By Peter Chakerian
The Plain Dealer/Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Grammy nominated singer-songwriter Chris Trapper has traveled the world over, performing to a dedicated and ever-growing fan base with nothing but his guitar and his songs. Raised on John Prine and Kris Kristofferson, Trapper’s first foray in the music industry was as frontman of the critically acclaimed alt-rock band The Push Stars.
Yet, over the past decade, Trapper has become something of a modern-day wandering minstrel – performing over 150 dates a year as a headliner and sharing stages with the likes of Rob Thomas (Matchbox 20), John Hiatt, Pat Benatar and even Prine himself.
“I have had some great experiences along the way,” Trapper told Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer in an interview last week. “Hitting a stage where no one knows you at the beginning and they’re all singing back to you by the end? Those are the things that have kept me going all this time.”
Trapper’s latest album “Watching Sparks Fly By” is his 12th full-length solo effort and will be released later this week (snippets are on his website). The Boston-based troubadour employed multiple producers to bring 13 brand new tracks to life – along with three bonus tracks including a studio version “Keg on My Coffin.”
Highlights include the first single “Campfire Symphony,” the G. Love collaboration “Swept Away” and a plaintive ballad called “Toast to Us” featuring Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Pat Benatar. He will perform many of these songs at an intimate, small-hall appearance at Treelawn Social this Friday, March 14. The show will double as an album release party, as attendees will be among the first to get their hands on a hard copy.
Popdose said of Trapper: “His humble sense of humility is what makes [his] songs so strong... He makes you feel like you are the person he’s singing about.” “For me, [songwriting] is like keeping a diary of where I’m at in life,” Trapper said. “As songs come together into a decent-sized batch of 10-12, that’s when I start to make plans to record them. In the back of my mind, I usually have an idea of what I want them to sound like; how they fit together.”
A favorite of Hollywood’s music supervisors, Trapper’s songcraft has graced many a film including “The Devil Wears Prada” and “There’s Something About Mary.” His song “This Time” was the number-one selling song on the Grammy-nominated “August Rush” movie soundtrack.
With “Sparks,” Trapper was motivated by something a bit more sobering: grief. His brother Scott, who had struggled with addiction and homelessness over the course of his later life, passed away during the making of the album.
Trapper said his own life began to feel a bit like a movie in the process. “He had a lot of struggles, and I was trying to help him during the process of recording,” Trapper said. “My motivation to get ‘Sparks’ out was part of the phases of grief.”
Trapper called the new material “a mix of upbeat and melancholy songs.” The pain of Scott’s battles still weighs heavy on his mind. “This is a guy who had two college degrees,” Trapper said. “He wasn’t a couch-to-couch or shelter-to-shelter kind of homeless person. He was on the streets, not for lack of trying to help. It was a really challenging time and the music became a healing distraction for me.”
In the leadoff track “Campfire Symphony,” Trapper found an eerie sort of foreshadowing. He wrote and recorded it just a couple months before his brother passed. “It was very stream-of-conscious and the weirdest thing looking back,” he said. “It was a song about grieving, but when I wrote it, I wasn’t grieving anything. Just this strange, strange forewarning."
Trapper said that the loss was hard on his family because everyone is “very close, very supportive” and Scott was “too young, which made it all even more dramatic” to those closest to him. The throes of addiction can be tough to come back from. Trapper said that the grieving process “kind of made everything feel meaningless to me for a while” and that the idea of self-promotion, marketing and other tangential things related to being a songwriter felt empty. It took a Herculean bit of reframing for him to find silver linings.
“I really started thinking, ‘What does any of this matter? What’s the point?’ And then I started thinking about it in a bigger picture sense,” Trapper said. “I have higher goals as a person to – hopefully – put out music that makes other people’s lives better and helps them through hard times,” he added. “I get a lot of that kind of feedback from my career in that regard and I know that Scott was always very pleased when he’d hear that.”
One of his brother’s biggest thrills was hearing that his songwriting brother would get to open shows for Pat Benatar and her husband Neil Giraldo a few years back. Trapper himself is still coming down from that experience.
“I got one gig with them, right after Covid,” Trapper said. “We didn’t have much interaction; I felt like the best way to handle everything was with reverence and respect. I didn’t know if they liked me or not, but when the next tour came, I fought to get it and landed it.” Trapper was fortunate enough to tour with Benatar and Giraldo the next couple summers in a row. Calling them “one of the fiercest vocal-guitar duos on the planet,” he said Benatar called him “one of their favorite openers,” with Giraldo remarking to a group “Chris is an incredible songwriter, a great and a phenomenal guitar player.”
“For him to say that? I was over the moon!” Trapper laughed. “Most players see him as a monster guitarist. I think of my guitar as a vehicle to get through the song. It’s all a bit unconscious for me. ”Trapper said that with that “huge level of trust in me,” he felt emboldened to ask Benatar to sing background vocals on a new song. “I expected her to laugh and walk away, but she didn’t! The song really came from that touring experience,” Trapper said.
’Toast to Us’ is a stripped-back acoustic song about longevity in relationships – inspired to some degree by Pat and Neil’s enduring musical partnership-relationship against the crazy, fly-by-night nature of show business. They’re both inspiring people.” Having come to prominence with The Push Stars, Trapper still does reunion shows with his friends, bassist-keyboardist Dan McLoughlin and drummer Ryan MacMillan. But it’s a bit different from when they started in 1996. “We always love seeing each other and it’s always fun to play together,” Trapper said.
“I have a different love for solo storytelling. Part of that comes with feeling like I was never a great rock and roll frontman – which is a certain skill set that requires you to let go of self-consciousness and like just go for it,” Trapper said. He’s quick to add that awareness “doesn’t come from arrogance,” but from an understanding that “everyone has strengths and weaknesses.” Wait. Awkward? After all this time? Say it ain’t so!?! “It’s really a skill set issue for me,” he said.
“I do love doing both and there have been times with The Push Stars where we really put both of those things together well as a band. I just think I’m better at one than the other.”