What do you get when you combine classically-trained jazz with indie bedroom pop, a splash of EDM, a touch of hip-hop, and the classic struggles of a teenager? Probably something close to christopher normann, the 17 year-old behind berries, his latest concept album that explores themes of self-identity and maturation through the extended metaphor of a berry. With deep, soulful vocals reminiscent of King Krule or Yellow Days, complex jazz harmonies, and introspective lyrics that read like diary entries with which the listener is sure to identify, all tied together with home-made indie-style production, he's crafted an incredibly unique sound that listeners are sure to appreciate.
We were lucky enough to talk with christopher normann about his beginnings in music, the themes of berries, and being painted blue in a supermarket. Read the full interview below!
Interview by D
6/19/20
YP: Who are you?
CN: My name is christopher normann; some people call me Blue Face, some people call me Tobias from Arrested Development, some people call me Smurf, some people call me Christopher Badger, because that’s my real name, but you know, it’s your choice. I make music and I like connecting with people in whatever way I can.
YP: Why the pseudonym?
CN: Badger’s a cool name, but it just seems a bit aggressive. So I wanted to take my middle name, which is Normann, and kind of rep my Danish heritage. It’s a little more chill, a little more contemporary. It suits my persona and music a little better.
YP: When did you first get into music?
CN: When I was in 4th grade I started with classic rock -- I think most musicians start with rock and slowly get into jazz. My dad showed me this video of Santana playing (Da Le) Yaleo, and -- I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him perform, but he’s just so connected to guitar -- I was like, “I wanna do that. I wanna do whatever he’s doing.” As soon as I got to middle school I signed up for band and said, “I want to play guitar.” And they were like, “Well, we don’t have guitar.” So I picked the closest thing, which was electric bass. I started a band with my friend Dom, who has worked a lot on both my albums, but the band broke up when I started producing EDM. I was producing EDM from around 7th grade until junior year. I got, like, 8 million streams total -- that was my big thing. But I started to feel too constricted as an artist, I felt like I could do way more than that. I wanted to do other stuff.
YP: So how’d you get into indie music?
CN: About a year and a half ago, I was on a flight to New York once listening to bcos u will never b free by Rex Orange County, just listening to it, full attention, because I had nothing better to do. His songwriting, his sound, the image in my head of what he was doing as I was hearing it -- I was like, “Oh, shit. That’s sick. That’s just so cool.” I started playing around with sounds on my laptop, and when I got back home, I started taking voice lessons. That’s how christopher normann was born -- it was pretty much me going from rock, jazz, and EDM. I like to think of christopher normann as a combination of all those influences.
YP: How about the rapping?
CN: I think that came from the whole Rex influence. I do listen to a lot of hip hop -- a lot of Kendrick, a lot of Tyler. I love Tyler. I used to just write rap verses all the time because with rap you can just go at it so quickly and come up with so many ideas. Rex does a lot of that spoken-word rap stuff, but he also puts a melody to it. I was like, “If he can do it, I can try. I might actually be able to pull this off.” I got out of my comfort zone and tried rapping a little bit. You definitely hear that on berries, especially the last track.
YP: Did you record the album at home?
CN: Yeah, I recorded it all right here at home with FL Studio. I’ve got my guitars, my keyboards, my mics. I like to think of the album as the most I can possibly do on my own. I’m going to Berklee College of Music next year, I’m gonna be collaborating with a bunch of other musicians. I don’t know if I knew this when I started the album, but I realized as I was going that I wanted to push it to its full potential. I wanted it to sound super professional, super clean -- the best I could do with this setup.
YP: Mixed and mastered yourself?
CN: I mix while I produce, because that’s a pretty common thing in EDM. I really wanted to do a proper mix to make it as professional as possible, so I stemmed out the whole album and sent it to my friend Dom, who did his own mix of it. When I heard his mix initially I was, like, seething, because I put so much time into these songs and got so used to this mix that I had made, and then Dom had added all these other details. I was like, “No, no, no!” What ended up happening is I played around with his mix, and we met at this perfect halfway point that made the album sound so much better overall. It was sort of a back-and-forth mixing effort between me and Dom. As for the mastering, I can master stuff, I did master my last album. But I wanted to get somebody who had the proper equipment, so I sent the album to my audio production teacher from high school, and he mastered it for me. But we’d go back and forth: he’d send it to me, I’d give him feedback, and we came to a perfect consensus there as well.
YP: What’s the music scene like by you?
CN: I live in Portola Valley, California, which is not much of a music scene. It’s really just a bunch of old rich people. Redwood City, which is by me, is a little more popping. I can’t think of that many Redwood city artists, but a lot of people are into West Coast hip hop. That’s what most people are listening to at parties and stuff. But because it’s California, there’s also this huge indie-pop craze. Everyone’s listening to Rex Orange County, Mac Demarco, Tyler, the Creator. There’s that West Coast rap sound from the Bay Area, but then there are also all these people getting into more indie artists -- you know, Cali beach vibes.
YP: Who are you listening to most these days?
CN: I’ve been listening to a lot of Nat King Cole recently; also a lot of Jack Wilkins -- great jazz guitarist, reminds me of Wes Montgomery; Noname, especially her last album; my man Kenn Igbi’s new album -- he’s a friend of mine, actually, we’re doing some work together. A lot of different artists, a lot of jazz, a lot of hip hop. Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly is more relevant than ever right now, so I’ve been listening to a lot of that.
YP: Top 5 desert island albums?
CN: Oh, man, I couldn’t pick. This is like that Bill Clinton swag thing, where he’s holding like 3 albums, you know? Hmm… Rex Orange County -- Apricot Princess. Kendrick Lamar -- To Pimp a Butterfly. Tyler, the Creator -- Cherry Bomb. Tyler, the Creator -- Flower Boy. Last spot, it’s gotta be a jazz album. Oscar Peterson -- Night Train.
YP: Cherry Bomb? That’s a tough one to get behind, even for most Tyler fans.
CN: I actually never used to listen to a lot of Tyler, but then I liked this girl, and she listened to him a lot, so I was like, “Guess I have to start listening to Tyler.” But it turns out I really like him. Cherry Bomb really rides the line between dumb/insane and genius, but honestly, I’m leaning towards genius for a lot of that album. The arrangements are just so out there. It taught me a lot about telling stories; it’s not even a story, it’s very “stream of consciousness,” and that paired with the distorted sound and the jazz chords -- that contrast you hear all the time is super cool. I definitely understand why a lot of people don’t like it, but at the same time, for me it’s just so great. I love that album. It could take a while to appreciate, but there’s a lot of artistry there.
YP: Now let’s get into the new album -- do you want to talk about what berries means?
CN: I’ll just say this: the album is a story; it’s a story that proves to the listener that you’re not as grown up as you think you are, whether that’s in a relationship or just personally. A lot of people think they’re super grown up because they go to parties or have a girlfriend or whatever it might be, and I’m guilty of that. Everybody’s guilty of that. I don’t think it’s good to feel grown up, you know what I mean? I think that’s a problem with a lot of adults also: people will be, like, 50 years old, and they won’t look at themselves critically anymore. They’re like, “Aw, I’ve lived on this Earth long enough.” Maybe you have, but you can still have tons of emotional mismanagements or whatever your problems may be. We always have room to improve.
YP: Would you consider berries a concept album?
CN: Yeah, but not in the sense that it’s a fake or fictional story. It’s a real story. I write my music like a diary: I tend to stay fairly direct and try to reference situations like an awkward handshake, for example, because that can actually tell a lot more than you think. And then during that writing process, writing songs for 9 months, I was also in a relationship that had all sorts of twists and turns. I wasn’t thinking about the album concept from the beginning, but it came to a point where I was at the end, looking at all these songs I wrote since my first album, thinking, “How can I tie these all into a story? What can I learn from this?” I did a lot of thinking, a lot of considering, and I came up with this idea of the metaphor of a berry in my head. And I thought, “What if I were to somehow combine the literal, scientific descriptions of berry growth with music?” Actually, the phases, the tracks 1 and 2 from the album, are verbatim from a website that describes berry growth. The third one I kind of made up myself, but that’s pretty much what it is. After that, it was all about ordering the songs in the right way to make it logical, which I put a lot of thought and effort into. It’s sort of a concept album of myself. We’re all berries, I’m a berry. We’re all growing. Even if you paint yourself as blue as the ripest berry, the paint is still gonna come off in the shower. You can try to act grown up, but at the end of the day, you can’t fake who you are.
YP: How many times have you been blue?
CN: I’ve painted myself blue two times in my life. I never got into makeup before the concept came to mind, but I wish I did, because it’s a lot of fun to be a blue person. Once was for the music video I did for figure it out, which was in a public park in Palo Alto. It’s an interesting experience to be in public when you’re painted blue. You get a lot of questions. We went to the supermarket later that day, and I got a lot of scared looks, to say the least. There was this grocery store lady who came up to us and was like, “I’ve seen it all.”
YP: What was the inspiration for those 3 interlude tracks? BROCKHAMPTON did that kind of thing on the Saturation trilogy -- was that an influence?
CN: I think I just had that thought; I’m sure it came from somewhere, but I’m not sure where. I actually don’t listen to a bunch of BROCKHAMPTON. But I really respect their sound and I’ve been meaning to get more into them. That’s one of my artists that I haven’t explored deeply yet, which I feel guilty about since I painted myself blue, too, which I didn’t realize was their thing. I think the interlude thing came from the skits in Tyler’s music. All the skits he does in his albums are so cool to me. There’s this song off of Cherry Bomb, 2SEATER, that does that. I just love the idea of a skit going into a new song. I think the idea came from songs like that. The phases themselves came naturally; as I was reading about berries, I was like, “That’s exactly what’s happened to me.”
YP: Annika Park’s vocals on my world are incredible. Who is that?
CN: Annika Park is a friend of mine from school. She’s a sick person, she’s awesome. She has an insane voice. I saw her perform with the jazz choir, and I was like, “How come we haven’t worked together?” I wrote that song, my world, one night and texted it to her, like, “Hey, you should come sing this. Come rerecord it.” So yeah, she did that. It was two four-hour sessions, because she’s a complete perfectionist -- like, crazy -- but it really paid off. And then the next week I made the song unripe, and she did some background vocals on that song to prelude to my world. She’s really, really talented.
YP: The ending of what it means to love got pretty intense and electronic -- was that some of your EDM influence?
CN: That’s the most EDM-influenced song on the album. I used a lot of dubstep sounds and samples. I was listening to a lot of King Krule also, and I was really inspired by that screaming-squelching thing he does. I wanted to combine those vocals with this epic synth thing and big, booming drums. I wanted it to be super intense and loud, and I think it worked out.
YP: It’s funny you mention King Krule -- listening to the album, I kept thinking that your vocals sounded a lot like his.
CN: I was watching King Krule’s Tiny Desk Concert -- he was playing Deep Sea Diver from The OOZ -- and his opening vocals, I sound exactly like him. It’s really funny. I actually hadn’t listened to a lot of King Krule before that, but I wanted to see how he uses his voice so I could use that as inspiration. I’m really glad I explored his music. He’s got himself figured out so well -- that’s something I envy a lot. That’s one thing I look for in artists: people who know what they’re doing, people who know what they want to do and just do it. You can tell by his photos, the sounds in his music. And that’s all sort of marketing, but it’s more a self-image thing, a self-understanding. His music, his songwriting, it’s so his own. It’s incredible.
YP: Do you ever feel imposter syndrome as a musician?
CN: I think I definitely felt that back when I was making EDM. I was getting a fairly good amount of streams and listeners, and I think I became content with that in an unhealthy way. That’s probably the reason I quit that. But I think because of that, my parents and my friends at school were always like, “Oh, he’s the music kid. He’s super good.” And hearing that, it’s a good thing, it’s a compliment, but it could also be a lot of pressure in a weird way -- pressure to myself, because sometimes I don’t feel like I’m always that. Sure, I have nights where I’m going off on piano or I’m going off on this song, but I don’t always feel like I’m popping like that.
YP: What do you see for your future with music? You’ll be heading off to Berklee in the Fall, you’ll be surrounded by really professional musicians and resources -- do you think you’ll hold onto that DIY indie sound and setup?
CN: I’m excited to continue learning and working with other musicians, but I want to keep my sound. I want to keep producing my own stuff. I want to continue writing my songs in the honest way that I do, because that’s really why I started writing songs in the first place -- it’s like a therapy to me. I want to do more live shows. I had two live shows planned that were both cancelled because of COVID-19. It’s so much fun to perform on stage, and to be able to perform these songs would be crazy. I go crazy, I go nuts. Overall, I just want to be the best musician I can be, and I want to work on a bunch of new concepts and sounds.
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