Chaz Cardigan on Music, Activism, and Quarantine Concerts
Chaz Cardigan has come a long way from his Kentucky roots. Despite 2020 being a universally chaotic year for everyone—to say the very least—Chaz has had multiple career breakthroughs this year. To start, he was the first artist to sign a joint deal with both Capitol Records and Loud Robot. Then his song “All I’ll Ever Be” was featured in that little Netflix romantic comedy sequel “To All the Boys: P.S I Still Love You” (ever heard of it?). Which was followed by his song “Not Okay” charting at #18 in Billboard’s Alternative Airplay and releasing his EP Vulnerabilia.’ More recently, he just released his new album Holograma in late October.
Soul Talk was able to talk to the up and coming alternative artist himself on his new album, his advice for new artists, and where he sees himself in the future.
Kerry Michelle: Describe yourself and the type of music you make.
Chaz Cardigan: I would say I make extroverted music for introverts. I love people, I love using music and songwriting as a way to figure out how we talk to each other, why we say the things we do, why we don’t say the things we don’t say, and I guess exploring the idea of being an in-progress person around a bunch of other in-progress people.
KM: Describe your new album ‘Holograma’ in 3 words.
CC: Nostalgia looking forward.
KM: How is Holograma different from your previous work?
CC: I think it’s more sure of itself. On my other projects, a lot of the time there was this process of sort of throwing things at the wall, seeing what sticks, trying a bunch of different things. With time I’ve just been able to sort of cut the dead weight and figure out “oh I don’t really do that thing so well”. Holograma is the first time I think I was ever able to work totally on a project and just know it’s this thing. I’m gonna do this thing, I’m gonna use these sounds, I’m gonna play with these influences and that’s specifically what I’m doing. So I think it feels more confident.
KM: How did you come up with the idea for a 3D model of yourself in your recent music videos?
CC: That was all the director’s idea. At the beginning of quarantine, my team and I tried to figure out a bunch of ideas to pull off music videos. Do you do socially distanced video shoots? Do you try to do animated videos? And there were a bunch of options flying around but at the time there was just a lot of red tape and liability around getting people in rooms together. So even getting together with one or two other people was just a total no-go. Luckily I was able to find this director named Haoyan of America, he’s out of New York, and an animator named Alex Futtersak. They had been playing around with this technique in a few videos, the technique is called photogrammetry. Which is this idea of taking like depth scale models of things and being able to animate a 3D model, and we were able to do it all using an iPhone! We were able to do everything using these apps on your phone that scan you in. Pretty tedious to use actually, but worth tedium I think.
KM: What inspired you to make Holograma?
CC: After I signed my record deal in early 2019, my EP Vulnerabilia was done, and I was traveling back and forth to LA a lot more from Nashville. And all of these dynamics in my life were changing: my friendships, my relationships with my family, my relationship with my significant other (as in my first like adult relationship), and I was traveling a lot more and playing a lot more shows. So, everything was just getting put through a stress test and that made me sort of look through my life and look at these old stories: my first relationship, the way I was raised in the religion I was, or getting out of my hometown, and wondering were those things really what I thought they were. The whole album was about perspectives, shifting on these things that are just a core part of who I am.
KM: You’ve been doing a lot of concert live streams for your fans during quarantine. How has that been?
CC: You know, it’s all half solutions. I love the capability TikTok and Instagram have in letting people get to know you and it gives you this intimacy with people. But at the same time, I’m in my room and I’m watching myself on screen... and my interaction with people is limited to a bunch of comments. But they’ve been really good! With that out of the way, they’ve been awesome! And pretty much everything I’ve gotten to do this year that has been, uh, you know a career milestone it has all happened in quarantine. It’s all happened during the pandemic. So a lot of people, most people, have found my music in the pandemic and they find me and then they can watch my TikTok live stream, and I do that pretty much every day. Or I’ll come into Instagram and there’s this community we’re building that way. And the fans have all become friends with each other and there’s a fan discord server now and there’s like a real community. One fan lost their grandmother about a week ago and people were writing them cards to Argentina and that’s so cool! So that’s been a beautiful, beautiful offshoot of doing live streams a lot.
KM: What originally drew you to the music industry?
CC: Oh, I never wanted to do anything else. I was terrible at sports. I was okay in school. Music was just this gravitational force in my life forever. As a kid I was always making things, I would, you know, make these little inventions out of shoestring or duct tape, or come up with movie ideas or stories and act out little plays for my family. And when I found music and I really put time into it and got good at it, it was just this ultimate way to create things and be able to make them again over and over and over and over and over, and you make a song and you can sing it night after night after night. I don’t remember a time I didn’t want to do this for a living, from the time I was about seven or eight. I think a lot of adolescence for me, as I was like meeting mentors and studying the craft, it was more just figuring out well how does the industry work and just navigating that. I never wanted to do anything else. There was a part of me.. like, I still have ambitions to do other things outside of music but I knew, hey, this is a thing I’m really good at and I can make a living here doing this.
KM: Do you have any advice for a younger artist?
CC: Yeah, give yourself time to play in the sandbox. You have a toolkit right now, that is so much more complete and accessible than anyone’s ever had to write and produce and release music and make money doing it right now. But you got to give yourself time. It doesn’t just come overnight. If it does come overnight, it leaves overnight. But put music on Youtube, put music on Spotify, put music on SoundCloud, and Bandcamp, and take feedback. Put it up on forums, put it on Reddit. Get people to listen to your music by building relationships with them. Find people to collaborate with and write songs with and be in bands with. Give yourself time to play around and find your voice because it takes writing thousands and thousands of really bad songs before you start writing like 12 great ones that you’re proud of the next year. And that’s okay. There’s no rush. Frankly, no one needs more music. This is a thing I don’t think a lot of musicians want to hear and I have to remind myself a lot of the time: no one really needs you to write more songs. We don’t need more movies. We don’t need new things. So, you got to figure out why it’s important that you do it. You gotta figure out what you’re really supposed to write about and your story, your perspective that’s what’s important. It takes just experimenting to find that and to find your style.
KM: Who’s someone you’ve always wanted to collaborate with?
CC: Imogen Heap. I would say Imogen Heap or The 1975. I think Imogen Heap is the best living creator we’ve got and I hate that she’s not more famous but I also don’t think that she wants to be. She’s such a genius as a writer, as a multi-instrumentalist, as a producer, as a mixer. I just think she’s got a brain that history books are gonna write about. And as an inventor too. And as a businesswoman, I think she’s brilliant. The 1975 are my favorite band, just cut-and-dry there.
KM: What’s your favorite song off of Holograma?
CC: Oooh, this is hard! I love them all for different reasons. My favorite song is ‘Jesus Christ I’m Lonely’. It’s just the most personal one for me. If it wasn’t ‘Jesus Christ I’m Lonely’, I would say ‘Change Your Mind’. I think those are kind of like the duality of my songwriting. ‘Change Your Mind’ is this big upbeat pop song. ‘Jesus Christ I’m Lonely’ is this, like, piano songwriter song. So I think either of those is 50/50. But I would personally say ‘Jesus Christ I’m Lonely.’
KM: You’ve been very vocal about politics and the recent election on social media platforms like TikTok. How important do you think it is for an artist to use their platform to speak out?
CC: My gut reaction is yes and that you have a responsibility as you got a public voice to say something, but I think it’s a little bit more nuanced than that. Some people aren’t politically active and they’re not politically minded and I think there is a dangerous standard and precedent that you set when you tell people who are not politically minded that it’s their job to talk about politics. Not everything has to be so serious and substantial all the time. Ernest Hemingway, when he talked about ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, he said “the old man is an old man, the sea is a sea, the boy is a boy.” There is no subtext, there is no deeper thing. And not everyone has deep political opinions. That is foreign to me and I do think that it is my job to talk about politics with the platform I got, but that’s because I really care about politics and it’s because I really want people to be active and civically minded about those things. But, you know, that’s not a priority for everybody and I can’t expect that to be for everybody. But I do think that if it’s important to you, it’s your responsibility to talk about it.
KM: In five years where do you see yourself?
CC: Oh, wow, five years. 2025? I hope that no matter what size the venue is, I’m playing shows almost every night to people that really want to hear the music and who are there with their friends to have a good time. To hear music that makes them happy, that they’ve gotten an attachment to, and that I can pay my bills with that. That’s all I want.
