We recently connected with CS Taber and have shared our conversation below.
CS, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?
My career in music is a tale of two places and times. In my teens I began a serious exploration of creating and performing original music in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. I was in a series of progressively serious and talented groups, culminating in a three year run with the folk rock band Three a.m., while I was also going to college in east Tennessee. Three a.m. was a four piece group in the Laurel Canyon mold that toured throughout the southeast U.S. in the 1980s, gaining a decent following and producing a series of demo recordings that we tried to parlay into a record deal. When we finally got our opportunity, we went into a studio in Nashville with a record contract on the line, We were a group of four pig-headed songwriters who could all share the limelight in live shows, but when it came to the studio, the record company producer wanted us to mostly record my songs, leaving the others in secondary roles. In a story as old as rock and roll, this proved to be the end of Three a.m. Following that experience, I stepped away from professional music for a long period, going to graduate school, getting married, and raising a family. But I never lost my love of songwriting, so years later, when I found myself at a job 1200 miles away from my partner during a global pandemic, I filled the isolation with a serious return to music. I partnered with Everett Young, a producer and multi-instrumentalist with a jazz background living in Florida, and Patricia Taber, a wonderful singer living in Nashville, to produe an album as Chucky Trading Co. We released our 15-track double album simply called Chucky Trading Co in December of 2021, and found considerable critical support and strong interest from fans around the globe! Our music was streamed, downloaded, and shared by people in over 100 countries. And yet, we remained a virtual rock group, living in 3 different states and never performing together live! Now we are planning our first tour together in the spring of 2024, following the upcoming release of our second album, A Sky of Hopes. What I regret is allowing so many years to pass between these two periods of professionial creativity!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am CS Taber, a singer, songwriter and guitarist for Chucky Trading Co. CTC is an independent folk rock band of three musicians. In addition to me on vocals and guitars, we are Everett Young on keyboards, bass, drums, and other assorted instruments and Patricia Taber on vocals. We work with friends and session musicians to fill out our sound. We have released one double album (Chucky Trading Co, December 2021), one EP (Four Days in May, June 2022), and have an upcoming album (A Sky of Hopes, spring 2024). We have released 15 singles, with strong radio play and streaming numbers. We have had multiple songs chart on independent radio in the US and several other countries. Our recorded work is availble on CD, digital download, and streaming at our website (https://www.chuckytradingco.com/), bandcamp site (https://chuckytradingco.bandcamp.com/), and wherever music is streamed (https://linktr.ee/ChuckyTrading).
I think what sets CTC apart is the familiar, retro sound in a modern production package. We produce new original classic rock in the Laurel Canyon tradition that made California the center of 1970s rock music. I am most proud of the response we have received from critics and fans around the world, from Brazil to Spain to the UK, and here in the U.S.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
From my earliest days as a professional touring musician in my teens, I always believed that music creativity is for young people! Seasoning and gray hair meant you would inevitably become a pale reflection of your youthful creative outburst! Aging rock bands that I saw seemed more like cover bands, playing the songs of their own creative youth.
What an ageist arrogant idiot I was! I now know that people at any age can be intensely creative, and I know many artists across multiple genres who are creating the best art of their lives with gray hair!
In my own case, I am experiencing a burst of creativity I never experienced when I was half my current age, and the songs are better than ever.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Like most artists, I love seeing the response to my finished music from critics and fans alike.
But the greatest rush I get from music creativity is the intensely personal feeling of actually creating!! That moment where a song starts to take shape is the biggest thrill for me. Alone with an acoustic guitar or bouncing ideas with a collaborator, that moment of creation is magical. I have two different creation processes, which are both incredibly rewarding. Most often, a song takes shape over several days or weeks as I noodle through some riff or melody fragment, eventually finding the full melody and words that come together into a finished song. This feels like intentional, active construction of something entirely new, and I love it! The less common process is when a song just appears in my mind like a bolt from the blue! It doesn’t even feel like I am writing the song as much as I am channeling it! I used to think that this was simply magical or spiritual, without explanation, but I now understand more about how the human mind works unconsciously to create and solve problems. Occasionally an entire song or other creative art is entirely formed outside of awareness, dropping into consciousness as a complete product. I also love it when this happens.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.chuckytradingco.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chuckytrading/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chucky.trading.9
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChuckyTrading
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/chuckytradingco
Image Credits
Susan Taber Patricia Taber Steve Leacock