Chad Thompson starts off talking about tanks and burnout. But he’s really talking about songwriting.
The Ferndale-based multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and producer has spent the last 18 months developing a quirky pop-project known as Bandeau. It’s been a significantly refreshing experience for the lifelong musician and creator, but it’s required a careful distribution of energy.
“There can be a choice,” Thompson says, “when it comes to what you’re allowing to drain your tank.” He’s talking, albeit abstractly, about that internal reservoir of elusive energy that every creative person often finds themselves scrounging for, or cobbling together, at the end of their proverbial day. “You have to be careful how you’re using that [energy], too; you can only go so far on a certain tank until you risk beginning to repeat yourself.”
With Bandeau, the distinctly contemplative Chad Thompson delivers a potent and pleasing patchwork of pop-adjacent sonic flavors, complete with danceable beats, splashy guitars, spacey synths, and catchy earworm melodies — something like a nü-new-wave, or a jazz-injected disco, conveyed in a sort of post-modernist cosmic crooner style. Yes. All of that, and more! Bandeau’s debut album, Spirit Fingers, is available digitally this weekend (Bandcamp, Apple Music, etc.), and there’s a formal album-release show booked for January 25 at Outer Limits Lounge. But let’s get back to the tanks …
Thompson admits he was beginning to “feel some burnout” with his “career,” which would understandably be draining his creative “tanks” because for most of the last decade he’d been working in animation, which involved writing, editing, and composing. It’s just that it had been a while since Thompson made art, and specifically music, just for himself, rather than, say, a client.
“There was only one tank for all of that stuff, and it was getting used up by the end of each day,” Thompson says. “Then there’s nothing left for your own stuff; I was using my tank toward lots of other things, really.”
Thompson’s a natural-born performer who’s been making music for most of his life. He and his brother, Keith, grew up out in the sticks of mid-Michigan, near Flint, raised by a musician father who got his boys started on instruments at an early age, indirectly, as a way to stave off boredom out there in the remoteness of their rural milieu. As children of the ’80s, Chad and Keith also got their hands on an inspiration-stoking camcorder, which started feeding their fires for DIY production and nurturing their sensibilities for an inherently entertaining strain of moderately hammy, absurdist anti-humor.
All of that energy was later harnessed, in the mid-2000s, for a dynamic art-rock/dance-pop band known as Johnny Headband, with Thompson on keys/lead vocals/guitar, and his brother, Keith, on bass/backing vocals. It was quirky, it was aerobic — it had props, costumes, and choreography, but the songwriting at its core was finely crafted and served as the beating heart for their performances and for their several albums and EPs, the last of which came out in 2016.
Thompson’s day-job’s demands inevitably put Johnny Headband into a sustained period of inertia, and Thompson worried that his songwriting muscles were beginning to atrophy. “Then I bought a Wurlitzer electric piano just before quarantine, and it reenergized that particular aspect of my life,” he says. “I sat down at that thing and wrote a song called ‘No River,’ which was a Harry Nilsson-esque kinda country-ish song. I thought, 'Whoa, that was pretty good' … Then I started to do another. Then, after four or five more songs, I started thinking, 'OK, well, maybe this is something' … But I didn’t intend to make an album — not, at least, until the songs started fitting together. And so you just start working harder at it, more so than just dabbling.”
And this is work, after all. Thompson isn’t necessarily joking around here — even if, when you see a Bandeau performance, he could likely be in a costume of sorts, potentially a black do-rag with garish tinted glasses and a frill-laden cowboy shirt, maybe. And, similar to Johnny Headband, there could be rudimentary-yet-rhythmic choreography, and there could also be a lingering composite of deadpan melodrama and gonzo vaudeville. But that stagecraft is all very intentional work for Thompson, just as his focus on songwriting also has an air of disciplined stoicism.
“You either have to work at it or play just for fun — there’s no in between for me,” Thompson says. “You could either be having fun and just jamming, or you’re really gonna go for it and work at it and finish something.”
And after so many years away, Thompson simply missed being onstage.
“I love performing,” he says. “But it’s also really hard and it takes a lot of work — I just don’t ever want to half-ass it.”
Looking back at what would eventually become the first song for Bandeau, “No River,” Thompson realizes that the lyrics became emblematic of a specific motivational urgency. “Like, what the hell was I waiting for?” he asks. “Why did I wait so long? It’s about embracing the things you’ve been avoiding and how you hope that you didn’t squander too much time. And then I really felt grateful and appreciative for everyone around me at that time.”
Thompson’s grateful for his early Bandeau-era collaborators — his wife, Michelle, and his brother, Keith, contributed to early music videos and the first live shows. Guitarist/songwriter and kindred contemplative spirit Gregory McIntosh (from the Ypsilanti-music scene) provided lots of guitar parts for Spirit Fingers and recently, officially, joined the band for live performances — you’ll see McIntosh onstage with Thompson at Outer Limits on January 25.
Thompson might speak about music with a beguiling sense of pragmatism, but deep down he also does want to have a little fun up there; he particularly hopes you, the audience, do, too.
And on that note, now that Thompson’s essentially “back” with Bandeau, he wants to play as many shows as possible.
“I get myself into trouble being too solitary in this, when the whole point of it all is to connect,” he says.” You don’t do all of this if you don’t really wanna connect.”
Bandeau will be performing at Outer Limits Lounge on Saturday, Jan. 25. Doors at 8 p.m.
