When it comes to life and music, singer-songwriter Chris Kroeze – perhaps best known as the runner up in the 2018 season of The Voice – has a steadfast, small-town DIY mentality of doing things.
“I was never real good at following directions I guess, so I’ve just always done my own thing,” says Kroeze.
For example, about two years ago he turned an old empty shed on his property in Barron, Wisconsin – a relatively small town of less than 4,000 residents in northwestern Wisconsin near the Wisconsin-Minnesota border – into his own recording studio and a space to spend time with his family. He really enjoys having the extra room and says matter of factly that “it keeps all my gear out of the house.”
“It was kind of an old rotten shed when I bought the house [five years ago] and I beefed it up and finished the inside and put a big ceiling in here and a bunch of sound treatment stuff and it kind of doubles as a recording studio and man cave hangout,” he says.
“My kids love hanging out in here watching movies and stuff. We’ve got a big TV and a huge surround sound system and it’s like a functioning studio. But we also use it for a lot of entertainment purposes for the family and get togethers and whatnot. It turned out really cool.”
His house, which was formerly an Amish farm, is not too far from where he grew up and where most of his extended family lives. He says it’s a perfect place to get away from the spotlight and focus on music and family.
“It’s tucked in away from the road and really quiet and there’s no people around me which is kind of nice with what I do for a living,” he says. “I’m around tons of people all the time, so it’s nice when I’m not working to be able to escape that. We love it. It’s quiet. The nearest town is probably 10 minutes and it’s just a little town. It has a grocery store and a couple of gas stations, so we like it. We’re not too far from Eau Claire, WI or Minneapolis so we can get to a city if we need to.”
Since all his musical equipment is in the studio area and is always set up for recording, he decided to self-film his entry in the Water Tower Sessions series with his phone.
“I tried to keep it simple,” says Kroeze.
The backdrop to the session is far from simple and mundane. His “little corner” and recording setup includes a keyboard and a couple guitars that he plays occasionally. There’s an American flag behind the guitars that he says was a “super cool gift” he got from a pilot in the Air Force he met in the Middle East.
“I’ve done a bunch of USO and Armed Forces entertainment tours all over the world,” Kroeze says. “That pilot flew that flag on a mission and then he mailed me the flag that they flew while they were doing bad things to bad people.”
After going on almost a dozen overseas tours to perform for the US military, Kroeze has developed a large fan base within the military. He is a recipient of the Red Cross Community Hero Award.
The guitars have a special history for Kroeze as well. There’s a 2002 Gibson Firebird that he purchased at a guitar shop in River Falls, Wisconsin, about an hour and half west of home. It’s a model of guitar he had always wanted, so it was an easy decision to purchase when he spotted it. There’s also a 1962 Gibson ES-125 that he considers a special guitar. For the session, he played a Martin CEO-7 acoustic.
“It’s my favorite acoustic guitar that I’ve got and it never leaves my studio,” he says. “It just stays in here all the time.”
While Kroeze loves performing with a band, there’s something unique about playing acoustic. It has a freeing quality that lets him dictate fully where a song can go.
“It’s super fun to have those guys to kind of bounce off of and do all that, but when I’m playing by myself, I can just kind of do whatever I want,” Kroeze says. “I can change a song up and don’t have to worry about anybody else following me. I love playing acoustic guitar. It’s been my favorite instrument, for sure, forever. I just love that I can do my own thing and make the songs what I want them to be in the moment and not really have to worry about anybody else.”
For the session, he decided to perform three songs – his original hit song “Human” as well as covers of Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and Delbert McClinton’s “Two More Bottles of Wine.”
“This little three song session that I got here pretty well sums up what I like to do,” Kroeze says. “I tried to pick three songs that were fairly different from each other, and I like all kinds of music…It was super fun. Laid back. I was just in here by myself with a couple mics set up and I wanted to keep them raw and just one take.”
The session opens with “Human,” one of his most popular songs. He recorded and released the song a few years ago while he was on The Voice. Since he made it to the finale of The Voice, he was able to release an original song. He says it was a “cool way to release that song” because he had recorded it previously to being on The Voice and it gave him a reason to finally release it.
“It was super fun to get to work that up with that band and get to debut a song in front of millions of people on TV,” he says. “On the biggest stage I ever got to play on is where I got to debut that song and it did really well. It was top 10 on iTunes for a while, and so it’s probably my most streamed song by far.”
The song in its acoustic form is no less emotional and impactful.
Next, Kroeze unveils a strikingly emotive cover of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” His dad taught him how to play guitar when he was six years old and it’s the first song he learned how to play.
“The version that I learned it from when I was a kid was Willie Nelson, and it’s one of my favorites,” he says. “It’s still one of my favorites. I sing it almost every night. It’s the song I’ve been playing for the longest.”
“It’s a feeling of nostalgia for me for sure, because I learned it when I was a 6-year-old kid and kind of brings me back to sitting around the campfire with my parents and camping and doing all that fun stuff. It brings me back to my childhood for sure.”
He finished the session with “Two Bottles of Wine,” which he says is an “old Delbert McClinton song but done in a little different style.”
“I kind of randomly picked it because I kind of had forgotten about it,” Kroeze says. “I don’t play it very much anymore. That’s a song that I got to sing with Blake Shelton on The Voice. We recorded it and it’s on Spotify and Apple Music and all that. There’s a version of that song with me and Blake singing it together.”
Kroeze caught up recently with Scummy Water Tower to talk about the importance of his small-town Wisconsin upbringing, why he’s content releasing singles instead of albums lately, and how he’s found inspiration in music and his personal life.
You grew up in northwestern Wisconsin and a lot of those stories and lessons have found their way into your music, and you talk about what it was like growing up. Why’s that important?
Growing up here in a super small town, tight-knit community, everybody knows everybody. Everybody helps everybody out, and I’ve always loved that and just always wanted to raise my family in that same way. I went to the same high school as my great-grandparents, so my family’s been here a long time.
Long line of tradition for you. And that kind of tradition seems to be a big part of your music too. As far as honoring it, but also kind of adding a new chapter.
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m always trying to stir things up a little bit.
Country and rock have been important styles for you. What about those styles of music?
With country, I think it’s the relatable lyrics and just the stuff I grew up listening to. You kind of just become fond of that because you listen to it so much and it just becomes part of who you are. But rock and roll, as a guitar player, the best guitar I think that’s out there is a rock and roll guitar. I love all that stuff.
How do you think your musical influences have evolved in the last few years?
I don’t know. I mean, I don’t evolve too much. I guess maybe I should [listen to] more because music is always changing, but I still listen to a lot of the same music I listened to when I was a kid and I try to listen to some new stuff once in a while. I just end up back on the old stuff.
A lot of people know you best from being on The Voice. I’ve talked to a couple people that have been on The Voice and other similar shows and have gotten the impression that they’ve used it as a springboard to really explore who they are rather than let it define them.
Absolutely. Yeah, you kind of have to go out and do your own thing, but definitely a great springboard because it’s a huge, huge audience you get to be in front of. Definitely a big springboard and something that I’m very thankful for the opportunity that I had to do it.
How has your relationship with your song “Human” evolved since you wrote it and played it on The Voice?
It’s a classic case of I’ve played it so many times, and so there’s times when I don’t want to play that song anymore, but I always go back to it because it’s a big moment in my career. Really the biggest moment in my career is the finale of a nationwide TV show on primetime TV. Definitely a big deal. Maybe not in the grand scheme of things if you compare it to the big boys in the country music world, but for me it was a really big momentum, so it’s a special song for sure.
After releasing your debut album in 2019, you’ve been releasing singles here and there. What do you like most about that format?
I think we just kind of have to adapt to this whole streaming world of Spotify and Apple Music and all that. It’s tough to get people to listen to a whole album. So, we’ve just been putting out one song at a time and getting that out and kind of just taking it step by step. I like the format because it gives us something to promote throughout the years rather than just letting everything out at one time and then you’ve got one little chunk of time to promote it. Now we get to kind of promote these songs as they come.
Do you have any plans for a bigger release in the future, or is that that plan for now with singles?
Yeah, for now it’s going to be singles for sure. But I’m going to be putting out a lot of music this [upcoming] year, so it’ll be a good year for music for sure.
They always say that creating one’s sophomore album can be a challenging thing to do.
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily hard. I guess the hard part is getting people to listen to it.
I meant more that it’s a lot of pressure to follow up one’s debut.
Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. You always want it to be better and it’s hard to compare which one’s better because they were just different points in my life. I hope that the last stuff I release is always the best stuff I’ve done, but you never know.
One of your new songs you performed live recently is based on an experience you had growing up and getting in trouble on the bus. Can you talk about your inspiration for that one?
I haven’t recorded that one yet, but I’m going to. I wrote that with a couple of friends down in Nashville and we started talking about all these things about small towns. Everybody knows everybody. If so-and-so gets in trouble, everybody knows about it. Part of the inspiration for that was I got in trouble on the school bus. Not bad. I think it was just that I got put in the front seat of the bus and got chewed out by the bus driver or something, and somehow my parents knew before I had even gotten home. So, it was just kind of funny.
I imagine it’s nice to be able to test out the new songs live.
Yeah. We love doing that. It’s fun because I think it’s fun for the crowd because it’s a new song and then it’s fun for us because we get to see if people react to it or not and see how they like it. So that one, it seems like people like that one when we play it.
Can you talk about some other songs that you’ve been writing that you’re excited about?
Yeah. I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve got one coming out this winter that’s called “A House in the Country,” and it’s just about all the things I love about living where I live, and that [features] a buddy of mine from Minnesota. His name’s Michael Shines. It’s a dual release. We both sing on it and we both wrote it together. It’s going to be a really cool song. I really like it. And that one, I don’t know exactly the date that that’s coming out, but it’ll be sometime after the holidays.
How do you think your songwriting has grown most in the last few years?
Definitely a little more confidence with it. Songwriting is a pretty cool thing once you get used to it. Right away I was nervous. I didn’t want to say anything stupid or come up with a bad idea for a song or whatever, and now I just kind of write songs and you just have to accept the fact that not every song you write is going to be a great one. I think just letting that go and not caring too much about it, just writing what I write and sometimes they turn out and they’re cool songs and sometimes they’re not and no one will ever hear it.
You have a large fan base in the military. Why do those fans and performing for troops mean so much to you?
I was raised with a strong respect for the military and taught if there’s ever anything we can do to support [our] military, whatever, that we should take the opportunity. And I got some pretty big opportunities to go travel overseas all over the Middle East and Africa and some places down in Central America and just kind of all over the place, really cool opportunities for me. And then we get to go and bring a couple hours of entertainment for these guys that are in a place that no one wants to be and they’re away from their families.
I’ve only ever been gone for a couple of weeks at a time, and I was ready to go home. I don’t know how these guys do it for six or nine months or a year. We get to do the things we want to do because there’s people out there making sure we get to keep our freedoms like that. So, it’s really important to me that we show them respect and do anything we can to make their time over there a little bit better.
What are some of your favorite stories?
One of my favorite ones, this is pretty funny. So, I’m from a town of 3000 people up here in Northwest Wisconsin and I was over in a place, Amman, Jordan, and we were playing a show on a military base there. And I met a guy that went to the same high school I did, and we didn’t know each other. Pretty crazy.
Small world.
Very small. Yeah. 8,000 miles away from home and I met someone from my hometown.
What’s next for you?
Next up, man, the only thing I’m really thinking about is deer hunting right now. We’ve got some pretty cool shows booked in December. I’m going to be at a casino up here in northwest Wisconsin called St. Croix Casino in Turtle Lake, WI with Chevel Shepherd. The girl that won the Voice the season that I was on it, she’s coming up and we’re going to do a show together at the casino. So that’ll be really fun. And then we’ve got a bunch of Christmas parties to play, and a big theater show in Eau Claire, Wisconsin at the Pablo Center. So, it’ll a pretty fun December. But until then I’m going to be deer hunting, so that is what I’m currently excited about.
I imagine you’ll be fairly busy next year.
Yeah, next year’s filling up fast, looking at the calendar stuff’s coming in. It’s going to be a good year. We’ve got some pretty cool festivals booked again for next year, and it’s looking like it’s going to be a pretty good summer.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
