Chris Brochu: Do Your Best to Do Your Best
IT TOOK AWHILE for Chris Brochu to call himself a musician. He’s always been an actor. That = the profession. The easy identity. Role after role — from independent short films to hit TV show, “Shameless,” to 2019’s World War II-based movie, “Recon” — and life in L.A. to build a résumé in the career that can feel so feast and famine.
On down days, Brochu would wander from the city bustle and into Elysian Park or the Los Angeles National Forest. There, with the wind in his ears and emerging melodies as company, he’d strum the guitar.
“Divinity is within all you see,” he’d sing, feeling the music as his truest form of expression. “All you are is more than you need.”
When Brochu got to Taos at the beginning of the pandemic, he’d play just to play in the plaza gazebo or outside of Manzanita Market. He hadn’t done too much busking before and he wasn’t really trying for money. Still, passersby would encourage him to put out his guitar case. Sometimes he’d make 30 dollars in 30 minutes. The folks at Chokola would give him a yummy discount. The now-32-year-old felt it a good sign to keep singing in this new home he’d moved to for the nature of it and the film ties to Santa Fe and Albuquerque. (Mainly growing up in North Carolina and California, Brochu feels a close connect in mountains and rivers.)
“I play with no expectation,” says Brochu, who’s played at Revolt Gallery twice this year and who hopes to have a singer-songwriter circle around a fire there in the coming weeks. He also plans to release a full album after his fall film work. He’s learned to live more in an acceptance and flow state since the skin cancer scare back in 2014.
“The same week I found out I had cancer was the same week I found out I’d booked ‘The Vampire Diaries.’ It was the worst and best news,” Brochu says. After a couple surgeries, he’d walk barefoot around his neighborhood, reading about Einstein, hoping for clarity. He stopped stressing about this gig or that and started trusting in the grander macrocosmic unfolding.
These metaphysical themes surface in Brochu’s music. In a newer tune, “Eggshells and Landmines,” he considers how humans live, die, theorize. In upbeat, bright-voiced “Home,” Brochu sings, “I tried solving the universe and the answer is what you choose to believe.” Another yet-to-be-named song deals with “the oil to your water,” or, in other words, how some individuals don’t mix well and how you can’t change anyone.
“There are reasons why there are all these colors in the rainbow. It can either be conflictual or complimentary,” says the south end resident, his stainless white linen shirt tucked into his jeans that tuck into his some laceup boots he scored down in Española. A nice tan cowboy hat rides his blonde shaggy hair. The Thunderbird bracelet his photographer wife gifted him shines as a clasp of pulsing strength. So does his attitude of “doing what I can to the best of my ability,” which he repeats often, like a mantra leading him on.
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