Chris Blevins: Grief, Love and Other Gifts
I interviewed Chris Blevins in late 2019 about the exciting plans he had for the upcoming year, including three record releases and a new baby. His son was born last May but the records never came out because 2020 turned the other plans sideways. 2021 is finally offering a reset to the year that was put on hold.
The duet project that Chris had called Grief back then is now titled Grief, Love and Other Gifts, and is being released on Tulsa’s Horton Records. “This started out as a very single-minded project and quickly became something else entirely,” Blevins explains. "We changed the title because albums, when they have a specific intention, I think they’re a bit amorphous in what the expectation of the creator is and as we added songs and subtracted some songs that were maybe not as strong it just became a different thing and it no longer fit that paradigm and we shifted more and I changed the title as a result of that.” He added, “The tone of some of the songs initially was grief and very much centered around the prospect of grief and how we process that and now it’s more in line with just human experience and the different facets of that and how we process those.”
Chloe-Beth and Chris Blevins
Fellow Oklahoman, Chloe-Beth has joined the band as a full-fledged member. The juxtaposition of the two on stage is striking. Blevins is very tall and Chloe-Beth is, well, not. Chris says he now plans to feature her in some capacity in just about everything the band does. It is her magnificent voice that makes this record sparkle. Chris says, “She has the ability to simultaneously be very empowered and also extremely meek. She’s very small. Her personality is not necessarily small. She has this ability in her voice to be meek and empowered at the same time.” It is her voice that is first heard on the record’s first track. I asked Chris to describe the songs on Grief, Love and Other Gifts.
Letting Go: “That song is a procession of grief in the planning of a loved one’s funeral; literally the planning of a funeral and the bereavement process quickly thereafter. I thought it better to give her that first verse and have this thin pallid thing in the front set the tone for it. I’m kind of harsh when I sing sometimes and I didn’t think that suited the song.”
Half Hung Hammer: “Just an amalgam of a bunch of existential one-liners. It doesn’t have an overbearing theme or a through line to carry it from the beginning to the end. Two individual perspectives on loneliness or longing or just processing existentialism in the ways that we do. Sometimes it’s lamentations, sometimes it’s a statement of intent. I didn’t want it to be too serious so I wrote it kind of open-ended. I think it’s just ambiguous enough that everybody can identify with some portion or the other. Blevins credits John Moreland for the premise of that writing style, “He is a great literary writer. If you listen to a lot of his work, it’s just these insane one-liners from off the cuff. He writes that way I think intentionally because there is no base through line to follow word by word but if you look at the work as whole, they all kind of imply the same feeling. I like that ambiguity a lot. It makes people feel more connected. There’s no way to draw division with ambiguity. There’s just not.”
I’m Your Man: “The past couple of years we’ve been coming off the back of the #MeToo movement and this sort of feminist mentality that’s proliferating popular culture right now. In Red Dirt and Country and those kinds of genres, typically gender roles are set in stone and they’re immovable and you can’t really get away with much, so I wrote a song where the male in the story is very subservient and the female is the one that’s empowered. I don’t really mean to make a statement by that other than suggesting that those roles are not mutually exclusive to either gender and the tagline of the song (‘I’m Your Man’) is one that even she echoes throughout the song. Because that’s the stereotypical gender role that a man fills in the relationship is to be the empowered dominant one, so I wanted her to echo that same line. On its own, it could just be taken as a fun, sexy song. But if you thought about the implication of the lyrics superimposed on modern society, you could see that intention buried in there.”
Spectator: “is actually a really personal song. It is my coming to terms with my parents’ lives and their stories and how that reflection lands on me and my own. In the first verse I talk pretty explicitly about my father and the vices that led him down a bad road. And how, if there is some sort of omniscience looking down over the top of us, they are no more than spectators. It doesn’t seem as if they’re there to help. It’s not necessarily an anti-religious kind of song. I’m not that kind of guy to start with. I’m a firm Agnostic, just to set that straight. It’s very much looking at the perceptive notions of God and what that might mean to your own personal story. In the second verse, I talk candidly about my mother, even though that’s Chloe’s verse, and the way that we worship certain things and how they typically betray us. The last verse is mostly about me and my own feelings on the whole subject. I’ve got a stepson now and I just had my first kid. I actually went back and reworked some of the lyrics to reflect my feelings on him being here.”
Folded Arm Farewell: “is a pretty straightforward breakup song. I was with a girl for a while and I very much enjoyed her. At the end of any relationship, it doesn’t matter who is the scorned party or who is the adjudicator of the end, it inevitably leaves a mark and you come away with these jaded notions of how the other person had behaved. There’s a line in there ‘it’s all done now with a folded arm farewell / packed up tight, staged, ready for sale.’ It just seems like that’s what happens at the end of a lot of relationships.”
What Will We Love: “I listen to a lot of Hayes Carll’s writing and a lot of it is super tongue in cheek and never takes itself crazy seriously. But then you listen to the lyrics and maybe it's impactful or maybe it is just what it seemed on the surface, but regardless, the language and the phrasing is always unique and I wanted to lean into that a little bit. It’s a silly song that takes itself maybe a little too seriously in the second verse. The behavior of two people who have been together for a long time and how they might cajole or insult each other a little but ultimately, if either were to go away by one means or another, they would be missed. That’s all I’m trying to portray in that song.”
Love Has Found You: “is a platonic love letter to a former lover. That’s the most concise way to try to get across my meaning. At the end of a relationship you can come away with certain conclusions. This is kind of a diametric opposition to ‘Folded Arm Farewell.’ It’s the positive side when things are amicable and you see what somebody could be and what somebody wants to be and you want to advocate for them regardless of how the relationship ended between the two of you. It’s a friend ballad. It’s wishing somebody well despite your own grievances.”
Chris describes Grief, Love and Other Gifts as “outside what we would normally do and outside what we’re doing with the full band record later this year.” Most of the players are the same for both projects: Lane Hawkins on fiddle, Matt Teegarden on drums, Johnny Mullinax on guitar, Paul Wilkes on bass and Andrew Bair on keyboards. Blevins also credits Bair with a major hand in producing the overall feel of the record and some of the arrangement choices.
Kendall Osborne engineered the recording in Bixby, Oklahoma at Closet Studios which Blevins describes as “by far the most competent in the state. I’ve worked in a lot of great studios but as far as local to Tulsa, Closet has a lot to offer the community and I wish more people would use him.”
As ready to go as he was in 2019, Chris Blevins is even more eager to get on with 2021. He says he’s sitting on about 40 tunes he wants to put out and another full band record is due out in August. He’s also recording a solo project by himself at home and making preparations for co-producing a full-length record for Chloe-Beth in October. Grief, Love and Other Gifts is just the beginning of a very busy year that Chris Blevins hopes is even better than the one he had planned last year.
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