I’m excited to announce my new Chris Cates album “Complicated Artist Type”. It features 14 brand new songs I wrote in Ireland, Las Vegas and at my studio in Atlanta.
It’s a bit different than most of my albums in that the instrumentation is more sparse, just utilizing a single acoustic (or 12 string), one super distorted electric guitar, sometimes swapping bass for cello and very minimalist drums and beats. And of course, my signature harmonica and John Kell’s sax.
It creates the mood around the mental and emotional struggles of dealing with life relationships and the want and need to be constantly creating art.
I’m still running behind but I did write this yesterday. I didn’t get around to recording it until this morning. It took about an hour to record which is still a little longer than I would like to take but my drums are getting a lot better already.
I’ve played and recorded drums five times this week which is five times more than I played them all last year. This blog is definitely going to get my off instruments more tight.
“Good Liver” comes from something I misread on a medical flyer while recycling the other day. It turned into a funny song with a tragic message about that friend of yours who loves to party.
I finally broke out the distortion pedal on this one.
Welcome to Chris Cates.com. I'm an old school independent artist with lots of albums, songs, solar panels etc. This site tries to encapsulate what it is I've been doing since I played my first professional gig at 13. I post a song of the day occasionally from my somewhat excessive original song catalogue and I'm constantly recording new material when I'm not building solar farms, trying to play golf or tennis or taking care of my new twin girls.
Chris Cates .com 