Chris Michols

Chris’s musical career started back in the early 90's when he learned to play part of the theme from the Godfather from his friend David Hellman (who later founded the successfull sleaze rock band Crash Diet). That little taste of music gave Chris the courage to ask his oldest brother about letting Chris practise using his precious guitar. Andreas, Chris's big brother also helped him get started by teaching him the intro to Guns and Roses Paradise City. David and Chris started a band, Warpath, and made their first record. The band played together for a year or two. During that time Chris had begun writing his own songs, very much inspired by the Nirvana Unplugged album. So with a teenage-rockstar-dream-clouded head Chris teamed up with Peter Wikner (now music producer and founder of Stagger Productions) to start an all unplugged band. This band later transformed into Dislife. The post-grunge band Dislife played together for seven years. One of the songs Chris wrote for Dislife ended up on the sixth Halloween episode of the world wide known TV-show Dawson’s Creek. Following Dislife's break-up in 2002 Chris together with Peter Lindolm (guitarist in Dislife) and Karl Jansson (percussion in Dislife) started the very first Chris Michols Band. They played together for a year and recorded a 3 song EP. The years 2003-2007 is very much a blur. Chris may have started a band or two or he might have done something completely different. Or both. Anyway, lets just skip ahead. In April 2008 the solo album The Long Road was released as a zip archived online album. It has since then been downloaded over 100 000 times. All though Chris himself thought of The Long Road as a demo album with a questionable recording quality many still regard it to be one of Chris's best releases. On this album there was a called These Memories. It topped charts at Sweden's, at that time most import music site, and won the publics vote in the competition Miller Fresh Sounds 2008. Fall 2009 the EP Fade In was released as the first official Chris Michols production. Following the success with The Long Road and Fade In Chris needed a band for live perfomances. Mikael Bodin and Henrik Wahlgren was kind enough to join in. A few concerts later they decided that the lineup (acoustic guitar, organ and vocals) was way to thin. They needed some bass and drums. Fredrik Olsson and Martin Hast, previous members of Dislife, was the natural choice. Now the acoustic act was all of a sudden a rock act and consequently Chris started writing songs that suited the genre better. After more than a year of writing, arranging, recording and producing the band finished their debute album, Scar Trek. It was released in August 2010. In 2011 Henrik, Mikael, Martin and Fredrik started the Swedish punk band, Björnarna and Chris went back to writing and recording singer/songwriter-material. Early 2012 Chris was contacted by guitarist Andreas "Berra" Berthagen who said he just wanted to play in a band again after the break up of his former band Shots and Motion. Chris said that he did have the music but no musicians. Three hours later Berra got back to Chris with the news that he had successfully put a band together. At the time Chris was finishing up the recording of the single From the Start. He wanted some really good female back up vocals for the song and luckily one of the just recruited band members was Frida, former singer and songwriter of the band Kinema. Her vocals perfected the song and it was sent to the competition Svensktoppen Nästa, hosted by Sveriges Radio. After several steps of selection including jury and audience vote Chris Michols Band performed their song in the nationally broadcasted final with almost 2 million listeners. Late 2012 Chris Michols Band released the EP Live at HiJazz. In early 2013 Chris wanted to make a music video but had no idea of how to do it. So he did what he could with what he had and made a video for the song "Killer" with just flashing text. The video was a great success and landed at about 100 000 views the first week. Having now understood the value of having music on Youtube Chris contacted Peter at Stagger Production. Together they made a video for the song If. In only 13 days the video amassed 150 000 views. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.