Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Beland. They and their team shared their story with us below:
When Chris Beland picks up the phone to do an interview for this bio, a friend is having a baby in the living room of his Arroyo Grande home as a chorus of roosters crow in the background. It’s an apt thing to happen to Beland — not only because his life has been anything but traditional but also because his forty-plus years on this Earth have been replete with beginnings and endings, a constant cycle of rebirth. A musician in the style of troubadours like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Andrew Bird, Beland first fell in love with music at age five when his grandmother played him a Willie Nelson record. “I remember the needle hitting the record and hearing that scratch, sitting next to the speaker, mesmerized. It was magic,” he recalls.
After his grandfather bought him a guitar when he was six, the Santa Maria native careened through the genres; the first song he wrote was a rap for his school’s D.A.R.E. program, and then he moved on to playing drums in a junior high band, and, finally, guitar in a hardcore band in high school. Beland’s life took a turn when he and his girlfriend were expecting and got married at age 15. The two dabbled in drugs and after they broke up, Beland was homeless for a time — before he met a woman in front of 7-11, where he was playing guitar, who offered to get him help at a rehab in San Diego. After being forced to throw away all his grunge CDs, he entered rehab at age 17, where he fell in love with religious music.
Beland only began writing music in earnest when he was 20 — after a stint as a single father to his son and step-dad — when he met his second wife. The two moved to Oregon, where he wrote his first album, Outer Space, in 2009. Replete with love songs for his wife and tracks about his sons, “Song for Kane” and “Jude”and friends he’d lost, “Heaven’s Side”, the album was a self-released effort that he created with his friend Casey Parnell, using the bare minimum of instruments with GarageBand. “Some of the songs on this first record were describing my struggle, my identity of being a dad, and not wanting to be my dad,” he says, sharing a fraught relationship with his father that would only become more complicated as the years wore on.
His next record, The Weather Man, dropped in 2010. At the time, Beland was going to school to be a nurse and working as a dialysis technician while finally coming to terms with the fact that music was truly what he wanted to do. “This dream was growing in my heart to do music — and there was a struggle I had accepting that,” he says. Right after he finished recording the record, he learned a key fact about his background: The man he believed to be his father was not, in fact, blood. As it turned out, his real father was the guitar player for Ricky Nelson and The Stone Canyon Ponies named John Beland
— a surname Chris adopted after meeting the man. The elder Beland attended the release party for The Weather Man, and the two decided to make music together at long last.
After raising more than $11,000 on Kickstarter, the newly reunited father and son released Danger of Love in 2012. “I started questioning what I believe spiritually at that point,” Beland says. “I had been told something my whole entire life and I just believed it. So I was just kind of setting everything on fire — clearing the table.” His belief in God waned and he started to smoke weed again. “My wife says it’s our almost-divorce album,” he adds.
Resilient in their love; however, the couple worked things out, deciding to move back to California, where Beland’s life changed, once more, in a drastic way. After playing a festival back in Oregon, he ran into an old dialysis patient of his who needed a new kidney. He decided right then and there to give her his. But first, he would record a barn-burner of a live album, 2015’s Live in Tumalo. That record was recorded two days before his surgery with a cadre of friends at an Oregon barn. When he woke up after the kidney extraction, he was flooded with music.
His next album, 2017 marks Beland’s return to spirituality; Gospel Hymns #5, which he penned the collection of songs after his sister gave him an old 1800s hymnal. “It felt more like I was exploring spirituality with a different lens rather than coming back to someone or something I once was forced to believe in. Following that record, he went to Sisters Oregon and 2018’s Eclipse was born inside of a cabin overlooking a serene lake in wintertime.
When the pandemic hit, Beland became even more introspective — especially since musicians were no longer able to tour or play shows. “I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to play music again,” Beland says, explaining that it was then he decided to undertake the most ambitious record of his career thus far, What I Believe, out in August. “If this was the last thing you were going to hear from me, it was going to be really good,” he adds.
The result is a collection of songs that touch on the world today, as well as Beland’s evolution as a man. The album features Ryan Allshouse on drums, Phil Siems on bass, and Adam Nash on electric. There’s “Family Tree,” a swinging track about how despite how polarized our country is at the moment, we’re all still the same. “We’re all part of this together,” Beland says. “Even if you don’t like the person on the other side of the aisle, you’re still connected as a branch on the same tree.” Then there’s “Stare at the Walls,” a honeyed, crooning song about, well, just that, and “World,” a blazing rocker about unity.
Album-opener “What Is Georgia?”, an almost Springsteenian folly jammer, brings in current events, weaving the story of the historic election in that state. “It felt like I had something to speak into this generation,” Beland says of the upcoming album as another generation comes into the world in his living room. “I want to bring people together instead of divide.”
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Some of the struggles along the way have been believing that I’m good enough to pursue a life career in music. Self-doubt and all of that. It’s an everyday thing for me to fight those feelings and put one foot in front of the other.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Barista by day, musician by night.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/chrisbelandmusic
