Chris Sligh

Chris Sligh entered into the national spotlight during the sixth season of American Idol with a desire “to make David Hasselhoff cry” and a talent that carried him to finishing tenth in the competition. During that time in the spotlight, Sligh showcased his powerful voice, a wry wit, and a bold choice of songs, daring to incorporate songs like dcTalk’s “Wanna Be Loved” and MuteMath’s “Typical” on a show better known for Top 40 fare.

Not long before the release of his debut album, Running Back to You, Soul-Audio’s Matt Conner sat down with the curly-headed artist to talk about avoiding the Idol curse, his choice to enter the Christian market, and the benefit of ’street smarts.’

SA: Before American Idol, you obviously had a goal in mind of where you wanted to go. Do you feel like the AI experience helped that or shot you away from that or…?

Sligh: Well, I think it definitely shot me past because as a new artist, no one knows who you are. You have to fight to get into radio stations, you have to fight to get played; it’s a huge, huge struggle for a new artist. And I have been really, really lucky with that. Because of American Idol everybody knows who I am, especially in the Christian market because there’s so many Christians who watch the show and, even if they didn’t necessarily know my name they’re like, “Chris Sligh, the guy with the curly hair from American Idol. Oh yeah! That’s the guy.” So it definitely has opened up a lot of doors.

If I’d have just come into this industry as a new artist, I mean, this first GMA, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you, I probably wouldn’t be talking to most of the people I’m talking to. So it definitely puts me in a different place as a new artist and it does that for just about everybody that comes off of Idol. The problem is that a lot of Idols’ put out crappy albums and they don’t have the music to back up the fame. So what we try to do, and hopefully we’ve been successful, you know, we’ll start to see as the record comes out and everything, hopefully we have succeeded in making a great record that will just solidify in peoples’ minds that “not only is he famous but the music’s good too.” That’s the important thing.

The Idol brand has kind of been muddied a little bit because of so many bad records so people don’t know. It’s like, “Well, is it good or isn’t it? I’ve heard a lot of really bad Idol albums.”

SA: Do you feel like you have to fight more for your artistic integrity and reputation?

Sligh: I don’t know! I got to make the record that I wanted to make down to a “T.” The label that I signed with, Brash Music, you know has Aaron Shust and has his success. The way that they work is that they do not sign artists unless they trust them to make their own records. So I didn’t produce it although I did get credit for ‘additional production.’ (Laughs) Because basically I produced all the demos and the songs ended up sounding a lot like the demos. But I worked with a producer, Brown Bannister, who is a legend yet he’s very, very much about having it sound like the artist. So I feel like with this record and how it came out, I don’t know that I would change anything about it.

You know a lot of people get done with their record and they’re like, “Oh, man, I wish I’d done this” or “I wish I’d done that.” Literally any idea that I came up with we would chase in some way or another. Brown was so great about it. I was like, “Hey, we’ve got this raging rock song. Why don’t we do it with just strings?” And it’s like, “Okay? What do you mean?” “You know how like with “Eleanor Rigby,” if you play it with a full band it’s really rocking? What if we did that with this song?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I guess let’s try it.” And so we go and came up with an arrangement and we go, “Holy crap! It works!”

It’s like any idea I came up with, you know at the end of the record we had twelve songs on the record and I kind of came in and I was like I feel like we really need, we’ve got all these epic moments on the album, I think we need just an acoustic and vocal kind of thing. And I came up with this song I wrote ten years ago in my college dorm room, and it was just me and an acoustic guitar and we put a string quartet on it and it ends up being, for me at least, I don’t know how it is…For me, “Vessel” ends up being one of those really magical moments. For me, at the end of the record you’re just like, “Wow!” Like, what a great way to close the record. So it was like any idea I could come up with we would chase down and some of them were really crappy ideas just because, hey, I come up with crappy ideas! (Laughs) But some of them were crappy ideas and some of them were really good ideas and we just ended up exploring all these different things and trying to figure out new ways to arrange things and put songs together.

I think that being in a position where I could do that definitely aided in…I can honestly say that every single song on this record I feel like deserves to be there and every song on this record is done exactly how I feel it should be.

SA: So what kind of players did you use on this album? Did you go back to your old well or…? What happened to those partnerships and are you doing anything there?

Sligh: No, no, no. Well, the bass player is still in college. Half Past Forever, which is a band that I was in never had a drummer; we hired out drummers every time, so it was just me, the bass player, and the guitar player. The bass player’s still in college, didn’t feel like he should quit college to come out and play and the guitar player’s in my live band that plays. They did not play on the record.

We decided and we got Nashville’s “A-list” session players. That’s kind of who Brown uses. Guys like Jerry McPherson, who was played on all the old Amy Grant records, Dan Needham who’s one of the best drummers in town, and for three songs, Jim Bogios, the drummer for Counting Crows came in and played. Will Denton and Joey Canaday played on three songs; they play with Leanne Rimes now but they had played with Steven Curtis for years. Yeah, Will played on the Jesus Freak tour. So we got really great players to come in and play and I did most of the guitar stuff myself and then guys like George Cocchini played.

Most people don’t know session players but I’m like a credits nerd and George Cocchini was the guy who wrote “Colored People” and played that tune (Hums the tune). So that’s George Cocchini playing. He does this thing called the tone chaperone where he comes in, for guys like me who are newer players, and he just brings in all this old, vintage gear, sets it all up, and you just hold the guitar and he tunes the guitar for you while you’re holding it and all this kind of stuff. It’s pretty awesome! (Laughs) And he actually played some stuff on the record too and Paul Moak played some guitar, like some of the lead stuff on the record too.

SA: So you really did rub shoulders with some of the best?

Sligh: Oh yeah! I mean, we spent four days in the studio, we did four days of tracking and then the rest of it was kind of in overdubs. Blair Masters played keyboards, Jimmy Lee Sloas played bass. Jimmy Lee Sloas is seriously one of those magical bass players; it’s like butter, the stuff that he plays. So to be able to work with some of those guys was just incredible. And it’s like anything you can really dream of, they can do. So it’s like you’re saying, “I kind of want to hear this bass part, like on a rise, I want to hear this bass part do this (hums the tune)” and he knew exactly what I was talking about and he’s just like, “You mean like this?” “Yes, exactly like that, actually! (Laughs) So, yes, please, do that!” So it feels really, really good.

And also I think American Idol afforded me…most new artists would not have the budget that I was able to have, especially on an indie record, because Brash Music is an indie label and they wrote the checks. And Brown Bannister would not normally work with a new artist and he took a huge pay cut to work with me too. So to have someone that believes in the songs and in me as an artist and a singer, it really is incredibly humbling and you just go, “Man, this is way better than I imagined it.” So I definitely think that American Idol shot me past where I thought I could be or where I thought I could have been, everything like that.

SA: So even with all the advantages of your Idol success, where there any negative effects to that success, like some areas where it maybe set you back a bit?

Sligh: The only thing that I can think of is that, you know, you’re definitely playing a character on TV. And they cast you how they think they want to make you look. But I don’t know that…I’m like an optimistic kind of guy anyway, like I always see the positive in everything? So it’s kind of hard for me to think of anything negative. I just think, you know, I came in tenth place so maybe people think that “Oh well, he was the tenth most talented on that season” because there are actually people who think that. “Oh, he came in tenth place; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and it’s like, okay. So whatever.

But I think that for me, it’s just all been good. I was very, very lucky that I had done it before. I had been traveling as an independent for seven years so I had product that labels could hear and look at. At one point I had eleven labels that were in the mix of trying to choose what I was going to do, everything from mainstream major labels down to Christian indie labels.

SA: So why’d you choose the Christian world?

Sligh: Actually, Brash is not a Christian label. It’s a mainstream label that does Christian music.

SA: Are they the imprint of a larger company?

Sligh: No, they’re an independent who is distributed by Warner Brothers and Word. The thing that it came down to is that I wanted to make records as a songwriter, because I feel like I’m more of a songwriter than I am a singer, so I wanted as a songwriter to be able to write about life, and my whole life.

With the mainstream market, I actually had a mainstream label put a lot of money on the table. They put a $250,000 advance plus a $250,000 budget and I’m going, “Holy crap! I’ve never going to see that kind of budget again! That’s amazing!” (Laughs) And it was an amazing deal. It was like, nineteen points, which I don’t know if you know record deals, but it was nineteen points on a record and…

SA: So what does that mean?

Sligh: Well, to put it in perspective, like a normal deal for a new artist is like ten to twelve points, which basically, a point is worth eight cents on a record.

SA: So it’s essentially a bigger cut on a record and a more artist friendly deal?

Sligh: Yeah, and it was a great deal but as we talked about what they wanted from me it was very, they were very cold to anything faith driven. This label in particular has not done that very much and they were just kind of like, “Well, it’s cool if it’s like U2 but we don’t want anything that’s pretty obvious about your faith.” Like the question that the guy asked me in my first meeting with them, the president of the label comes in and he goes, “So, man, how Christian are you?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I still sin, pretty much daily. So maybe like a seven? Like on a scale of ten.” (Laughs) What a crazy question.

So on that side and then the major Christian labels were the opposite. It was like, “Well we want you to write all faith driven songs and we don’t really want the love songs and that kind of thing” and I just kind of went, man, I want to be able to write about my love for my wife. I want to be able to write more vague songs. I was just telling somebody else in another interview, I think that in the Christian world we have on one side Casting Crowns and on the other Switchfoot. And one of them’s cool and the other’s not. When did this happen? I want to be both Switchfoot and Casting Crowns. I want to be able to write songs that are very clear about my faith and go straight to the Church and the heart of the Church. But I want to be able to write songs that are maybe more poetic, or vague, or just talk about love, singing a love song. Why can’t I do both?

SA: So did it seem like Brash was the most set up to allow you to do that?

Sligh: Yeah! And they caught the vision for the record and, nothing against the other labels, other labels are great and I think the other major Christian labels are great at what they do; they just didn’t get what I wanted to do. And Brash caught it immediately. They were the first one’s to put the deal on the table…

SA: Was that pretty meaningful?

Sligh: Yeah, it was just kind of one of those things. I didn’t know that Brash was going to be the place, honestly, because I was looking at it thinking, “Man, Brash is two people in an office.” That’s their whole office. It was kind of scary with it so small but then they sold 250,000 records with Aaron Shust so it’s like, they can move product, they can do well. But it was a little scary. I thought that I wanted something that was going to be a little bit bigger. I wanted a bigger team, I thought, but the more I researched it, the more I thought about it, the more I prayed about it, the more I talked with these labels and kind of where my heart was and what kind of record I wanted to make, it just came down to that Brash caught the vision for the record I wanted to make.

And then as soon as I signed they were like, “All right, go make your record.” “What, you don’t want to be involved?” “We trust you. Go make your record.” (Laughs) How many new artists get that kind of freedom to go make the kind of record that they want to make? So to be able to be in that kind of position is just a fantastic, fantastic position to be in.

SA: So, tangibly, what’s happening around the record?

Sligh: We just got done with a 65-city radio tour, or 65 radio stations. I think it was like 45 cities. But we did 60 or 65 stations. Did a lot of schmoozing. (Laughs) But it was great, man! The way that I look at it is that I’ve had seven years to really work out what I want to do as an artist and most artists are not lucky enough to do that. You’re Leeland and you get signed when you’re eighteen, you know? And do you really have a time to figure out, obviously I don’t know his situation, but I’m looking at that going, man, at eighteen, what would I have done at eighteen? I just would have signed any deal that came my way.

It’s just kind of one of those things that you don’t get time to grow into it, as a businessman especially. And I’ve kind of had time to grow as a businessman and really figure out what I want to do from a business standpoint and try to do things in a smarter way than what’s normal in the industry. Because let’s be honest, I’m not going to sell records because I’m good looking. (Laughs) My good looks are not going to sell records! So the way that I have to do it, at least, is that I want to work smarter and work harder than every single person around me. It doesn’t mean it’s going to make it successful but at least at the end of the day I’ll be able to say, “You know, I worked my tail off and I did it in ways that I was taking a risk and trying to do it in a way that’s different from what’s normally done.”

When it comes down to it, I want to be satisfied at the end of my career. When I move into just doing writing or doing producing and the artist thing is over, which eventually happens for everybody, when that is done, I want to be able to go away from it and say, “You know what? I did it exactly how I should’ve and I did it with no regrets.” And I think that’s the key.

From the very beginning I want to do things in a different way and do it smarter. As I look at the industry, I’m just going, “Man, there’s so many things that should be different.” There’s just so many things that should be more relationship driven as opposed to, not that I think that people are just after money but money driven. I want to do things in a way that, instead of thinking about how I can make the most money in the shortest amount of time, why not set myself up, hopefully, to make a consistent amount of money for ten years instead of making a lot of money for two years?

And I think that as a kind of businessman that’s how I want to do it. I want to form relationships and do things in a different way. Instead of asking for five thousand dollars when I can get it, let’s ask for three thousand dollars so the next time around those people haven’t lost so much money that they’ll have me back the next time around. I think most artists don’t think about it; it’s not that they’re jerks, they just don’t know. And I went through seven years of being an indie artist trying to figure out a way to make this work that I just think I come at it from a different angle than most artists do.

SA: Maybe some street smarts?

Sligh: Yeah, some street smarts and also, you know, no Idol has ever come off and just done a grassroots thing. And obviously, Idol was used to my advantage, it’s great, but I’m getting in a van and riding around with my band playing $1500 shows just so that we can get out in front of people.

From the very beginning we’re going out as a headliner and, kind of using MuteMath, who is one of my favorite band’s in the world, kind of using MuteMath as a business model of, just get in your car, tour, tour, tour, tour, tour, tour. And I think that’s just going to be a huge way of how I want to do things. I just want to get in a car and tour and be with people and hang out with people. And obviously if we can get some radio hits that’ll help and “Empty Me” seems to be doing pretty well right now and I think it’s just about relationships. I think it comes down to the people.

I make music for myself, and I find great enjoyment for making music. But ultimately, if I make music just for myself then it’s a little bit selfish. I’m making music for myself and I’m also making music for, hopefully, a lot of other people. So that’s my goal. I just want to connect with people and part of connecting is just getting out in a concert situation, hanging out with people after the show, doing it in a way that no one loses their shirt when they bring Chris Sligh in. And we do it for cheaper and we do it for, not that I want to lose money on touring, but I don’t have to make $5000 bring-home per show when I’m playing 200 shows a year. I can make $300 and I’m going to be okay. I can pay my bills, it’s great, we’re going to be fine.

I think that that’s what I want to take away from this, is that I want to do things in a way that I use integrity. From day one, that when you get Chris Sligh, you’re getting a certain thing and that that’s how it is with Chris Sligh for the rest of his career. I don’t ever want to get to the place where I’m happy with where I’m at. I want to constantly be in a state of growth and learning how to do things better and constantly trying to think of new ways to do things and new ideas on how to be better at what I do and how to be a better representation, ultimately, of who Christ is here on earth.

And not to over spiritualize it but it just comes down to the fact that, I think God wants us to be creative. He’s the Creator. He’s pretty awesome at creation. And I think that He wants for us to be creative. And part of being creative is figuring out how to be better at what we do. So that’s kind of my goal with life. (Laughs) And ultimately, when it comes down to it, I want to be a great husband and a great artist at the same time. And really, the whole artist thing in comparison to my marriage is not really worth that much so hopefully both can work.

SA: So as you look toward what your musical legacy might be, when it is all said and done, is there a band or an artist that you kind of look to for guidance there?

Sligh: I don’t know that I have any. I mean, if I could get ten years of success I’m going to be happy. Because at that point I’ll be forty years old and when I’m forty years old, hopefully I have kids growing up, I don’t know that I want to be out on the road 200 dates a year. At this point my wife and I don’t have any kids and we can make the sacrifices that we need to, for me to be gone and for her to come out and see me every couple of weeks and everything like that.

When kids come along, it’s a different story, man. I don’t know that my career will be as important once kids come along. And here at the beginning it’d be great if we could see enough success that it could tide me over for a few years that I don’t have to work quite as hard but knowing me I don’t know that there’s ever like an ‘off’ button for me, you know? So if I can get ten years, I’m going to be crazy happy. If I can get longer than that it’s going to be awesome. But ultimately, I really want to move into production. It looks like I’m going to be producing some stuff this summer.

SA: Really? For who?

Sligh: For some different artists. I’ve got a couple of the labels that have artists that they want me to develop and song write with, everything like that. So I’m going to be doing some of that and hopefully I’ll move into that being my career. But at the same time I don’t know if I’ll ever give up performing. I just love being in front of people! (Laughs)

So, if I could have ten years, I think I’ll be happy. I just turned thirty last week and in ten years I’ll be forty and at that point, I just don’t know…I guess you’ve got Smitty and Steven Curtis that are in their forties and probably the Third Day guys are getting close. The MercyMe guys are in their mid-thirties. I’m sure Mark Hall is probably close to forty…Honestly, I don’t know. I’m looking at this record taking me probably three years down the road that I’m going to be working this record so it’s like, three years from now, what if that record takes another two or three years? You’re looking at, in today’s music industry, two records could last you five years, easy.

So I don’t know. Maybe it is going to be a little bit longer than ten years. I mean, if I get three records, that’s eight or nine years, you know? I don’t know, man. It’ll just be exciting to see what God does.

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