In these days of manufactured celebrity, it takes a lot to stand out from the cookie-cutter crowd. It takes someone with real talent, guts, charisma, and maybe a wardrobe that won’t earn him a GQ spread anytime soon.
Someone, that is, like Chris Sligh. Problem is, there isn’t anyone “like Chris Sligh” except for Chris Sligh. And that, of course, is the point. If you watched him rock it and sock it back to American Idol on Season 6, or riff with Jay Leno and Little Richard on The Tonight Show, you know that you will never, ever forget him.
For Chris Sligh is a genuine original, blessed with a golden voice, a style of songwriting that communicates even as it defies the commercial “rules,” and a world view that encompasses edgy humor, rebelliousness, and rocksolid faith.
All these elements breathe life into every moment of his new album, Running Back to You. From the soaring resonance of “In a Moment” to the sly rhyming of “Love is Raining Down,” Sligh manages to be funny, entertaining, provocative, inspirational, and maybe a little cheeky, all at the same time. His music is rich in character; his character overflows with music. His reverence is no less real for being at times irreverent.
And more amazing than this is the fact that, for all the ground he’s covered so far, this unique artist is only just starting to tap into what he has to offer to the world.
From the beginning, Chris Sligh’s story didn’t conform to the norm. He was born into a musical but conservative family. His father was a gifted guitarist, singer, and songwriter who nonetheless banned non-classical music from his household. At night he would play recordings of works by Mozart or Beethoven as bedtime music; Chris, at age four or five, would listen, picking out and singing along with individual parts of the composition – maybe the second violin or lead viola – until finally falling asleep. Growing up in Germany, where his father worked as a chaplain among American troops, Chris was in his own words a “typical jock.” His enthusiasm for sports mirrored that of millions of guys his age back in the States – yet being far from home, he also developed a complex way of looking at life, in which elements of skepticism and worldliness tempered his church-based upbringing.
“When you look back at past leaders, both church and historical, they all had a rebellious streak. Obviously, I wouldn’t put myself in the same ballpark as those leaders, but I have always had that rebellious streak…I want to find truth and that makes me ask a lot of questions. In asking a lot of questions, you sometimes question authority. But I’d rather err on that side than be led blindly down the wrong road.”
As with his music and theater, which began taking root during high school, the seeming contradictions in his outlook ultimately strengthened him artistically. Inspired by actors such as Jack Black, Will Farrell, Kevin Spacey, and Ben Stiller, all of them leading men who infused their roles with offbeat elements of character, Sligh developed an approach that involved finding that place where the way he presented himself onstage intersected with elements of his offstage personality.
Beginning his college study in pre-law at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, Sligh transferred in his sophomore year to Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, an equally fundamentalist institution but one that also offered more advanced opportunities for achieving his goals. “I wanted to major in music,” he says. “This freaked my parents out, because music is the most unmarketable degree there is. But I told them, ‘I don’t need jobs. I’m going to be a singer!’ And of course, that freaked them out royally.”
Despite having had no previous formal instruction, Sligh progressed rapidly in the school’s vocal performance program, to the point of understudying major baritone and tenor roles in student opera productions and being invited to audition both for The Juilliard School and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. At the same time, he pursued a parallel interest in theater, going beyond the Shakespeare roles he had tackled in high school to earn an A in playwriting and explore the Stanislavsky Method of stage performance.
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