When he's not fronting the Spin Doctors—one of the least-appreciated guitar bands of the past 25 years—Chris Barron often can be found working with the Canoes...
When he's not fronting the Spin Doctors—one of the least-appreciated guitar bands of the past 25 years—Chris Barron often can be found working with the Canoes or adding to his ever-growing stockpile of songs in waiting.
"I have this gigantic backlog of eclectic songs that would never necessarily work for the Spin Doctors," Barron told Billboard last month[1]. "I wanted to make a solo record for a really long time, just as a creative outlet. So here it is."
The "it" in Barron's sentence is Angels and One-Armed Jugglers, his new solo album, which is slated for an October 20 release via Chrysanthemum Records. Today you can enjoy our exclusive premiere of the powerful and poignant "Too Young to Fade," which closes out the 11-track album.
"This is a tune I wrote over the course of about 15 years about my childhood friend, Bobby Sheehan, best known as the bass player of Blues Traveler, the great brother band of the Spin Doctors," Barron told us. "He was a mythical figure in my life, as close to Jack Kerouac's depiction of Neal Cassidy as a flesh-and-blood human being could possibly be. A visceral, instinctive and accomplished musician, he also was deeply vulnerable, burying deep suffering beneath supreme confidence and the kind of seeming 'luck' workaholics often have.
"I started the song in some weird horn key, Eb or Bb—I don't remember exactly). It came alive when I transposed it to my pet key of G major, which is a sweet spot for my voice. Then I could use those bar chords on the verses—boxy, descending, parallel inversions—and switch to the throaty, open-string root-position cords for the verses. The verses are written from Bobby's point of view, through the filter of my imagination, of course.
"The inspired electric