Lakes Region brewery hosts Charlie Chronopoulos
Amidst the challenges of 2020, Twin Barns Brewing Co. in Meredith continued to offer live music along with craft beer. That is scheduled to continue on Jan. 8 when singer-songwriter Charlie Chronopoulos appears, on the heels of a new album he released at year’s end.
Chronopoulos said in a recent phone interview that the seven starkly rendered songs on Chesty Rollins’ Dead End reflect daily life struggles he sees in his home state of New Hampshire.
“There’s this backward narrative of poverty around this area,” he said. “A lot of these are real stories that I wove into a record. … I would call it northern rock and soul.”
He carefully alludes to the shame and desperation of addiction on “Solomons” and “God In The Details,” then confronts it head on in “Middlesex,” a loping shuffle that recalls a former band member lost to heroin. “He went to Hollywood and found a rubber band,” Chronopoulos sings. “Coming of age, it came and went.”
Punctuated by deft fingerpicked guitar riffs, “Glass Factory” lays out the themes haunting the record. “I can tell you all about the fragile things we make,” Chronopoulos sings in a near-wail. “They spend their lives about to break, should stay up on the shelf.”
Much of the storytelling comes from his theater experience. Among other projects, Chronopoulos worked with American Repertory Theatre on Witness Uganda, which later went to Broadway as Invisible Thread.
“A lot of the cast overlapped with the team that worked on Hamilton,” he said. “So I got to see that take off.”
The raw honesty in his lyrics also reflects a decision to pursue an artist’s life close to home — “a lounge singer, that’s what I am, I’m not some touring national act” — and what he’s been exposed to as a result.
“I play a lot of rural bars, and I see the other side of things,” he said. “I’m not trying to take a political stance on it, but I see the humanity in a lot of the struggle. My mother’s side of the family had a lot of death to heroin in the last few years and displaced family members hopping around. My little sister, she’s on the spectrum, finding housing for her has been tough. All these things ended up coming out in the songs one way or another.”
Its title is an amalgamation of a famous stripper — “she had 77-inch guns ‘like deadly weapons’ was the way they sold her” — his mother’s maiden name, and Chronopoulos’s early life experience.
“I realized that … certain pursuits, things that I thought were the goal, were actually a dead end,” he said. “I needed to tie them off. They weren’t my path.”
He played sparingly over the pandemic-scarred year.
“I called a few of the places that were still able to be open during the summer and told friends of mine that ran the bar that I’d play for free,” he said. “They were working at half capacity with people still showing up expecting the same service and show; I knew they couldn’t swing it.”
With an open guitar case for tips, Chronopoulos played and sang.
“People wanted to help,” he said, adding that the overall response to original music like his was heartening. “In the food industry, we want to eat a salad that’s from the local farm, but for some reason music is supposed to just come out strictly for scale…. I’m supposed to be counting streams, all that nonsense. That’s what I’ve been railing against artistically for the last 10 years anyway; it’s just self-sabotaging.”
Chronopoulos looks forward to sharing his new material at Twin Barns.
“The place is great, they’re such cool people,” he said. “The beer’s amazing [and] their protocol isn’t insane — there’s a lot of space and good ventilation. It’s a cool old barn and it sounds amazing in there. When they invited me I said that regardless of Covid, we could probably do this safely and make it a good show.”
Charlie Chronopoulos
When: Friday, Jan 8, 5 p.m.
Where: Twin Barns Brewing Co., 194 Daniel Webster Hwy., Meredith
More: facebook.com/twinbarnsbrewing
Concerts
Venues
Palace Theatre
80 Hanover St., Manchester
668-5588, palacetheatre.org
Stone Church
5 Granite St., Newmarket
659-7700, stonechurchrocks.com
Shows
• A Natural Woman (A Carole King Tribute) Friday, Jan. 8, 7 p.m., virtual concert via Palace Theatre
• SOUP (featuring members of Slack Tide and Clandestine) Friday, Jan. 8, 8 p.m., Stone Church
• Dave Gerard & Tim Theriault Saturday, Jan. 9, 7 p.m., Stone Church
• Jeff Daniels with music from his album Alive and Well Enough Tuesday, Jan. 12, 8 p.m., livestreamed acoustic concert via Palace Theatre
• Brooks Play Brooks (Garth Brooks tribute) Friday, Jan. 15, 7 p.m., virtual concert via Palace Theatre
• Wood & Bone Friday, Jan. 15, 7 p.m., Stone Church
• A Night of JGB & The Dead Saturday, Jan. 16, at 5 and 9 p.m., Stone Church
• The All New Piano Men (hits from Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Elton John, Barry Manilow, Freddy Mercury & more) Friday, Jan. 22, 7 p.m., virtual via Palace Theatre
• Russ Condon & Tim Cackett of Town Meeting Friday, Jan. 22, 7 p.m., Stone Church
• Brian O’Connell Fellowship Saturday, Jan. 23, at 8 p.m., Stone Church
• Dave Gerard Thursday, Jan. 28, 6 p.m., Stone Church
Featured photo: Charlie Chronopoulos. Courtesy photo.
