S3 MUSIC + SOUND

By the time Kentucky native Chris Carpenter entered junior high school, his encyclopedic CD collection featured titles from alternative radio mainstays like Oasis, Counting Crows, Nirvana, and U2 as well as rock architects like Bob Dylan and the Beatles, so when it comes time to cite influences, he has no shortage of guitar-wielding gurus to evoke. But when Chris first picked up a guitar at the age of eleven, rather than study tab sheets of Noel Gallagher’s frenzied arrangements, the first thing he tried to do was write a song of his own. Like countless teenagers, Chris gravitated to the guitar as a means of expression and catharsis. Unlike countless teenagers, Chris focused on emulating his influences instead of imitating them, taking meticulous notes on the nuance and texture of their compositions and performances.
  By the time he started working on his own material, Chris was already a freakishly accurate musical mimic, using his pitch perfect ears to pick out chords and cadences with pinpoint precision. Before he was old enough to drive, his voice had the broken-in soulful grit of a rock howler twice his age while keeping the dead-on clarity most would-be male vocalists lose before the onset of facial hair. He immersed himself in high school choir, local theater and anything else that fed his addition for performance. By his sophomore year in high school, Chris was playing in and with numerous local bands, booking shows as theaters and small venues in and around his hometown—Winchester, Kentucky—and logging in hours at recording studios.
   After two years in Belmont University’s regionally renowned music department, Chris left to focus full-time on his career as an artist. At the age of twenty Chris’s musical instincts, technical proficiency, and focused ambition had made him the musician’s musician: a consummate singer, a consummate songwriter, a consummate guitarist. He left Belmont with a self-produced album of original songs entitled What Am I Waiting For. After coming back to Winchester, Chris spent months in quiet contemplation and careful self-examination, thinking about Love, Life, and God with the kind of consideration those subjects deserve.
  These reflections resulted in the creative outpour that is Chris Carpenter’s most ambitious project to date, Falling Out of the Atmosphere, a sharp often gorgeous album that features the rare combination of art house smarts and radio friendly accessibility. From wistful melodies like “Lately” to the black-coffee-barrelhouse of “Ain’t Got Nobody,” Falling Out of the Atmosphere is as broad in lyrical scope as it is musical variety. At twenty-two-years-old, Chris wears his musical dexterity as comfortably as an old pair of sneakers. On plangent, willowy songs like “Away She Goes,” Chris’s vocal swoops show he can still clear melodic hurdles with engaging ease while the up-tempo anxiety of “Secrets and Lies” reveals a bite in Chris’s voice that could only come from the most indelible markers of adulthood: conviction. And conviction is also something Chris Carpenter wears well, because falling out of the atmosphere is too important to do without a safety net.
  Currently Chris has been hard at work with the Grammy nominated production team of John Mattick and Rodney Lawson, better known as Crew 22, writing and recording new material for his next record. As Chris continues to create and perform in and around the Nashville area, there’s no doubt this upcoming album will be filled with the same heart, conviction and accessibility that you would expect from the young singer/songwriter.

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Where You Are

3:40

Confident alt. rock/alternative with male vocals

Vocal