For a musician who is frequently labeled as one of the leaders of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti’s indie-folk scene, you might expect Chris Bathgate to have an air of pretense.
But during an interview Saturday morning at the Neutral Zone teen center in Ann Arbor, where Bathgate is the Music Coordinator, it was almost impossible to tell the 27-year-old was a popular musician who had spent the previous day holed up in a studio working on a highly
anticipated new album.
With the pounding of a drum set emanating from a small studio in the Neutral Zone where a teen ska band was recording a song, Bathgate was completely straight-faced and modest when asked about his purported leadership role in the local indie-folk scene.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever declared myself that,” said Bathgate. “I don’t know who deemed me that, but I’ve read it a couple times and I think [label Quite Scientific] has even posted it on their website.”
“I don’t know if there is an indie-folk scene anymore,” he said. “I think there’s just a couple bands that are active. We don’t seem to be as unified as we were when Canada was around, that was years ago. It’s flattering, I guess, but since I don’t think there’s a ‘scene’ left I don’t know if it’s relevant. Maybe in 2006 I was.”
As the popularity of national indie-folk acts like Wilco, Bright Eyes and Fleet Foxes has risen over the last several years, the label of “indie-folk” can sometimes distract from the actual music, especially for smaller artists like Bathgate.
“I think most artists don’t like to be pigeonholed, but I realize, you know, your CD has to go somewhere in the bins,” Bathgate said. “I guess things are rooted in traditional music and in folk music, but I don’t think I’m necessarily a folk artist. I have a friend who actually is getting a degree in American Folklore from the University of North Carolina and she’s always harping me because I’m not folk.”
Despite being fairly well recognized in this area, Bathgate is still very humble.
“I’ve gotten occasionally stopped on the street, but it’s never been like ‘Oh my god, you’re Chris Bathgate!’ It’s like, ‘Oh hey, nice show at The Pig’ or ‘Nice show at the Elbow Room,’ “ he said. “I feel more like a milk man than a rock star, which is maybe a good thing.”
Though he’s now become almost synonymous with the Michigan music scene, Bathgate is originally from Pecatonia, Ill. He spent a year attending Northern Illinois University in Dekalb before his father accepted a job in Dearborn, Mich. and his parents made the choice to move to Ann Arbor.
“I was super pro-Illinois and I wasn’t really into leaving,” Bathgate said. “And then I came and I visited the [University of Michigan] art school, and then I was shown that there were free recording studios for students, and I had been sort of tinkering with recording and I’ve been writing since I was 16, so that was pretty attractive to me.
“And then I saw Leo Kottke at The Ark and I learned that they had Open Mic, and suddenly I saw—based on those two things—I saw a support system for music that was way better than what existed in Dekalb,” he said. “There wasn’t even really a place that I could play in Dekalb.”
After moving to Michigan he quickly fell under the spell of Ann Arbor, which helped him further define his musical tastes.
“When I came to Ann Arbor I was lucky enough to discover Encore [Records] within one of my first weeks here, and I just sort of spent all of my cash in the local music section, like obsessively would go every week and find out what was new,” he said.
“But I guess that’s one thing that changed: I started listening to Ann Arbor music, and that changed the way I thought about stuff, I think,” Bathgate said. “I didn’t ever have access to a local scene, or anything that was on the ground level before, because in Dekalb there was nothing, and growing up in Ill. we were the scene.”
For a few years Bathgate recorded a number of EPs and singles before working on his first full-length album since high school, “Silence is for Suckers,” which came out in 2005. The album was recorded entirely on 8-track and was self released.
He stayed busy over the next few years, releasing several albums and EPs in 2006 before making his breakthrough with 2007’s “A Cork Tale Wake.” One of the singles off that album, “Serpentine,” was named NPR’s Song of the Day in January 2008.
Since that period of prolificacy Bathgate has only released one EP—2008’s “Wait, Skeleton”—though he has hardly been sitting back and relaxing.
He graduated from Michigan in 2007 with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts, took periodic time off to record various projects, has toured extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe and has been keeping busy with his work at the Neutral Zone helping teens as they discover the ins-and-outs of the recording industry.
Bathgate started work on his follow-up to “A Cork Tale Wake” last year, but progress has been slow until very recently, when he says things have finally come together.
“There’s a point when you’re baking bread in the oven, I call it the moment when it pops, when suddenly you can smell it,” Bathgate said. “Like suddenly it stops being dough, and it has magically become bread, due to some chemical reaction caused by heat. So, I think the record just popped, and it’s slowly filling the studio with a really warm scent. It’s sort of amazing.”
“For a long time I was obsessively listening to mixes and figuring out different parts and re-tracking stuff and rewriting parts, and suddenly over the past, maybe even three weeks, it’s popped,” he said. “And it’s so close; we only have a couple things to track. But something happened where the mixes have been glued together in a way they never were before.”
The new album, which he expects to be released sometime this summer, is entitled “Salt Year,” after a track that appeared on his last EP, “Wait, Skeleton.” Bathgate frequently rewrites his own material after a few years and a reworked, full-band version of the song “Salt Year” will appear on the new album.
The album, once again, sees Bathgate working with producer Jim Roll, though it will sound a bit different than his previous material. In particular, he’s making a deliberate attempt to move away from using choruses and many of the new songs will be more instrumental, while the album as a whole will have a few musical themes running through it.
“I like the idea of things being able to reference each other,” he said. “On “Cork Tale” there’s a couple Ann Street references, and those songs are about a similar time and a similar place, and they’re doing similar things for me psychologically.
“So that happens on this record, even more so, and probably the most transparent of those is the reference to a person or a character called Eliza,” Bathgate said. “But there’s melodies, there’s almost like a theme for the whole record or a melodic structure that permeates the whole thing.”
Though he’s still putting some finishing touches on the new album, Chris Bathgate will be playing a show at 10 p.m. this Wednesday at The Elbow Room. Bathgate will be joined by a three-person backing band.