Interview with Westwood-based Singer/Songwriter Chris Trapper

Westwood-based singer/songwriter Chris Trapper is no stranger to the business of writing music for motion pictures. With songs in films like "There's Something About Mary," "The Devil Wears Prada" and "August Rush," and television shows such as "Malcolm in the Middle" and "ER," Trapper has developed an extensive Hollywood résumé.

And this summer he can add to that résumé: Two of his songs were featured in season six of FX's original series "Rescue Me," a drama focused on the troubled personal life of a New York City firefighter played by Denis Leary.

Westwood Patch spoke with Trapper about his experiences in the Boston music scene, his solo career and the difficulties of working with producers for film and television placements.

Westwood Patch: How did you come to live in Westwood?

Chris Trapper: I'm from Buffalo, New York originally, then I moved to Boston after college. And I lived in Brighton for about 10 years and I've been in Westwood for the past five years.

WP: Has living in the Boston area had some kind of impact on your music?

CT: You know, it's funny, because I think Boston's a pretty supportive city of the arts in general relative to the rest of the country. I mean, I've toured now in all kinds of big cities, in-between cities and then tiny hamlets and stuff, so I have a pretty good impression of what kind of support systems you can come up, in music, with. And I think that Boston's one of the better ones — one of the top five or 10 music cities.

Even though, when I first started, I had a band and we were playing mostly kind of typical rock clubs, and we realized that to make a living you have to leave Boston. You need to make money in other cities. But as a launching pad: I think other people from other places respect Boston as a cool music town and I think being from Boston — it's competitive so it makes you better. I remember when I first moved here to Boston I was with a college band, and we picked the Boston scene because they used to have this thing called the Boston Band Guide and it said right there on the cover, it said "three thousand bands!" And I guess we were like, "Whoa. Oh no. That's some heavy competition." You're in some cities and you have 30 bands you're up against for attention.

So I think Boston is cool, and the thing is, it's pretty easy to navigate a gig here. If you have a gig somewhere, you can get there, people can get there. Some other, bigger cities that's a little more challenging. I feel bad for a band that lives in Brooklyn because just to exist there, to pay the rent there, to load in equipment there, to store equipment there — it's just, it must be incredibly expensive.

WP: When you came to Boston, were you with the Push Stars?

CT: No, I was with a band from college called Awake and Dreaming. And we really came here on a total whim. It's just somebody heard that somebody heard that somebody heard that bands were getting record deals from Boston, so my band from college was like, "Well, there's nothing else going on." So I quite college and just moved here with a rock 'n' roll band. And then we broke up pretty quickly because I think we just didn't have realistic goals and a realistic vision for where the band could go, there was no business plan.

I always tell people now, if I were to take one class as a musician, as a songwriter, I would take a business class. Just one business class, but just learn it. Because that's what ultimately hurt my first band: We moved here— we were actually a pretty good band, we were getting good gigs, we were opening for all the bigger Boston bands — but we just had no clue. We thought if we played in Boston once every five months it would somehow make a career out of it.

WP: Did you fall in among a community of musicians and join other bands?

CT: Well, I quit music for about five years and I started working at the Copley Plaza Hotel. It was one of those jobs where you're working in the basement and you had to wear a name tag and a hairnet. It was just always — you're somewhat miserable there.

But I had been writing songs since college the whole time, on a consistent basis. So my father one day called me and he said, "Are you still playing music?" You know, I think he said, "Are you still writing songs?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm writing pretty much on a daily basis." And he said, "You should quit your job and just try and do something with it."

So after five years of not doing music, I started playing these different open mic nights. In fact, there was a poetry reading right across from the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston that became my first kind of real gig, because I played the open mic night and the woman who ran it said, "Hey, you want to feature here sometime?"

Then I went and featured, and I just remember: I think the hat got passed around and I got about fifty bucks worth of tips, and I just remember thinking, "Oh, my God, this is awesome, you can get paid to play music." And I think something clicked then that I could kind of start a business if I kept my perspective in tangibles. Like: if I play this gig, I make this money; if I play this gig I, make this money — and then you have a job that you're ultimately happy with too.

WP: That's interesting that your father actually encouraged you to quit your job and become a musician. It seems that many musicians struggle with their families about their careers.

CT: Oh yeah. I've seen most of my friends — the majority, I'd say — 80 percent of my friends, their parents have been discouraging about it. And not that they don't want them to play music, it's just, as a career choice, parents worry, so they say, "Hey, you know what, that's all so well and good, but get a real job."

One of my best friends, he's a very talented guy, and I don't know what's in his heart exactly but he could have been a huge musician and he just bailed on it. And I've seen that again and again.

And it's also what's in someone's DNA. You know, a lot of my friends get dropped from record deals and they just head for the hills because they either want the safety net or they don't want to struggle with reinventing themselves. I mean, I've been through four record deals in my brief space with music and each time you've got to relook at what you're doing and reinvent yourself.

WP: You've had a lot of success getting your music featured on television shows and in films, most recently in FX's "Rescue Me." What was it like singing a song someone else wrote for "Rescue Me" when you're used to writing your own songs?

CT: That's a great question because right as I was doing it I was thinking, "This is not something that I usually do." I've taken pride in the fact that I'm a writer first and a singer second. So I actually haven't thought of myself as a singer very often. I usually think of myself as a songwriter who goes out and sings his songs.

When I went in — you know, my friend has a studio, name of Crit Harmon, and he's actually recorded a bunch of my stuff so I know him well and he needed to ask me to do it as a favor for him. And that's actually kind of cool.

Plus, I liked the tunes, too so it made it really easy. Some people have asked me to sing on their records, maybe a guest vocalist, and the music has been not my cup of tea and it's been miserable. But these songs were good and solid and I know him and he's actually mentored me a little bit. When I recorded my very first solo record I was kind of in a very weird headspace and I was just — I didn't know what I was doing with my career or anything. And Crit kind of helped me straighten myself out.

So, basically, if he asked me to paint his house I would do it. This is much easier than painting his house. To sing a couple songs.

WP: What was his involvement with the show?

CT: I think that's one of his main things. He writes jingles for commercials and he does music for various shows. I think he and his friend are doing all of the music for "Rescue Me." That's their gig. So I think he writes a couple of songs each week.

WP: In general, when you write songs for TV shows or movies, do you write the songs or do you sing songs others wrote?

CT: Up until maybe 2005, everyone just kept using songs that I had written and recorded. And then I felt I developed a reputation as I songwriter since I had made about eight records and some people liked them, so I started getting requests — like I had a theme song to this WB show called "Pepper Dennis" which was Rebecca Romijn's sitcom. And the producer and writer of the show, she was a fan of mine. So she had her people reach out to get me to write a theme song for the show. So I was among like three writers that were asked to submit theme songs. I feel like after years, I was getting a reputation.

Same thing with "August Rush." They actually sent me the script for it and asked me to write a song for the film. They said that they needed the central theme in the film and a bunch of heavy-hitters had been tested to write something but nothing was working. So they sent it to me in the eleventh hour — "Let's get this kind of unknown songwriter to write something for it." And then I wrote it and the next day I was on a conference call with Warner Brothers and they were saying, "You nailed the song, it's perfect and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who's the actor, he loves it." So it was one of those rare occasions where everything works, kind of.

But I get asked to write — I mean, nowadays, fairly often — for stuff. Really you kind of write and it doesn't happen, but if you get one of those things, like one theme song, in a film, it can be a year's worth of income. So you kind of go to the wall to get it. So say I write a hundred songs and one lands, that's still good.

Even though, it gets frustrating sometimes because I'll do what I think is the perfect song for the perfect scene — like, the movie The Blind Side I wrote four songs for. And they kept coming back to me and asking me to write more, and I kept turning them in. And each song I thought, "That was the perfect song." And once you write a song, for some, in particular, it has to go through about 10 channels before it lands in the film. It's like, it has to go through the writer, the director, the producer, then the studio, then the president of the studio, you know? It has to go through screening.

So, even for "August Rush," after I got on the conference call that was like, "your song's in, it's great!" I didn't believe it until I saw the movie. Because I had an experience a long time ago — I think it was like 1999 or 2000—that Drew Barrymore had a movie called "Never Been Kissed," and they had asked my band to remix a song that we had around. I think they asked us to record a different version of it; they wanted it in a waltz tempo. So we remade the song, reworked it, and we spent a lot of time. And they kept coming back asking us to remix it and then, finally, it was in the film and then at the very final screening Drew Barrymore pulled the song out. She was very involved in music and her boyfriend was in a band or something — they were into the indie rock scene — so they changed the song.

So that's why I always think it's kind of like winning the lottery. But with experience in the business, I'm finding that I'm getting asked to do more and more stuff. Which I take as a compliment: That people are starting to have faith in the fact that I can write a decent song once and awhile. Which is cool.

WP: You said earlier that for every album you've done, you had to reinvent yourself. Do you feel that that's also the case when you're writing for television or film producers?

CT: No, I mean, in that case it's kind of like pleasing a client. But I do see it as two separate things. Like, there's the side of me that's the artist and wants to make records that express myself, and then, if you're writing for film, you're kind of directable for a scene. So the best case is when you can kind of do both.

Like when I wrote this song for "August Rush," I knew what they wanted but in the back of my mind it's generally safe that if this song does get into a film it's going to have to be something that I can play on tour again and again. So you want to have a song that you're not miserable singing because it's so lame. So you need to write within certain boundaries.

The funny thing about that song too is that at the time I wrote it I was going through a lot of the stuff that the character of the film was going through. It was weird. So I could actually write a very honest song about myself and at day's end they loved the song. I mean, here was a character whose band had just broken up and my band had just broken up and I was definitely soul searching and the character was soul searching. So that got kind of linked up.

With film and TV placements I think you need to be able to tap into creativity when they ask you to. With Warner Brothers they recently asked me to write an eighties song. It had to be very derivative of that standard eighties music. So I had fun with it, but it's not something I think I would say I'm really stressed about — the fact that this song has to represent me.

WP: Which TV or film placement do you feel was most relevant to you?

CT: That's a good question. This year I had a couple of songs in the show "All My Children," which is a soap opera. And it's one of the weirdest things — seeing yourself used in this really dramatic setting. Soap operas are usually over the top. 

I think maybe my favorite placement experience was the theme song for "Pepper Dennis," because it had to be on the show with Rebecca Romijn in a scene, which was cool, and then also I got to know the whole crew, the whole cast very well from meeting with them. So I got to have a personal stake in the show and I met both the writers and they became friends of mine, so I think when you have a personal stake in the show it's a lot more fun than just "We're using your song, you have a nice day." You know what I mean?

The "August Rush" song—I play that on tour, probably every show. And I always feel good about playing it. I like to feel like, you know, you were made to do this song. I think that accidentally I wrote a good song that I could play again and again and not get totally burnt out.

WP: Do you feel like writing for movie and TV placements has improved your solo career?

CT: It's weird because my career has definitely been big drips and drops. There's been no lightening strikes moment where "this is it." You know: "You just made it. You made it with this placement." But I realized that you're at a tour and people show up but there's never a moment where like my big break came.

This is it. But the flipside is that after every show I'll do a meet 'n' greet and everybody's story is very different. A lot of people are like, "Yeah, I heard you from the "Something About Mary" soundtrack in like 2008 — or 1998" and I'm like, "Oh, wow, yeah, cool!" And another person says, "Yeah, I heard you open for Martin Sexton somewhere," and another person says, "I heard you in a Home Depot," or "the satellite radio system." But what I'm proud of is that I've built a fan base that is very much kind of hand-to-hand, heart-to-heart. It's been built that way rather than mass marketing dollars. I've never had marketing dollars spent on me.

But a film, "August Rush" was—when people loved it, they really loved it. So they kind of looked to see who wrote that song and they found me on tour. I can remember I was touring through Canada last spring and every sound guy in every club, after the show they were like, "I can't believe you wrote that song from 'August Rush!' I love that song." It was all the sound guys. It was very weird.

See, so it's definitely been good but it's not as definably good as people might think. You can't get a song in a movie and then suddenly you're set for life or you're set for your big fan base. I have seen certain shows that generate massive fan bases instantly for people. Like "Grey's Anatomy," if you can get songs on that show — the same guys that were opening for me last year start to sell out clubs this year. Because of "Grey's Anatomy." That show's audience, they're so apt to go out and buy the music that they hear on the show. With a lot of shows people just see it as background music.

WP: As a songwriter, what do you view as more important: The television and film placements that can make you a sizeable chunk of money, or your artistic career where you have more freedom to express yourself?

CT: Another great question. That's an awesome question. I think what I view as more important is — I would probably quit the business if I didn't have that gene that makes me want to write songs that move people. And it could move like five people. It could move 10 people. Whatever. But you definitely need to have that gene that kind of — that makes me want to be a good artist.

I could never just sit in my office and write songs for films and send them in and then kind of sit and wait for the checks to roll in. It'd be a great job, but I'd rather bag groceries.

But, I love to go to Cleveland and have people show up and they wait to hear track eleven off your last CD because they loved the lyrics. Or whatever. That feeling for me is more meaningful. It might not be as dramatic as seeing your song in a film that you know that millions of people will see. "Something About Mary" — that was one of the biggest films of that year and still plays constantly. And then "The Devil Wears Prada," my song in that — these are big movies, but it's honestly more meaningful when someone approaches me after a gig and says, "Your songwriting means a lot to me. It just changed my day and made me feel better" — that really means a lot to me.

But I think I've struck a nice balance of the best of both worlds where I can actually go on tour and then something like that happens, and I can also do things with my songs in placements.