What songs are meant to do

You may not know it, but you’ve prob­a­bly already heard a Chris Trapper song. Though the Boston-​based song­writer hasn’t become a nation­wide house­hold name, the sophis­ti­cated sim­plic­ity of his tunes has earned him a well-​deserved rep­u­ta­tion as one of best song­writ­ers cur­rently work­ing in the craft. And that rep­u­ta­tion has brought with it one oppor­tu­nity after another for his music to be fea­tured in films and television.

Trapper’s music has been a back­drop for day­time dra­mas, teen drame­dies and even a real­ity dat­ing show. His songs have also been fea­tured on the sound­tracks for fea­ture films “There’s Something About Mary,” (“Everything Shines”) “August Rush” (“This Time”) and more.

And, while his songs are won­der­ful com­ple­ments to big screen sto­ries, the most strik­ing thing about Trapper’s music is the com­plete­ness of each song in its own right. Every song tells a story, and the nar­ra­tive land­scape of each song is replete with richly drawn char­ac­ters who come alive as the song’s story unfolds.

I was intro­duced to Trapper’s music by friends when I was liv­ing in Rochester, N.Y. I met his music in the con­text of his for­mer group, The Push Stars. I actu­ally saw The Push Stars once, in Buffalo, dur­ing what I believe was their final tour together. I was drawn to the songs I heard that night both for the power of the per­for­mance and the emo­tional inten­sity of the words and melodies; the music that seemed to paint a world for the char­ac­ters and sto­ries to inhabit.

I was hooked on Trapper’s songwriting.

The songs I heard when I first dropped one of Trapper’s discs into my player weren’t just tightly crafted pop nuggets (though Trapper’s mas­tery of his craft approaches per­fec­tion); nor were they heady folk songs with some­thing big and bold to say (though almost every tune leaves me reel­ing). It was the sto­ry­telling that wrapped me; that pulled me close and made me want to cry.

Trapper doesn’t take on the moniker of sto­ry­teller, though. “I don’t really see myself as any­thing but a song­writer, in the purest and most ver­sa­tile form,” he says. “I can write uncom­fort­ably per­sonal songs, and songs for a bub­bly WB tele­vi­sion com­edy, and feel equally rewarded when or if they take hold. I’d like to think what I write may have the power to trans­port at least a lit­tle bit, either through story, melody, or ide­ally, both.”

Perhaps the most strik­ing thing about Trapper’s songs, both on the solo records and the songs he wrote for The Push Stars, is the char­ac­ters. Even when a song is first per­son, there’s an engag­ing cast of char­ac­ters that inhabit the world of the tune. Whether it’s the blue col­lar sto­icism of the father in “House Next To The Drive-​In,” (“Songs From The Drive-​In,” 2002) the for­mer lover in “Outside Of A Dream” (“Paint The Town,” 2006) or the “friends who were buried alive” in “Cadillac,” (“After The Party,” 1999) there is always sub­tle detail that makes the world, the char­ac­ters come alive.

Trapper cred­its his eye for char­ac­ter to his child­hood as a mem­ber of a large fam­ily, and also to a well-​honed abil­ity to observe and report — a key skill for an artist in any discipline.

“I sup­pose some of the cross char­ac­ter­i­za­tion comes from just lis­ten­ing to peo­ple,” says Trapper. “I am the youngest of six sib­lings, so it was vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble for me to get out of the twelfth grade with­out already know­ing some pretty intense sto­ries. But like many song­writ­ers, i’d say the power is in obser­va­tion, and the abil­ity to con­nect the pen to the paper when the time is right, so to speak.”

And that laser-​perfect obser­va­tion has to turn inward from time to time as well. Trapper: “The other impor­tant thing I think is just mak­ing a com­mit­ment to reveal your­self, and in an hon­est way. If it’s any­thing less, it’s a waste of time for all involved.”

As I write this, I’m lis­ten­ing to “Paint The Town.” I’m five songs in, and I’ve already been on an emo­tional jour­ney through the dis­qui­et­ing real­ity of bal­anc­ing rela­tion­ships with life on the road (“Claire”); the long­ing and sus­pense of won­der­ing what hap­pened to a for­mer life, a for­mer lover and the friends we once knew (“Outside Of A Dream”); a hymn to life, and the won­der of love, the uni­verse and every­thing (“Galaxy”); and an almost defi­ant state­ment of sur­vival in a world full of chaos (“Lucky Sevens”).

“Freedom,” “Paint The Town” and “Keg On My Coffin” are com­ing up before long, and I know I’ll be trans­ported to a world of blue col­lar sim­plic­ity and the sheer joy of fam­ily and friends.

As I lis­ten I can’t help but con­sider the Chris Trapper cat­a­log and think of the way his songs are explo­rations of a vast emo­tional land­scape. They encom­pass so much of every­day life, and tend to track some­where between pathos and joy, some­times hov­er­ing near the edge of each; one thing I never hear in a Chris Trapper tune is cyn­i­cism. Reading between the lines on some tunes, I get the sense he could take a cyn­i­cal point of view as he com­ments and reflects on the life around him.

Trapper agrees. And he sees music as a shield against the cyn­i­cism that waits just below the sur­face of our life, wait­ing to take an mile for every inch it gains.

“Music has always been an escape from cyn­i­cism for me,” he reflects. “I can def­i­nitely lean that direc­tion in my daily life, but it is very dif­fi­cult for me to strum a gui­tar and feel hopeless.

“It just doesn’t add up that way to me. There’s too much mys­tery and magic in it. To fill a room that was quiet with strum­ming from your fin­gers, and the shapes they make seems like the oppo­site of cyn­i­cism,” he continues.

“Also, the fact that I’ve been very lucky to have a career totally self-​steered yet suc­cess­ful enough to make a liv­ing for 12 years now is unbe­liev­able to me. In fact, it blows my mind. And I never for­get that music was my ini­tial escape from a lot of pain and sad­ness, so I never take it for granted.”

I find Trapper’s melodies, instru­men­ta­tion and arrange­ments com­ple­ment the “story-​line” of each of his songs; some­times it even seems like the music is a “char­ac­ter” in the nar­ra­tive arc the song takes. Melodically, his tunes havea a very defined pop sen­si­bil­ity. Yet, espe­cially in the solo albums, I hear a lot of jazz, Texas swing and tra­di­tional folk melodic turns.

It’s no acci­dent that so many influ­ences co-​exist in the Chris Trapper musi­cal uni­verse. He lis­tens broadly and lets his obses­sions guide him when choos­ing what goes into heavy rotation.

“I lis­ten to my obses­sions mostly. For a few years, it was Cuban music. I have no idea why, but I heard a song I liked in the movie “Before Night Falls” and I went out and bought every Cuban record I could find, from thrift stores, Amazon​.com to Amoeba Music store on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles, all I cared about was Cuban music. And there is always a pretty wide vari­ety going on beneath that, and I love a lot of styles.”

Ironically, Trapper isn’t a huge fan of his own space in the musi­cal spec­trum. “Probably the style I like the least is the one I do,” he says, “because it seems over-​saturated to me. My newest obses­sion has been a song­writer from San Diego named Gregory Page, because he fear­lessly will jump styles within his records. From 1930s style French roman­tic music, to clas­sic rock.”

Because Trapper’s tunes feel so com­plete, I won­dered about his process. The per­fect pair­ing of lyric, melody and accom­pa­ni­ment piqued my inter­est. What was the process like? How did these songs come into being?

“I’ve been writ­ing songs now for many years, and the process, as I allow it, must be nat­ural,” Trapper says. “If I were to ana­lyze every­thing I wrote, I’d prob­a­bly throw it all away in it’s imper­fec­tion. In other words, I sup­pose I want a cer­tain sim­ple magic in the process, and if that doesn’t hap­pen, I’d prob­a­bly try another craft.

“I usu­ally save the lyrics as the last piece of the puz­zle, because they are the sub­stance of the song. It requires suc­cess­fully bond­ing the words to the emo­tion in the music, pro­vided there is some.”

He goes on: “When I was first learn­ing song­writ­ing, I would take poems that my friend had writ­ten, and try to pro­vide a com­pat­i­ble chord and melody struc­ture to give birth from lyric to song. Now I’ll play some chords, or have a melody saved on some 1980’s micro-​cassette player, and I’ll try and turn that into a song. But it was help­ful to learn back­wards, because you see how the music and lyric are intertwined.”

One of Trapper’s recent efforts, “Songs From The Middle Of The World” (2008), is a col­lec­tion of (mostly) solo acoustic songs. It almost feels like a jour­nal or sketch book, not in the sense that it feels unfin­ished, but it in the sense that it’s a very inti­mate col­lec­tion of songs that seem per­sonal and reflec­tive. Musically, it’s a very cohe­sive album, stripped and simple.

“Songs from the mid­dle of the World was kind of an acci­dent,” Trapper says. “I was get­ting uncom­fort­able cause I hadn’t released any new music, and when you’re in the music busi­ness awhile, you fear, some­times irra­tionally, that your audi­ence is going to just dis­ap­pear, or move on to Michael Bolton or something.

“I had all these demos that I was try­ing to decide if I should record in a pro­duced fash­ion or not,” he con­tin­ues, “and I started feel­ing like they made sense as a col­lec­tion as they were. One of my favorite records is called “North Marine Drive” by Ben Watt (half of Everything But the Girl) and I love it because you can’t tell where or when the songs were recorded, or what they were meant to be in the grand scheme of things, but you feel that every breath in the vocal is sin­cere, and the music’s sim­plic­ity trans­ports you. I wanted to repli­cate that.”

There’s no doubt that Trapper loves his craft. He jokes about why he got into song­writ­ing: “Songwriting enabled me to meet cool peo­ple, see cool places, and talk to cute girls.”

But then he reflects on the real joy of mak­ing songs: “I’ve been able to com­mu­ni­cate what’s in my soul to peo­ple all over the coun­try, and now, in cer­tain cir­cum­stances, the world. This, for me, is a huge priv­i­lege, and I wouldn’t give it up for all the money in the world.”

Trapper’s song­writ­ing is com­pelling for many rea­sons. Technically, his songs are nearly per­fect; they’re com­plete and sophis­ti­cated, but, at the same time, sim­ple and engag­ing. Lyrically, they’re like novel­las set to a tune; they draw a world, peo­pled with fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ters and filled with a sense of adven­ture. But none of that explains why I con­nect so deeply with Trapper’s tunes.

Trapper’s songs do what songs are meant to do. In the inti­macy, the soul-​sharing moment of a song’s final, lin­ger­ing breath, a lis­tener can find solace and feel the peace of hav­ing said what needed to be said. A great song and a great song­writer speaks for the lis­tener, not just to him.

This item orig­i­nally appeared in the The Daily Times.