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Gravely James, a.k.a Chris Madronich, is an Americana and Folk singer-songwriter based in Niagara, ON. Growing up in Port Colborne, ON, Madronich spent a decade playing trumpet with a variety of jazz bands, which inspired him to incorporate blues, soul, and rock into his art. Through these experiences, along with teaching himself guitar, he developed soulful songwriting and dynamic performance skills which ultimately led him to Gravely James.
As a solo artist, Gravely James has won many categories in the Niagara Music Awards, placed as a finalist in the Toronto Blues Society “Talent Search” and the National Canadian Songwriting Competition in the Jazz/Soul category.
As of late, Gravely James has been recording with a full band creating a larger roots rock sound. The band just opened up a sold-out show for David Wilcox and is ecstatic to release recent recording projects with Jon Harvey of Monster Truck and Justin Meli up at Chalet Recording Studio.
Gravely James shared the process behind his song Honey. Download the lyrics to follow along.
We talked about:
- Our songwriting challenge to write a song in an unusual mode
- Phil’s strategy for the challenge to examine the unique intervals of a mode
- Neel’s idea to write a classic rock song in Mixolydian for the challenge
- Phil got a new Mac Mini M2 Pro
- How Neel discovered that wi-fi signals in your studio can result in clicking noise in your studio monitors
- Why Chris adopted his artist moniker Gravely James
- How Chris considers band arrangements as he is songwriting
- When you’re in a band, how one person bringing a central idea for a song is arguably best
- How Chris tuned his guitar to an open G to get a different sound (inspired by a mandolin)
- How to incorporate your title in a unique way
- Achieving “complex simplicity” in your songwriting