CHAPS is an Alberta-born, California-based singer-songwriter who tells sharp, closely observed stories about place, displacement, and landscape. His is a music about the bigness of small feelings and the freedom we find in dark corners, so long as we care to look.

Rooted in the textures and sensibilities of traditional country and western, he leans as well on the hazy atmospherics of contemporary folk pop and the bracing acidity of post-emo indie and alternative. His lyrics-- tender and evocative, but laced with an acerbic humor--are the suture that holds these disparate tendencies together.

The result is a music that is both earnestly traditional--but that rejects gimmick and pastiche--and fully contemporary, magnetized by its own moment. His debut full-length album, In All Directions, embodies this spirit. It is the work of a queer kid who grew up on the plains of southern Alberta, reared on country troubadours and songtellers, but who somehow ended up wandering the streets and dance floors of Los Angeles.

It documents the richness of contemporary queer folklife, the bittersweet pleasures of being a perpetual stranger, and the strange ways we find our footing when the bottom falls out of everything.

About In All Directions

This collection of songs is not a passive, pastoral portrait afforded by a reserved distance from its subject. This album tells the story of life among its people and places. Honoring a childhood steeped in folk music, CHAPS embraces what is hard won about the relationships we encounter, those we meet in passing and those we hold in perpetuity. The grounded, guiding lyrical emphasis reminds one of the portraits of folk artists of decades ago, particularly in its keen attention to labor and the everyday – bringing towns and sights into the white-yellow light of daybreak so as to admire beauty perhaps otherwise unnoticed. 

The result is a warm, attentive assemblage of cross-continent folkways that gathers its soul from stolen conversations outside gay bars and solitary drives along two-lane coastal California roads, pausing on the renegade beauty of wild fennel while recalling that recipe, aching on that tryst, or swimming in “Velveteen Green.” While admiration is certainly its centerpiece, In All Directions harnesses its intimate gaze to shed light on the inner fears of bad actors: "Can you find a place below / between the prairies and the snow / something more than a pile of bricks and a family name?" 

While his musical lineage honors folk tradition, CHAPS is undoubtedly contemporary, voicing the questions and desires that murmur in the minds of young folks yearning for the intimate spaces they feel are “home” but have yet to name as such; those impatient, untranslated grasps for connection that often stay in the bars, dance halls, or nude beaches where they’re born  – "drinking down the purple night / punch a hole straight through my skull with pounding bass and flashing lights / pour out whatever’s left inside / it’s a deadweight souvenir." In “Summer Boys,” we are invited to listen at a storied enclave of queer life, a particular beach in British Columbia where an understanding of willow limbs is needed to find  a long-sought inclusive place. Each song is a meditation on how communities of practice like the beach are forged through lived experiences. In All Directions is a witnessing of intimacy in spaces public, private, and particularly the in-between. 

CHAPS exudes a tender, precise insight honed by a youth felt distinctly apart in body and yearning. If the lapping shore of this album is intimate embrace, fallen tears, and hard feelings, its oceanic depths chart the changes befalling a community and a world – those “Young Men in Suits” who sow devastation yet coat the throat like honey. The songs ask their listeners what we learn when we are attentive to the meaning passed by word of mouth, through signs and symbols, touch and current.

-Kristen Skjonsby (Garden Grove, California, 2026)

Photo: Drew Wadden