Music by design
Run Chico Run make their own pop (and shirts)
A great number of bands, when starting out and due to financial constraints, have to make their CDs by hand. The result is generally a CD-R with photocopied liner notes and the band name and album title written in marker on the disc. There's nothing wrong with this method (so long as the music is getting out), but generally these bands aspire to eventually have mass-produced releases that involve little hands-on work.
For the West Coast pop band Run Chico Run though, the aspirations for their CDs include as much hands-on work as possible. Their creativity extends beyond the songs they write to include the final product that delivers those songs to the fans.
"Have you ever seen any discs packaged in that brown cardboard casing - not the digipak - the one with the actual spine? Some of them have a flap on the inside that you can just slide the disc into, and they're folded in two or three segments. Well, so we were trying to find somewhere to get those in bulk and screen those, but places we've talked to say it's as much to get them folded and glued as it is to get them pressed," band member Matt Skillings explained in a recent interview.
Run Chico Run is comprised of Skillings and co-vocalist/instrumentalist Thomas Shields, and it would seem the duo share a yen for silkscreening their wares. "We make lots of t-shirts - we do our own silkscreen shirts. We'll do a run of twenty or thirty of one design ... which is kind of neat, so you buy a shirt and there's only 20 other people that have them," described Skillings. Pictures of the prints on these limited-run t-shirts can be found on the band's Web site (www.runchicorun.com) but as Skillings explained, "the majority are sold out - it's mostly to show what we've done."
One other thing the duo has done is graduated from a high school band to a more musically mature project in Run Chico Run. "We were in a band together called Barnabus. It lasted until after high school - we moved to Vancouver in `96. We did the whole Monkees thing, all the guys living together in the same house, but it fell apart pretty quick. When I came back to Victoria, Thomas was putting together the whole Run Chico Run thing. It was his brainchild - he had a demo of about six tunes that he'd done on his four-track all on his lonesome. I had a couple ditties myself that we added to it and that was Low-Fi MoFo, our first album," said Skillings, tracing the history of the band.
That first album was followed by an EP and three full-length discs, the most recent of which, Shashbo, the band is now touring the country to support. It's a collection of off-kilter pop songs that recall bands like the Flaming Lips, and more recently, the Unicorns. "I like a little bit of 'what the fuck?' music, people who mix it up a little bit. Thomas is into that too," Skillings divulged, and then analyzed the sound of Run Chico Run: "I don't think it's particularly progressive or anything. We just want to do something a little bit different and have some fun with it [and] keep ourselves interested too. We just want to hear something new, that's all."
For your opportunity to hear something new, check out Run Chico Run at the Collective Cabaret in Osborne Village this Thursday, Nov. 13.