Chris Farren: Power Pop’s Casanova of Doom-Sized Magnitude

“I live to do press, baby. Let’s go. This is gonna be the best interview of all time,” Chris Farren chants at his laptop camera in the early hours of a Los Angeles morning, just mere seconds after dialing in. “What if both of us really fucking popped off in this interview?” Farren is currently in his home studio, which is barely bigger than an office cubicle and has walls covered from baseboard to ceiling in guitars, omnichords and keyboards. He picks up his laptop and shows me around, and the layout reminds me of that woman on TikTok who covered her bathroom walls with computer keyboards. It’s like a portal into the Chris Farren multiverse, where instruments from Like A Gift From God Or Whatever and Born Hot offer quick teleportations to the power pop of yesteryear—aka 2014 or 2019, respectively.

Farren has made a reputation of being a one-man band and putting out records that sound like a quartet made them. I remember when he came through Cleveland once—then mustacheless and sporting hair that tufted at his shoulders—and donned a guitar covered in reflective shapes. He brought his own light show and programmed a synthesizer to bestow drums, bass and keys into a world in which he shredded towards oblivion. That was the crux of Chris Farren the man and Chris Farren the band; he was a singular force with the composite of a hundred faces. Now, on his fifth album Doom Singer, rock ‘n’ roll’s handsomest son has relinquished his own oneness, calling upon Jay Som’s Melina Duterte to produce and Macseal drummer Frankie Impastato to co-write.

Farren met Duterte at a Camp Cope show in 2018 and have followed each other on social media since. Though the seed of friendship had been planted, they didn’t become close until Farren started writing Doom Singer. “When it came to start thinking about “Do I want to work with a producer?,” she was the first person that came to mind,” he says. “She had just put out a Bachelor record and I love that record. And I love that last Jay Some record. I thought it would just be a good vibe. I had Seth [Hubbard] from Polyvinyl just send out a feeler if Melina would be interested in recording and then she was very interested.” Duterte’s work on Doom Singer is another notch in a ridiculous 2023 for the multi-instrumentalist, which includes production on Boygenius’ the record and engineering on Fenne Lily’s Big Picture.

“I had to let go of a lot of control,” Farren says. “I’m certainly not a perfectionist when it comes to my music. I’m more interested in capturing ideas than making things sound perfect in some way. But, it was still a thing where I was self-conscious about my ability as a musician, as a songwriter, as an engineer, whatever. When you produce your own thing, you have so much control over yourself and you can fix your singing if you need to. It was an exercise in just letting go and trying to find a level of confidence in my own abilities as a songwriter and as a musician and let Melina do her thing as a producer—which was very fun and great and made the process a lot less miserable for me, because I don’t really like recording myself. I just do it because it’s the cheapest thing to do and then I can have money to exist in the world. But, this time, I was like, ‘Well, I want to make a record that I couldn’t make alone.’”

And that’s exactly what Farren did. Off rip, Doom Singer was unveiled by lead single “Cosmic Leash”—the bonafide song of the summer, maybe even song of the century—and it sounded unlike anything he’d ever done before. There was a sense of organic, un-digitized wholeness at play. It’s explosive in a way that a programmed drum just can’t replicate, and we have Impastato to thank for that—as her fills are full of volcanic, impressionable finesse. “Cosmic Leash” and “Screensaver” are loud, heavy and, well, perfect. You might look at Farren’s discography and see a bounty of bubblegum-sweet pop-rock and find his foray into hardcore here as an anomaly. But don’t fret, Farren has been brandishing these cathartic pipes for 10 years with his first band Fake Problems and as one-half of Antarctigo Vespucci—his superduo project with his best friend Jeff Rosenstock (who delivers a tasty sax on “First Place”). In fact, taking his octaves to capacity was his go-to mode back then. Having Impastato helming percussion opened the door for Farren to expand everything else, and it allowed him to approach uptempo ferocity through an accessible light.

“For Chris Farren songs, up until now, I’ve been recording them in this room,” Farren says, gesturing stoicly to his sonic dojo, even though his screen is tilted upward and you can only see the ceiling, really. “I’ve been making them and performing them live solo. When I would make those older Chris Farren records, it was always in my mind, like, ‘Make something that you can recreate.’ I liked the way I did it, with the tracks and everything, but there was something in my mind that was like, ‘Well, you can’t go too hard, because it just simply doesn’t quite work, so you have to figure out a more poppy kind of vibe.’ But, when I was making this record and I already knew—aside from recording with Melina—that Frankie was going to play drums, I was like, ‘Okay, this can be a little bit more bombastic, because it will make sense live and it will come across in a live setting.’ That gave me the comfort and freedom to go a little harder when I was writing the songs.”

For the phatter tones on Doom Singer, Farren was taking inspiration from places he hadn’t considered in a while, like the Amherst punk band California X and My Bloody Valentine—“shit that rocks,” according to him. But there are acts of subversion at play, too—like on the title track, which arrives like a department store pop jingle before transforming into a wave of harmonies that rebels against the gloom-conjuring downer its name might evoke. It’s the tongue-in-cheek pop architecture that Farren has long perfected, and no other artist can toe the line between novelty rag and greatest song of all time quite like him. Doom Singer is the best album he’s made under his own name yet—and he knows that truth, too, given his relentless and hilarious summer-long self-promotion. (Here’s looking at you, “Doom Singer make me feel good.”) As Farren aptly sings on “First Place”: “Take a bow and drop the mic.”

Last month, he unleashed “Bluish,” the Doom Singer opener that is a triumphant love song—one that I gushed about in one of our Best New Songs roundups so much that Farren accused me of being in love with his wife Cassie because of it. We’ve since cleared the air and are on good terms with each other (Farren has resumed liking my tweets on a semi-regular basis). But what must be said about his approach to love songs is that he has such a knack for writing about love that whomever the subject of any given story is feels like someone we’ve all loved for a long time ourselves. The people who populate Farren’s songs exist on a pedestal of generosity and compassion. And not many folks can fashion lines as good as “I don’t belong anywhere without you on my arm” or “It’s you who I remember on my last day alive. When life flashes before my eyes, I hope the clips are all of you and I” in loving honor of a six-time winner of the Chris Farren Wife of the Year Award. But, then again, so very few of us are Chris Farren (no relation).

“To me, and hopefully to somebody else, it’s interesting to write love songs about somebody you have loved for a long time. Most love songs are about somebody you just met, or a new relationship. And that’s cool, but it’s just not my life experience,” Farren says. “I haven’t been in love for the first time in, like, 15 years or something, at this point. But I feel in love and very strongly in love, and I just like to try to capture that in my songs. I think, when I was younger—and this is probably a reaction to my younger self in Fake Problems—and Cassie and I started dating, there’s a lot of mean songs about her. And I’m like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ to myself, as a young person. When you’re a young, 20-something-year-old man, you have a lot of feelings—and now, in no part of Cassie telling me to do this, I’m just like, ‘You deserve only nice songs for the rest of my life.’ Unless she does something horrific, but she doesn’t seem like that type.”

For any given record Chris Farren makes, he writes around 100 songs and then, slowly, begins trimming away the pieces that aren’t working—eventually arriving at a 12-track conclusion. When he’s in album mode, he wakes up and tries to write at least one song per day in the morning. The first chapter he brought to life for Doom Singer was “Bluish,” which he began sketching in Rosenstock’s studio in 2021. Farren doesn’t take long intervals when building a record; he doesn’t love the idea of working on a song forever, instead preferring them to be of the moment of his life, a time capsule he can look back on and see just how he moved through the world at that specific time. The germination period for every record is as quick as you’d expect when there’s a century-mark’s worth of songs to choose from when it’s all said and done, even if the genesis of each cycle is a miserable undertaking.

“I’ll put a record out and then I’ll tour it and I’ll be on tour for, basically, two years. Then I’ll get home and I’ll realize, ‘Okay, if I want to go on tour again, I need to make a new record.’ And then I will start freaking out and I will spend about three months going, ‘Okay, today I’m gonna start writing songs.’ And then three months will go by, every day I will have said that but not done it. Then, I will, inevitably, get to a point where I’m like, ‘My life is going to fall apart if I don’t start writing songs.’ Then I’ll write songs every day for a month and it’ll, essentially, be the most miserable month of the year for me—because I feel like such a bad songwriter who has absolutely nothing to say. In the third month of actually, actually writing, I will start to—not even necessarily like what I’m doing, but start to see the little glimmers of hope. The more I do that, the more that small amount of confidence starts to grow. Then I find, hopefully—and, luckily, this has happened every time I’ve made a record so far—I will start to be like, ‘Oh, this is interesting to me’ and then expand on that and start listening to other music that reminds me of where I think I’m going.”

Since his solo debut Like a Gift from God or Whatever came out in 2014, Farren has been lumped in with the emo adjacents that found their strides during the genre’s revival in the early 2010s. Though his work with Fake Problems flirted with pop-punk and emo in the past—and he and Rosenstock came up with PUP, Joyce Manor and Rozwell Kid in a heavier scene that flirted with the community Warped Tour but never crossed that line—he’s an even bigger part of the pop and rock world by himself. He’s also never considered himself to be an emo act. Instead, Farren’s outlook on his career has always been longevity-minded, so he refuses to focus on revivals—mostly because they offer the capacity of having a great two or three years before going stale, listeners will drum up whatever label they please and the work of Chris Farren has to live on forever.

“I was mad at the emo revival. I was jealous of everybody,” Farren says, laughing. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ I mean, it must be an ego thing on my part to think that my music is genreless and impossible to define, when people are just like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s pop-punk.’ With Fake Problems, we got taken under Against Me!’s wings, and we also sound exactly like Against Me!, so we were a punk band and we were with all the orgcore people. We never really identified with it, because we were all Saddle Creek obsessives. I think that, through that process of just realizing ‘Oh, people are just going to say whatever, we don’t really have control,’ you just learn to let go and have fun and make whatever you want and don’t try to think about genre because, as an artist, you have absolutely no control over what people are going to say. You can do your best by trying not to say certain words in your bio or something, but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter.”

Call the universe of Chris Farren emo or pop-punk or indie or whatever, but how many revivalists of any nature have had their faces plastered across a Hollywood billboard? Probably more than you think, but it’s still cool to see Farren getting really stoked on the world of advertising. When I ask him who will promote Doom Singer like Danny DeVito promotes Jersey Mike’s sub sandwiches, he only has one answer: Miss Piggy. Though, Cate Blanchett would be a close second. “If all of these bands are playing Amazon Fest and all of this shit, then let me have a fucking Coca-Cola sponsored album,” he adds. “Please, just one big check. That’s all I ask for. I’ll give an undisclosed amount of it to charity, too. Isn’t that pretty big of me?”

Speaking of Cate Blanchett, if you’ve been following Farren’s social media at all over the last year, you know that, when he’s not drawing pictures of animals smoking Marlboro Reds, he is a proud Tár evangelist—even going as far as changing his own name to Chris FÁRren once upon a time. Farren also knows how funny it looks to see someone lobbying so hard for a film that is subtle, quiet and artsy. He pulls up his phone during our call and reads a text conversation he had recently with Tim Kasher from Cursive: “[Tim] asked: ‘Chris, real question. Did you really love Tár or are you having a laugh? Because I just saw it and found it to be decent but pretty dull. And now I’m thinking maybe you’re doing that as a goof? Or did you love it? Because a lot of people definitely love it, so now I’m curious.’ And I said: ‘I love it, I’ve seen it four times. Sadly, I’m burning my copy of Mama, I’m Swollen now.’”

Tár conjures something inside Farren in the same way that Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things did three years ago. But what really set him off on a rabbit hole of wonder with the Todd Field-directed film is how, in his own words, it “doesn’t hold your hand and it doesn’t tell you how to think.” Farren found a real magnetic presence in the story’s nuance and subtleness and onus. It fits in with what he tried to make sense of on Doom Singer, the act of placing interest in questions rather than focusing on the answers.

“I think it comes through in my own songwriting, privately. Before, I would write a song and I would be like, ‘What is it about? What is the end? This is how you should think about this and this is the story of the song.’ I don’t know, I don’t want to pretend. I would rather try to make an authentic piece of art that, perhaps, has an answer in it that I just can’t even see right now. That is the crux of the whole thing. You write songs and you want people to hear them and you want people to connect with them. The more I do it, the more I learn that you’re closing off the possibility of people connecting with them if you spell out the point for them. I love other people’s interpretations of stuff. A song like ‘Cosmic Leash,’ I was really worried about it being the first single—because I just don’t know what that song is about. But I know that in a year from now, I will be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s what that song was about.’”

The biggest standout moment on Doom Singer comes during the album’s final moments on “Statue Song,” a synth-driven ballad about loss and longing. “Since the scaffolding came down, the tourists come from every town,” Farren sings. “They take their pictures and move on through the gift shop and beyond. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be that small, to chase the rushing river to the waterfall.” I don’t like to make it a habit of asking an artist what their song is about because, similarly to what Farren said about the emo revival, it’s, ultimately, up to each individual listener to form their own conclusions on art. But, I couldn’t let Farren go gently into his Los Angeles pastoral without asking for the story behind “Statue Song.”

“The story of the song came from when I was looking at pictures of giant statues, like the Statue of Liberty,” he says. “There are videos on YouTube—scale videos—that’s just a computer-generated video of ‘this is how big the Statue of Liberty is.’ ‘This is how big the Buddhist statue is.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna write a song from the perspective of one of those statues.’ And then I was like, ‘What does that mean and how would that work?’ It led to me writing a song about being abandoned. I don’t really know where that comes from in my life, other than my dad left my mom when she got pregnant with me. That probably will do it.”

Born in Michigan, raised in Florida and now residing in California, Farren’s work resembles his own migratory backstory. Shapeshifting through punk, indie rock and power pop over the last decade, he’s proved he can do anything he needs to on his own. Where he lands on Doom Singer is a revelatory creation brought into the world by many sets of hands. To watch a hero put out his best work yet is always a fascinating and rewarding privilege to have a piece of. From the anthemic days of Can’t Die in 2016 through the hypnotic dreamscapes of Born Hot three years later, Farren glazes his self-deprecation with yummy instrumentation and buoyant melodies that have now, finally, transformed into his ideal shape of “optimistic nihilism” on Doom Singer. As the title track suggests: “It’s not joy I feel, it’s joy I swear, it’s not doom!”

I ask Chris Farren where he thinks Doom Singer will land in the history of rock ‘n’ roll when it’s all said and done. In-between the Beatles playing The Ed Sullivan Show and Taylor Swift having Ice Spice on her remix of “Karma” is his first reaction, but something else sticks out greater to him: “Machine Gun Kelly making rock music for the masses and bringing guitar music back,” he says. “I didn’t even remember I had guitars until he came back around.” The “Emo Girl” to “Cosmic Leash” pipeline is alive and Doom Singer is forever.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from his home in Columbus, Ohio.