on the path to do that. My next release is a song called “Seattle” which comes out on June 21, 2024. As I said, I live near Seattle and this song is a story of longing to get home after being away on the road — like I am right now. It’s really a love song for Seattle. I’ve lived here since the late 90’s and whenever I travel and meet people who’ve never been here, I can’t help but share the many things that are so special about Seattle and all of the beautiful places and people all around it.

Thank you for doing this interview, do you have any last messages for our readers?

I guess my one last request to your readers is to support the creators of the music you like. You may not know how meaningful it is to click the save or like button when you hear a song that you like. Or maybe add it to a playlist of your own. Each of those tiny little actions is a signal to the artists and the people they work with that they’re making something good and they should keep going. And it’s completely free!   

Thank you for having me, it’s been great talking with you.