Talking With Chris Cron, “The Beach Boys Guy”

Chris Cron, “the Beach Boys guy” as he is known in some circles, has just released a brand new album featuring Beach Boys covers, songs inspired by the Beach Boys, plus a brand new song he did in conjunction with the Beach Boys, Sweetwater Music, and JHS Pedals, Benson Amps, and Keeley Electronics.

Memorial Day Weekend is considered the unofficial start of the summer and what better way to welcome in summer than a conversation with Chris, talking about his new album, a collaboration with Sweetwater Music, and singing onstage with the Beach Boys.

Talking Beach Boys With Chris Cron

JIM MONAGHAN – Chris Cron, his brand new album sounds so much like the Beach Boys. And well, I guess there are some people, Chris, who call you “The Beach Boys Guy.” Welcome back to WDHA. Good morning.

CHRIS CRON – Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for having me again.

JM – So tell me about the genesis of this song. I know you did it with a couple of other guys in conjunction with Sweetwater Music. And you tried to do this in what 24 hours? And it sounds amazing. Tell us about it.

CC – Thank you. So I got a message a couple months ago from a girl at JHS Bell over at JHS. And she said that they wanted to do some kind of collaboration with me. JHS is a pedal company. They make guitar pedals.

And they have a really cool show on YouTube, the JHS Show.

Anyways, I’m not really a guitar player. Keys is my main instrument. I play enough, but not enough to be like a collaborator with a guitar pedal company.

Beach Boys Documentary

So I was questioning why they wanted to reach out. And I got on the phone with her and she said, so over the past couple years, we’ve been working on these pieces of gear in collaboration with The Beach Boys, their management company, for this documentary that came out on May 24th on Friday.

And it is all the gear supposed to kind of like mimic different sounds or be stuff that they could have used on Beach Boys albums.

So anyways, they thought, you know, they were going to go up to Sweetwater and try out all the gear, do some video stuff around that. And they thought we should do a song in a day, like write a song in a day and use all this gear to kind of like mimic the Beach Boys sound.

Let’s Get “The Beach Boys Guy”

And so they were sitting around their conference room and one of them was like, hey, hold on a second. I saw this guy on Instagram. We should contact him.

So they reached out to me to like come up there to Fort Wayne, Indiana and write a Beach Boys song.

JM – So when obviously the Beach Boys songs were being written, Brian was just meticulous about what he was doing and labor for hours and hours and hours in the studio. How do you do that? How do you try to capture all of that in 24 to whatever 36 hours?

CC – I prepared a little bit like I had a, I think I had that little arpeggio piano riff. And so on the flight over, I’m thinking like, what is the song going to be?

And we talked like as a joke, it would be funny to like write a song about a sales engineer at Sweetwater. So for those of you who don’t know what Sweetwater is, it’s a the biggest online music gear, music equipment distributor in the United States. You can buy everything from ukulele strings to oboes to microphones.

We thought that would be funny.

So it kind of came up with some lyrical ideas, but we got there basically and had to like write this sonfg rom scratch. So we sat down in the morning, sat around the piano, came up with this thing, laughed a lot about the song.

I had this title coming in “As Long As I’ve Got Music, I’ve Got You.”

And then when we started to meld the Sweetwater angle into it, it just all made sense.

Oh, yeah, as long as I’ve got music, I get to keep calling this sales engineer.

JM – Right, we should point out that when you call, and I don’t want to make this one to sound like a commercial for Sweetwater, but they do…I’ve spent enough money there lately…they do assign a sales engineer to you and you work with that person and they stay with you.

And in fact, I’m waiting for Spencer to get back to me on something I purchased. Spencer, If you’re listening, let’s go.

But that person you are, you know, in regular contact with, and there are all kinds of references to that person in the lyrics of this song.

CC – Yes, there are. And also, when you order something from Sweetwater, they send you candy. And well, so there’s usually some like Sweethearts or Bit-O-Honey in there.

So we reference Bit-O-Honey in the song.

There’s a line in the song that I was a little bit worried about at first because it says, “Am I just another customer?”

And if you don’t know, it might sound like, oh, yeah, he or he is something else.

JM – You do all the vocals on there. And it really does sound like the Beach Boys. How difficult is it to do that?

CC – I’m at home in my studio with kind of like all the time I need and no one watching me. And I can just stay in there in front of a mic and kind of like mess around until I find land on parts. I have way more time.

If I make mistakes, if my voice squeaks, no one’s there to hear it.

But when we were there at Sweetwater, I had a few hours. So like arrange all the vocal parts, which if you’re familiar with the Beach Boys music is a lot.

So I kind of just went with the standard thing.

Brian Wilson was a fan of vocal groups like the Four Freshmen and Marble Shop Quartet.

So everything was like tenor 1, tenor 2, baritone, bass. I kind of went that route and I wrote on a legal pad. I wrote out all the notes for each part. I sat there at the piano while they were tracking some guitars or while they were filming some stuff or mixing some stuff. And I just scratched out all these parts and then got up at the mic and sang them.

JM – One of the things that you know about the Beach Boys was it’s a family. So you’ve got three brothers in there and a cousin. So the harmonies when family members sing together, it’s just different.

The Bee Gees before they went up on the helium stuff, the Bee Gees had it early in their career. The Cowsills, they still have that sound. It’s incredible. And the beach boys obviously.

Now you’re doing all of these voices. So I guess it’s kind of a family thing.

CC – Is that would that be incest? No, that one. It’s just me. So I kind of like have character voices for each of them.

Mike Love is kind of like this guy, he sings the bass parts a lot of the time though too. So it’s a little more nasally.

Brian Wilson has this kind of back at the throat thing a little bit more and then Carl’s in between.

Al is also on the brighter side but not as nasally.

So I just kind of like when I stack the vocals, I just changed the way I sing a little bit more.

JM – Well, it definitely works. There’s no question about it.

Tell us about the new album which also came out on Friday. There’s a ton of Beach Boys stuff on here, some covers and some new things of yours. Tell us about it.

CC – Yeah. So it all can just started out with the video I did on Instagram of how to sound like the Beach Boys.

And after that first video hit, I started writing some originals. I got a friend here in the Nashville area named Ben Shive and he’s an incredible songwriter and arranger.

The three songs that we wrote together were called “Don’t Be Afraid,” Ella Grace,” and “I Said I Love You.”

And he arranged all the like horn and flute and orchestral parts on those.

And then just as I was going as I was making content for Instagram, I would do covers and I would do.

I’d had to have something to make a video for. So I did “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift in the style of “Barbara Ann.” And I did “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus in the style of “Heroes and Villains” a little bit.

And so it’s just this kind of eclectic mix of everything from the beginning of the Beach Boys surf career route to the 70s when they were making Sunflower and surf stuff.

JM – I just saw something the other day “Caroline, No,” which I think you use some of those new pedals on that sounds really good.

CC – Yes. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I’m a big fan of “Caroline, No.” Keely, one of the pedal companies that was there, sent me two of their pedals one’s called California G, and it’s a 12-string emulator and the other one’s called I Get Around. And it’s like a Leslie speaker emulator.

So I ran those through that and it kind of felt like a little bit more modern indie pop indie rock kind of thing. So that’s why I went that direction.

JM – Why a 12-string simulator as opposed to just, let’s get a 12-string guitar?

CC – Six less strings to tune. And, because you can run any of your guitars through it and then get this kind of thing it also, it does more than just emulate a 12-string.

It does a chorus, it has a delay on it, it can pitch all the strings up two steps to two octaves so you’ve got like kind of a lot more color that you can make out of it. It’s, it’s a really cool pedal.

Singing Onstage With the Beach Boys

JM – One of the things I also wanted to ask you, and I forgot to ask you this the last time we had you on a few months ago is you actually got the sing in concert with the Beach Boys.

How did that come about, what was that experience like?

CC – Oh, this is weird but I met John Stamos through all this Instagram stuff and he introduced me to Brian who is the not Brian Wilson but Brian Eichenberger. He’s the music director for the Beach Boys.

He lives 15 minutes up the road for me so we’ve hung out and made friends and he’s he’s awesome. I’m going to hang out with him soon.

And he, I saw that they were playing in Kentucky in Beaver Dam Kentucky. And I reached out to him and he’s like yeah bring the family come on up I’ll get you in to the show.

So we show up. He got the kids oversized Beach Boys t-shirts because they didn’t have kids sizes.

We got to go on the bus and I met some of the band guys and the bass player was like hey you want to sit in with us tonight?

I look over at Brian and he’s like yeah sure come sing my part on on “Kokomo.” I was like what’s your part? So we had to show me what his part was.

So then we got to go up on stage the whole family during “Barbara Ann” and dance which was weird because they didn’t say like “oh welcome the Cron family to the stage,” it was just this random family dancing on stage with little kids.

And then and then they stopped and went into “Kokomo” and I grabbed the mic and that was it.

JM – For WDHA listeners who want to learn more about you I know they can go to your Instagram page.
ChrisCronMusic but where can they get this album?

CC – So the best place to get it would be Bandcamp.com if you go to ChrisCronMusic.bandcamp.com. The whole album is there you can listen to it you can also download it and have it for free.

There’s a pay what you want thing but if you put zero in there. It doesn’t matter to me if you want to put a dollar five dollars whatever in there that would be wonderful but you can have it for free. That would be the place right now, I would say to go check it out. It is or will be on streaming very soon.

JM – The Beach Boys documentary is out on Disney + and Mike Love, in fact Mike’s he’s bringing the touring band to the PNC Bank Art Center next weekend. So with the unofficial start of summer this weekend, I thought we’d bring you on Chris and talk all things Beach Boys.

CC – Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Here is the link to the Beach Boys Studio Effects Collection at Sweetwater that we were talking about.

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