Checking in with Breedlove’s January Featured Artist Chris Arndt
When Breedlove’s January Featured Artist Chris Arndt was first strumming his newly introduced Organic Collection guitars, we hadn’t even heard word of a novel coronavirus. Not long after, with it squarely situated on the front step, Arndt found himself, like everybody else, holed up at home—in his case in a remote Adirondack family ski house in the shadow of Gore Mountain, in North Creek, NY.
“It’s been pretty chill,” the beer- and bread-loving Arndt said on the phone recently. “It’s kind of a small house for six people, but we get along pretty well most of the time. We’re definitely blessed to be able to come to a place that’s not very heavily populated and where we can still go outside and have each other close.”
As songwriter and string slinger with the sibling act Jocelyn & Chris, Arndt, despite the pandemic pause, has been making mighty good use of those two sustainably sourced all solid wood Organic models—a Signature Concert CE and a larger Performer Concerto CE.
Late last fall, within days of first fretting the Concert, he was in the studio recording a live acoustic album, One Night in November, which birthed a breakout hit in “Mercy Me,” with the track, featuring fingerpicking, strumming and hot single note lead playing, standing as a showcase for both Arndt and the instrument.
He only had the chance to rock his Concerto onstage at a few winter dates before gigs, you guessed it, started disappearing. But many writing sessions followed, as well as any number of social media takeovers with various stations and outlets, along with a well-received series of ongoing quarantine Couch Concerts.
“We’ve been trying to take the opportunity to do everything that a musician can do from home,” he said.
The timing wasn’t quite as tragic for Jocelyn & Chris as it was for many other acts. The hard-traveling duo and their band actually had a clear spot in its schedule to start recording, in advance of a summer tour later in the year. Obviously, all of that has changed, but Arndt says the team didn’t have to endure the same degree of financial hurt as many colleagues.
“It did really mess with our recording schedule, because our producer David Bourgeois’ studio, White Lake Music & Post, had to shut down, which is a bummer. But, y’know, this whole thing basically closed the entire music industry down for a while, so everyone’s release cycles are totally screwed up for now.”
“We weren’t planning to go out on tour until mid-July, which is still up in the air as to whether or not those shows are even going to happen. A lot of the venues we had planned to play probably won’t be open by then. Still, we certainly won’t be as heavy hit income-wise as artists who had tours planned in March, April, May and June.”
Jocelyn & Chris had already established a routine web presence with their weekly Playlist Live events, which gather an interactive audience to create themed Spotify playlists posted within a day of the suggested compilation, and capped with a performance of a song or two. They amped up their output right quick.
“We jumped on the opportunity to see just how far we could take live streaming concerts and that whole game,” Arndt said. “The first one went really, really well. We finished it and had such a good time that Jocelyn was, like, ‘We should do one of these every other day.’ It hasn’t been quite that regular, but I would say we’ve been doing two or three a week, sometimes more. It’s been a really cool way to stay connected with fans and get to know them in a sense. I feel like we’ve learned a fair amount about them, just because we’ve been spending 40 minutes a day together, a couple times a week, for the past three months.”
“Sometimes, we’ll pick a theme for those, too. The other day we did one that was all mellow tunes, a ‘Sunday Brunch’ Couch Concert; and last week, we learned the Scooby Doo theme song just to keep things lively.”
