Interview with Brother Grey

This was originally in Issue #2 of the PDF zine… but, since we’re not doing them any more, and I think this is a damn interesting interview, I thought I’d post in on the new site as well. Enjoy!

Chris Pierson - Brother Grey

A couple of years ago (thanks to somebody called Roe) I stumbled upon the Chris Pierson Band. Their brand of radio-friendly rock instantly won me over and I soon found myself becoming a loyal fan. Since then, the band as they were have called it a day, but now Chris Pierson has re-emerged in a new band called Brother Grey. Thanks for the wonders of Skype I was able to have a bit of a chat with him and found out loads of stuff about the forthcoming album, the main differences between the two projects… and, what the story is behind the name Brother Grey.

“Probably the biggest difference [between Brother Grey and The Chris Pierson Band] would be rock style. We were a rock band in the Chris Pierson band and it was a little more Americanised, and now we’re going for more of an alternative vibe with some heavier guitars. We’ve kinda just spend the last three years exploring music as opposed to just laying it down on a CD.”

When Chris Pierson announced that he would be returing to music with a new band called Brother Grey, it instantly sparked some interested on the Loucifer Speaks forum, with some people (myself included) being quite confused about the choice of name. I asked Chris to explain the meaning behind it.

“I recently got married back in February, and obviously that was a big life-changing experience for me and one of the gifts that I got was a book called “Brothers in Grey” and it consisted of letters that my family had written back and forth to each other during the Civil War, back in the 1800s. I kinda dove into it because I’m a bit of a history buff and I just thought that I’d be able to get some interesting information and things like that, but it was really inspiring. It seemed like everything they were thinking, and what was going on at the time, really applied to everything that’s going on here. Their opinions, and where they stood in the world, really wasn’t any different to mine or yours, or anyone else’s that we may have run into. Me and George would kinda throw around band names all of the time and we finally just got to a point where we just let the journey speak for itself. A handful of songs had been written before I got the book, but as soon as I got the book it was kinda like a message for me. The more I read into it, the more life now seems to make sense. It inspired me big time – songs really started pouring out.

My particular favourite character in the book, who I would guess would be my Great Uncle three times removed, was my favourite just because I could identify with him a lot on his viewpoints on life and he’d always took the standpoint of “I want to do it my way” and not conform to everyone else’s opinion. That’s also the way that I’ve always been. So, some of the things that he was saying definitely inspired a lot of the lyrics in a lot of the songs. We also tried to use a lot of imagery from different parts of the book [in the lyrics]. There are chapters and chapters where they’re talking about war and battle, so we really tried to intertwine the battle aspect, but make it more of an introspective look. We didn’t want to go with a total concept album. We just wanted to do something that meant something to us, and that makes sense to everyone else.”

A song called “Healing Wounds” recently made its way onto Brother Grey’s MySpace and I asked Chris what the song was about and also when we can expect the new album to be released.

“We’ve got one song that’s currently on our MySpace called “Healing Wounds” and George and I have done a lot of that [healing] over the past couple of years. There’s been a lot of inner turmoil that’s gone on personally. Getting over that and moving on was a really big thing and I think that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to post a clip of that song online first. We hope to give people a glance as to where we’re at. To be honest with you, I’m still in the process of finishing up a few songs right now. I’m going over everything with a fine tooth comb. We’re really trying to focus more so on using imagery as a whole. Words from the book have made it into the songs, but it’s the overall general aspect of exploring one’s own spirituality and one’s own life that is playing the main part in most of these
songs.

We’re not completely sure on the release date [of the new album]. We’re hoping to shoot for a Christmas release. I would say that we’re about 90% finished. There’s some vocal things that need to be finished as well as some other little things. So, the release date is tentative right now. We’re hoping that maybe it’ll come out in January/February at the latest, but you should be able to get it anywhere online – iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby and our website. We are still completely doing this DIY.

We are firm believers in putting a physical product out into the world. I think people are missing that [CDs] and one of the big things that we’ve tossing around is releasing a limited edition vinyl. We don’t only want to create the visual aspect in the music, it’s got to be something more.

The album’s sound is definitely heavy, it’s heavy in subject matter. We ran through a lot of melancholy emotions during the making of this album so a lot of that made its way into the songs. There’s a lot of ambient guitar lines and a lot of really interesting stuff that just threw a lot of colour every which way.
So there’s a real melancholy vibe, as that’s where we were at the time. We wanted to go much heavier with it, more aggressive, and we explored a lot on arrangements and different instrumentation. We used a lot of things that we’d not used before. If I had to give you a five word description I couldn’t do it. It’s definitely going to be a record that you’re going to have to listen to more than once to get. We’re not putting something out there into the world that’s just another CD on the shelf. We hope this is something where you can listen to it for years and years to come and still pick out different things that you never heard before.”

If you search for Chris Pierson on YouTube, you should be able to come across a number of live clips from past Chris Pierson band shows. Chris really seemed to be at home on stage and since there had been such a break between live performances (due to the change of bands) I wondered if Chris missed performing.

“We really wanted to focus on the record, so we haven’t done any gigs as Brother Grey yet. Over the past 6 months the anticipation has been building up with some of the folks I keep seeing around town, but we’re going to be playing a gig soon. I’m really itching to get back out and play and we’ve been talking about it a lot.

There’s going to be a promo CD released soon and we may be able to get some of that put online so that people can get some free downloads. Once that begins we’ll start doing some radio tours and we’re hoping that we’ll be able to come overseas pretty soon too.”

According to the band’s MySpace it just appears to be Chris and George flying the flag for Brother Grey. When asked about the line-up, Chris confirmed that this was the case at the moment.

“At the moment it’s just myself and George in the band. We’ve spent the last 6 or 8 months bringing different guys into the studio and trying them out. I think we’re still in that process. We have a handful of guys that we’re considering for the band. This was our baby, so George and I went in and tracked all of instruments except for the drums. We hired a new friend of ours called JJ Bower to play – he plays in a band in LA and he’s just an amazing drummer. We had him in for a couple of days and he played on the entire record. We couldn’t be more thrilled with that. Now we’ve just come to the point where we’re trying to find people who can pull it off… because JJ’s a heck of a drummer! [laughs]”

The Chris Pierson Band had a wealth of good material and I asked Chris if that material was going to find it’s way onto the Brother Grey record.

“We thought about possibly putting “Debris” (a Chris Pierson Band song) on our record. It was one of the songs that never got released on a physical product with the Chris Pierson Band. In the 6 months that we had the song up on our MySpace we got 10,000 plays for it, so it was obviously a very popular song and we still get a lot of comments about it. That’s the one song that we already have recorded that could possibly be put on the record. We have to sit down with the entire record laid out and see if it fits somewhere. There was another song that we brought over from the [Chris Pierson] band, but we completely rewrote it, so it’s not the same song anymore. Otherwise, every song on this new record is brand new.”

If you’re looking at the photo of Chris that’s accompanying this article and wondering where you know him from, it may be that you caught an episode or two of a reality TV show called Rockstar Supernova.

“I think the experience of Rockstar Supernova has helped me 100%. The time when I was on that show, it honestly feels like another lifetime. I was at a place in my life when I was still trying to figure it all out. I was in successful band – a successful local band – at the time when I got picked up for the show and I was 24 or 25 years old and I’m almost 30 now, so it’s kinda been a while. It was at that time in my life when I knew who I wanted to be, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there… and I wasn’t there yet. The experience of being on the show was a swift kick to the ass so to speak! [laughs] It was really, really beneficial for me and I think it inspired me to take a step back so that I could take a couple of steps forward and really take my time in trying to develop. That’s why we spent so much time on this new record. I think from a celebritism standpoint, that’s been long gone, and to be honest with you I’m kinda glad that it is gone. People are going to tie that [Rockstar Supernova] into this band and I’m completely ok with that. But the comparisons between then and now are going to be null and void.”

The forthcoming album is the owner of a rather unusual name. Like the lyrical content and the main themes that Chris had told me about previously, I had a feeling that there was going to be an interesting story behind the album’s title as well.

“The new album is called “Boddhisattva”. Boddhisattva is a Buddhist term and I’ve recently, over the last 3 years, got into studying Buddhism a bit. It’s relevant to how I live my life and I’m a firm believer in good karma and have always been. I’m a very emotional person and that tends to hinder that for me. I’m emotional in the sense that I’m very relaxed, but my tail feathers can get very easily flustered if you offend something that I’m very passionate about [laughs]. This
last 3 years has been all about the journey for us and kinda enlightening ourselves. The definition of a Boddhisattva is ‘to be enlightening other people while you’re also continuing the journey yourself’ so it’s kinda a full circle.

If you’re interested in supporting the band further, Chris had something to get you started:

“We have the remaining merchandise from the Chris Pierson band that is on sale now with huge discounts! I think it’s $11 for a t-shirt and a CD. We’ve also started a project called http://www.kickstarter.com. Brother Grey has a profile on there and if you go on you can see what we’re going through and donate funds
to the band to help us with this project. As you know, when you’re doing this by yourself you don’t have that big $100,000 or $150,000 budget behind you from a label to support what you’re doing, so we can always do with the help financially. It’s really going to help us to get places like the UK and Europe to come
over and tour to see the fans that want us to be there. You can probably find the profile by searching for Brother Grey or Chris Pierson.

Probably in a months time we’re going to have a few more songs up for free download on our MySpace just to get people interested in wanting to hear the record.”

You can find out more about Brother Grey at

myspace.com/brothergreymusic

Since this interview was originally put online (late 2009), Brother Grey have put a new song on their MySpace called “Bloody Sunrise” – check it out!

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