Chris Velan’s music is born of duality. He sings of things big and small, of darkness and beauty, love and destruction, and of the struggle for personal fulfillment against the doubts that so often hold us back.

A classically trained guitar player from the age of nine, Velan grew up listening to an eclectic mix of his dad’s music collection: Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Willie Nelson, and Van Morrison, his sister’s early 80’s New Wave cassettes, and his uncle’s extensive reggae vinyl collection.

After an active music life attending college in Vermont, Velan traveled to New Zealand, Australia, India, Nepal and Indonesia with a beater guitar strapped to his backpack. Seeing world poverty, suffering and inequality up close led Chris back to Montreal to attend law school at McGill University. In order to maintain sanity while forging his way toward a law degree, Velan formed the band Equalizer, featuring a hybrid of root reggae and rock.

Despite label interest and a growing local fan base, Velan made the difficult decision to leave Equalizer after graduation and continue his pursuit of the law as a means to affect social change.

For a year, he wore a suit and tie to work as an apprentice attorney at a Vancouver law firm while writing songs morning and night. “I felt like I was two different people,” he recalls, “Sometimes even tapping out songs at my desk at the office.” A call from college friends presented what would be another life-changing decision. Zach Niles, then a concert promoter, and Banker White, a multimedia artist, had just received support from the United Nations to make a music documentary project in West Africa aimed at telling the story of a humanitarian crisis through art and music.

Equipped with only a video camera and Velan’s guitar, the three traveled to The Republic of Guinea to tour UN refugee camps where Chris performed shows for the refugees. At one such event they met the musicians who would become the subject of their documentary, and ultimately a lifelong inspiration: A band calling themselves The Refugee All Stars. Each had stories of limbs lost, loved ones murdered, and other unfathomable horrors. Chris describes meeting the All Stars as the first moment he knew that he was doing exactly what he was born to do. The film “Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars” helped bring the All Stars back home to Freetown, where Velan produced their first studio work. The music they recorded became Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars worldwide debut album, “Living Like Refugee”.

With renewed inspiration and self-assurance, Velan returned to Montreal to record his own first solo album, “It’s Not What You Think.” Velan toured regionally to promote the album’s independent release in 2003 while finishing the All Stars documentary and writing new music.

In 2005, Velan returned to the studio outside Montreal to record his second album, “Twitter. Buzz, Howl” – a continuation of the themes explored on the first album, but with a stronger first person sensibility and a confident blending of musical and thematic influences.

Velan toured more extensively throughout the U.S. and Canada, refining elements of his performance, and began working with a loop pedal to create his own live samples. He describes the process as elemental and minimalist, but the sounds he creates live are rich, deeply layered, and constantly changing.

In 2007, Chris spent half a year in California, recording demos, playing live shows, always writing, and performing frequently at LA’s Hotel Café. His time in Los Angeles won him many new fans and formed enduring relationships with a larger community of musicians, including members of the Brushfire label’s Animal Liberation Orchestra, and Tim Bluhm of The Mother Hips, who produced Velan’s latest album “Solidago.” “Solidago” gets its name from the late-blooming Goldenrod plant, and represents the blossoming of Velan’s musical identity.

Many of the new songs were written and experimented with at live shows in and around Los Angeles. Velan’s vivid imagery and graceful storytelling reach new heights on “A Year Can Change A Lot” while “Wobbly Bones” manages to convey both the horrors and hope witnessed in Africa. “House Upon A Hill” conveys a loving and grateful sense of place. “May Your Soul Get To Heaven” finds profound spirituality in a book of superstitions and offers a blessing in the form of a lullaby.

           In this, his third solo album, can be heard the culmination of a journey from a nine year old boy holding a giant classical guitar to a mature artist finally giving himself permission to let go. Now twenty-five years removed from the classical training of his childhood, Chris still doesn’t play with a pick.<!--EndFragment-->