Chris Stamey

Interview with Chris Stamey.

Chris Stamey began writing and playing music in grade school in Winston-Salem, NC, in the

mid 1960s, in what is known now as the Combo Corner scene. In 1976, while studying music

composition at UNC-Chapel Hill, he self-released Sneakers, one of the very first American

“indie” records. The following year, he relocated to Manhattan to play and record with Alex

Chilton in the burgeoning CBGB rock scene, then formed The dB’s with fellow Carolinians Will

Rigby, Gene Holder, and Peter Holsapple, with whom he made several acclaimed records of

original material, including Stands for deciBels (self-produced with Alan Betrock)

and Repercussion (produced by Scott Litt). 

During the next decade and a half in New York, Stamey worked with a wide variety of

musicians. He recorded well-received solo records for A&M and Warners and was a part

of Anton Fier’s Golden Palominos project, alongside an international touring cast that

included Michael Stipe (R.E.M.), Jack Bruce (Cream), Carla Bley, and Bernie Worrell

(Talking Heads, George Clinton). He continued recording and producing upon returning to NC

in 1993. 

His recent releases include The Great Escape, Lovesick Blues and Euphoria, as well as Falling

Off the Sky with The dB’s and A Brand-New Shade of Blue with the Fellow Travelers. As a

producer and a featured singer/songwriter with the Paris-based Salt Collective project, he

collaborated with Matthew Caws (Nada Surf), Juliana Hatfield, Richard Lloyd (Television),

Matthew Sweet, Peter Holsapple, and Susan Cowsill, among others. As a producer, arranger,

and mixer, he has worked with over a hundred artists, including Ryan Adams, Alejandro

Escovedo, Kronos Quartet, Flat Duo Jets, Skylar Gudasz, Branford Marsalis, Tift Merritt,

Le Tigre, Those Pretty Wrongs, and Yo La Tengo. 

From 2010-2018, Stamey was orchestrator and musical director for an international series of

concert performances of Big Star’s classic album Third, alongside Big Star’s Jody Stephens, Ray

Davies, members of the Posies, R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, Wilco, and Yo La Tengo; Thank

You, Friends, a concert film of these arrangements, was released by Concord in March 2017. He

currently tours as a member of Jody Stephens’s Big Star Quintet, whose line-up includes Mike

Mills (R.E.M), Pat Sansone (Wilco), and Jon Auer (Posies). His original radio musical about the

early ’60s in Manhattan, Occasional Shivers, premiered nationwide on Christmas Day 2016. A

“songwriting memoir,” A Spy in the House of Loud (Univ. of Texas Press), was published in

2018, followed in 2019 by his first printed collection, New Songs for the 20th Century, with a

companion two-disc CD (Omnivore Recordings). 

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