The Sydneysider Chris Lanzon grew up with two musical parents whose differing tastes exposed him to a range of options. “My mum and my dad, they’re quite different people,” Chris tells Post-Burnout of his earliest influences. “My dad plays guitar, he loves to play music a lot, so he was always playing songs around the house. He plays a lot of blues and rock, and that sort of world.

“Mum, she doesn’t really play music but loves listening to music, and I think she was always up-to-date with what was current, but in a cool way. I remember her showing me Bon Iver’s first record, and Angus & Julia Stone, and a lot of that stuff.

“But my earliest memory in the house was hearing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the first time. That seems to be one of my first memories where I was like, ‘Whoa! What is that?!’ [Laughs] I’m trying to think what else comes to mind. Like, the cliché ones, like The Beatles and stuff.”

Inspired by his dad, Chris got a guitar at the age of seven. After one lesson with his dad and finding it too difficult to immediately grasp, he abandoned it, but later got a ukulele, mainly as a means of pretending to be a guitarist.

After enjoying a video of a ukulele choir that he stumbled upon, he decided to actually learn the instrument. Finding success with the uke, he retried the guitar, taught himself his favourite tunes via YouTube tutorials, and found himself enjoying it.

While learning to play the guitar, Chris developed his own distinct musical taste beyond his parents’ suggestions. “I was always drawn to the songs that I loved, which are very different to what he listened to,” Chris says of how his tastes differed from his father’s.

“He plays a lot of blues and stuff, and I was more into contemporary pop music, at that time. [Laughs] I think once I heard acoustic guitar music – like, Ed Sheeran was a big influence when I was about twelve years old – like, hearing singer-songwriters doing that thing…I wasn’t interested in doing riffs, and scales, and crazy guitar acrobatics; I was like, ‘Whatever this is, like, that intimate, warm sound and people expressing themselves.’ I was really drawn to that.”

Chris began constantly playing and writing his own songs, and, not long after, he got his first taste of performing to crowds when he busked around Sydney. “That’s actually a big part of where my dad came in, because he started doing it himself, just busking up at the local shops or down by the beach,” Chris says of how he got into craft.

“He saw my interest growing in doing my own thing and learning these songs in my bedroom, and he was sort of like, ‘Do you want to come with me and play a couple of songs?’ I think he knew that him, as this 45-year-old man…not many people were probably going to pay attention, but this 11-year-old kid? He was like, ‘Oh, he’s going to get me some coins!’

“So, he was just like, ‘Let’s just see how this goes,’ and encouraged me to do it, and I was terrified. It’s such a crazy…Like, busking, I would say, is one of the most intimidating ways to perform because you’re literally just in public. No one is asking to listen to music. [Laughs] You’re just playing stuff, people are just walking past. But it was a really great way to learn, I think, how to just be in front of people and share music in that way.”

After grounding himself as a musician, in 2014, Chris auditioned for The Voice Kids, the child-focused offshoot of the singing competition The Voice. After a successful audition, he was mentored by Joel and Benji Madden of Good Charlotte fame, and made it to the Grand Finale before being knocked out.

Whilst at The Voice Kids, Chris made friends with some of the other contestants, who went on to form the pop-rock group In Stereo. In 2015, In Stereo auditioned for the Australian version of The X Factor. While the band would ultimately finish in eighth place out of twelve, they had a successful career outside the show. They were signed to Warner Music Australia, enjoyed high chart placements, and headlined several tours across the country.

Since then, Chris has admitted that the project was not the most creatively fulfilling for him. “That whole experience was a wild ride,” he says, reflecting on it now. “There were three of us in the band and we were very, very, very young. Like, we literally started when we were fourteen.

“So, it was an intense time, but just a huge learning period for those years. It was the first time touring, and the first time being in studios, and writing songs to be recorded and released. All of that at a super-charged pace, because we went on the TV show, and you kind of just go from nothing to, like, having thousands of people watching you and wanting things from you.

“There was, like, record labels and managers, and they’re leading the way and they all know best, and we’re just little kids. We had no idea what we wanted or who we were. So, it was very intense. It was a very intense time. But I sort of came out of it, approaching eighteen years old, and was able to be like, ‘OK, I think we can close this chapter now. It was a lot of fun, we learnt a lot, but let’s sort of go our own way.’

“It’s been interesting to process that time as an adult, and just growing older and still doing music, and still rediscovering my relationship to music. There’s been a lot to sort of work through from that time, but, overall, I think it was quite a positive experience.”

After In Stereo disbanded in 2018, Chris got back to his roots by releasing solo material independently. “[There was] a lot of uncertainty, for sure,” Chris says of the transition away from the major label security to doing stuff D.I.Y. “I just felt like I needed to get away from all of that. It was just so much, so quickly, at such a young age.

“I got to 18, and I was finishing high school, and I was like, ‘I don’t know who I am. I spent the last three years of my life, every moment that I’m not at school, I’m working in the studio, or I’m on tour, or I’m doing something that someone is telling me to do.’ The songs were a lot of fun, but I didn’t really feel very connected to them.

“As I said earlier, I was always drawn to the expression through music, not necessarily the ‘commodity of music,’ I guess. [Laughs] In the band, it was just very commercial and very…like, that whole scene of ‘the music business,’ per se.

“So, I just wanted to get away from all of that and just figure out who I was as a person, [Laughs] for a little bit, and that took a couple of years to just chill and not treat music as a business or a career and just get back to the love for it. That took the form of a lot of songwriting and learning how to record and produce my own stuff, because I didn’t want to depend on someone else.

“I do have the tendency to be a bit of a control freak, as well. [Laughs] So, I think part of that was just…Yeah, I just wanted to learn everything so I could do it all myself, but that’s also been a whole process of, now, learning how to let go and actually trust people, which has been a beautiful process over the last few years. I’ve got so many amazing people in my life, now, that I can lean on, and I’m really grateful for that.”

After spending a lot of time crafting new songs and learning to use Logic, on January 31^st, 2020, Chris introduced the world to his efforts with the single “Still.” Unfortunately, as his solo career was launching, a certain pandemic hit. “It was funny because I had spent pretty much the year before COVID alone in my room, figuring out all this” laughs Chris.

“I was like, ‘OK, 2020 is going to be the year! I’m going to put music out, I’m going to start getting out there!’ I put my first song out in January. Literally the day I put my second song out, we got locked down. It was, like, March 13^th or something. I remember it: The song came out and lockdown started!

“And, at that point, I had already set the EP release date to come out in May, I think, and I was just like, ‘Oh, well! I know what it’s like to exist in isolation and be on the internet, so I’m just going to keep doing that!’ So, I was able to just exist in that space for the next couple of years while the lockdowns just kind of happened, on and off.

“There was a brief period where things opened up at the end of 2020, and I did play my first show then, which was really cool. But it was still in a weird period where everyone was like, ‘Are we allowed to be out in the world?’, and all the shows in Sydney were seated. So, yeah, a very interesting time to release your first lot of music! [Laughs]”

Since 2020, Chris has released one EP every year, except for 2022. Last month, his latest EP, Angel Litany, dropped. From a production standpoint, this EP is notably more stripped-back than its predecessors whilst maintaining the indie singer-songwriter motif that Chris is known for.

“I think the first few EPs I did, I would be producing as I was writing,” Chris says of making Angel Litany. “So, I’d be sitting at the computer and I’d be writing things down and then recording them and trying all these different ideas, so there would be this sort of mismatch of all these little pieces everywhere, which can be a really cool sound, but I think I was really craving just getting back to songwriting as its own craft and then finding ways to adapt that into a recording.

“So, I think there’s a lot more space, this time around, in the sound. It sounds a bit more live, maybe, which I think has just been a result of a change of mindset and a change of process.”

For Chris, creating collections of larger works tends to be what interests him. “My brain is very project-based, I think,” he says. “I like to define parameters or a world that something is going to belong within. So, I think that’s why I’ve been doing EPs instead of just having singles out and then piecing it together now. So, it’s been very intentional, the last few years of doing it, which I’m happy about.

“This time around, it was a little less intentional in the inception phase. Like, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do; I just had a few songs and I was like, ‘OK, what if I put this one with this one, and this one with this one?’, and then kind of filled in the gaps. It’s, weirdly, I think, probably my most cohesive EP so far, so it’s interesting how that happened in the reverse way around, but definitely very intentional, most of the way. [Laughs]”

On Angel Litany, there appears to be a throughline of astronomy as a thematic concept, not that this was necessarily a premeditated move on Chris’s part. “It’s funny because, like I said, I didn’t set out to make something that felt cohesive; it kind of just happened,” he says.

“So, all of those themes that are shared across some of the songs, I didn’t do it once and then go, ‘Oh, I’ll into that a little bit more;’ they kind of all just happened and then I pieced them together.

“I try to let each song be what it wants to be. That sounds like a weird way of saying it, but I do feel like songs have a life of their own, in some way, and you’re just like, ‘OK, I’ve just got to figure this out and figure out how best it wants to be a thing.’ It’s like giving birth or something – not that I know what the experience is like [Laughs] – but it’s like…you know, you feel like you’re nurturing this thing until it’s its own thing.

“In this case, there were songs that popped up through this time, but I managed just to pick these six that felt like they were of a world, and once I do start to notice those throughlines, I am very conscious of tracklisting, and, obviously, in the production process, finding ways of…I like to give them some sort of commonality, so there are sounds that you’ll hear across the record that sort of pop up in a few different songs, like the violin or little piano tinkles or the way I’m playing the guitar or something. I like to have that thread through it. But, in the same regard, letting each song be its own thing is important, as well.”

Chris Lanzon’s latest EP, Angel Litany, is on all streaming platforms now. You can find Chris’s music, live dates, and social media accounts on his website.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.