A Chat with ChameleouS (21.08.26)
If you value craftsmanship over algorithms, albums over singles, and songs not made for trends but to connect with listeners, then you’ll probably take a shine to ChameleouS. Hailing from Tennessee, the six-piece band wanders through various genres, swirling across realms and keeping you guessing with every note. We speak with frontman Mac Bartine about ChameleouS, their new album, upcoming plans and much more.
OSR: Cliché, but a great opener. How did ChameleouS come about? What drew you all to music?
Bartine: We’ve all been musicians for decades (my mom is a professional musician, so I literally don’t remember a time when I wasn’t singing and playing instruments). The 6 of us slowly came together over time through random introductions and chance meetings.
The longer version: The first time anyone in the band met was 2002. I put an ad in the Daily Beacon, the student newspaper at the University of Tennessee, looking for people to play music with. By the time Rich Adlin answered, I’d already had a few practices with someone else who responded first, but we still got together to play. There was a lot of mutual respect right off the bat, but we only played together a couple of times. Jump forward to 2009, Bryan Wooten and I had become friends through our mutual friend Brad Coulter, and the 3 of us formed a band that Bryan played lead guitar in.
A decade later, in 2019, Rich was taking yoga classes taught by my wife Jill, who has pretty excellent taste in music and creates some great playlists for her classes. Rich gave her one of his old band’s CDs to listen to, thinking she might like it because of a similar vibe to some of her playlists. She played it for me, and I immediately recognized it because Rich had given me the same CD when we met in 2002. Rich and I got back together and jammed some, and started hanging out a little more. Then the pandemic hit and started to recede a bit, and Rich and I were both starving for the chance to play some live music.
He invited me out to a jam with some of his friends; we had a great time, and pretty quickly started thinking about forming a band. I’d had the idea for a band called ChameleouS that would genre-hop within and across songs, and I knew I wanted my friend and former bandmate Bryan to play pedal steel and lap steel in it, and to have keyboards and for our mix of instrumentation to make us sound distinct regardless of what genre we were playing. Rich is pretty well connected in the Knoxville music scene, and he brought the rest of us together.
OSR: Like chameleons and their colours, your music is diverse, with Wicked Din being a collective of everything. Why do you play in a variety of styles instead of sticking to a solid, single genre?
Bartine: Honestly, because it sounded like a fun and challenging thing to do in a band. It’s relatively easy to play cover songs from different genres, but turning original songs into genre hoppers is another animal. We wanted to play any genre we want or even mix multiple genres in the same song. That’s risky because it may not work, and even if it does work, people may not identify with music that isn’t easily put into a box, but we’re fine with that. It’s up to us as experienced musicians to make it work. It’s up to people hearing us to decide if they want to give us a chance. Happily, people have been pretty excited to hear something that’s both hard to pin down and familiar at the same time, and what started out as a hopeful experiment is proving to be worth all our effort.
OSR: You mention that the songs from Wicked Din evolved over time? How did they evolve – was it only melodically, or was there emotional evolution as well?
Bartine: I wrote the first versions of all the songs on the album between the late 90s and mid 2000s. My first wife died of breast cancer in 2009, which pretty well wrecked me for a year. I have a lot of newer songs we could have played, including ones written for ChameleouS, but I wanted to give those older songs a new life. The melodies stayed the same, but the lyrics were updated, and the tone of the songs expanded in all kinds of different directions when we started playing them as a 6-piece band.
Over the decades that the songs have lived and grown through, I haven’t just been changing as a person; I’ve been growing as a musician. Grunge rock songs got some swing to them. Folk songs became psychedelic rock anthems. It was planned to a degree, but my bandmates are all very experienced musicians who brought their own styles and favorite genres to the band, and the rest was an organic growth into the name ChameleouS.
OSR: What can you tell us about your album Wicked Din? Is there a backstory or theme?
Bartine: The name Wicked Din comes from the title track, which has its own story (you can read about that on its song story page on our site, which has lyrics, the circumstances when I wrote the song, and some recording notes: https://chameleous.com/songs/wicked-din). We chose it for our album title because 6 people pulling in a bunch of different musical influences didn’t start as an especially listenable project. We were having a blast, and we knew where we wanted to take our music, but ‘wicked din’ was a pretty apt description of some early shows and practices.
The cover art incorporates one of my paintings – a triptych called The Trio – which I had designed into a scene depicting a restaurant booth in the foreground and our band name and album title spray-painted over my paintings. We’re all pretty responsible family men, so the scene was more of a silly inside joke than anything especially meaningful.
OSR: What do you hope people take from Wicked Din, and what do you take from it?
Bartine: It’s a throwback to the era of vinyl records and albums that were made to be listened to from start to finish. If there are people who do that and enjoy the experience, then the album has achieved its purpose. I hope Wicked Din reminds people that listening to an album in its intended song order can be an experience – a journey. And if they like that journey, there is so much amazing album-era music for them to dive into!
OSR: What does music mean to you?
Bartine: Music is the most transformative human creation in all of history. It can pump you up, piss you off, depress you, make you giddy, turn you on, make you think, make you dreamy…it’s deeply ancient, and it’s brand-spanking new. Anyone who doesn’t keep a little music in some part of their soul is deeply vulnerable to the crazy-ass woes of our modern world, and is probably a broken person in more ways than one. In short, music is central to a life well-lived, and that makes being a musician a magical gift to ourselves and to anyone who hears us. Making good music is sacred to me and to my bandmates. We love playing together; we love playing for people; we love recording.
OSR: Performing live can be a transformative experience. What is your most memorable gig to date, and why that show?
Bartine: As I alluded to earlier, what we’re working to create has taken some time to get right, so my favorite gig is pretty much always our most recent one. We’re constantly getting better at being ChameleouS, so every time we play out, our audience gets us a little bit more than the gig before. They have more fun, we have more fun, and then we go practice more, and it keeps getting more enjoyable for us and for the audience.
OSR: If you were introducing a new listener to your music, what song from Wicked Din would you recommend?
Bartine: It would depend on their musical tastes and what they’re in the mood for. Right now, my personal favorites are ‘Life Fever’ and ‘Unshakable No’.
OSR: What makes ChameleouS unique?
Bartine: A lot of creative dreaming, time, very purposeful intention and consistent work, sprinkled with just the right amount of pixie dust.
OSR: What can we expect from the band in the future?
Bartine: If you like Wicked Din, you can consider it our barbaric yawp to the world saying “this is a wild record, and we’re just getting started”. There are multiple seasoned songwriters in the band – not just me. We easily have another 20 albums worth of songs ready to work up and record. As much as we’ve grown as a band over the last year, I honestly can’t wait to share more albums with the world.
OSR: Do you have a message for our readers?
Bartine: It’s easy as hell to be mean to each other these days. Being kind to the people you meet is as much a balm for your own soul as it is to theirs. Fall in love with doing something that fires you up and inspires you. Listen to our album!
Many thanks to Mac Bartine for speaking with us. Find out more about ChameleouS on their official website, Facebook, Instagram, Bandcamp and Spotify.
This artist was discovered via Musosoup #sustainablecurator
