Q&A: Chris Barron, lead singer of Spin Doctors

Chris talks abut his art, his unexpected rock star friends, and one of the band's best, most overlooked songs.

As both a solo artist and the lead singer of Spin Doctors, Chris Barron has been making rock music for over 30 years. The Spin Doctors’ biggest hits still get played all the time, and if you dig deeper into their catalog, you’ll find excellent songs like “You Let Your Heart Go Too Fast,” a jaunty reflection on doomed love that reached #8 on Billboard’s rock radio chart in 1994.

Recently, Chris sat with me in a Manhattan coffee shop to talk about writing that particular tune. Along the way, we discussed his high school years with the guys from Blues Traveler, the way his cat affects his guitar playing, and the process he’s developed to sustain his decades as a professional musician.

Highlights from our conversation are below. To find Chris’s latest music and get the dates for his solo shows, visit TheChrisBarron.com

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Mark Blankenship: I love the imagery in “You Let Your Heart Go Too Fast.” Did those lyrics come to you quickly, or did they require a little more effort?

Chris Barron: I like that you put it that way, because it’s never the same with any two songs. My two most popular songs: “Two Princes” I wrote in half an hour, if that, and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” took me three weeks to write. I wrote 15, 20 drafts. It was painstaking, word by word. “You Let Your Heart Go Too Fast” was one of those. I worked very hard on it and wrote tons of drafts.

MB: My favorite section is near the end, where you say, “I see the feathers that infringe your heart/ I see the blood ooze from around the dart/ Cupid spites the sense / That keeps two mismatched souls apart.” It’s such a vivid way of describing Cupid’s arrow, you know? And it tells me that whoever you’re talking to should not be dating this other person. But you also make it clear that once you’ve been hit by the arrow, then you’re never going to do the sensible thing.

CB: I’ve always liked that because most songs are about why people should be together, even if it’s unhealthy. This is a very practical song. It’s an elaborate image, but it’s something your grandmother would say. “You two shouldn’t be together!” 

MB: Do you remember where the song came from?

CB: Oh yeah. I had an ex-girlfriend that our manager subsequently had a relationship with. She and I were on-again/off-again, and it was tearing him apart. She wasn’t ready to settle down. So the bank tower in the [first verse of] the song is the Williamsburg Bank tower. She used to live on Flatbush Avenue. We would both go home with her, and we’d go by the bank tower.

MB: So you’re talking to your manager directly? 

CB: Yeah, it’s directly to him. There was some lingering acrimony between us, and back then I was a much better songwriter than communicator. Songwriting has always been a retreat for me into my most difficult feelings. It’s always been how I found solutions to the most difficult dilemmas in my life. And the song worked. He heard the song and said, “Buddy, yeah. You’re right.”

MB: What was it like during this period in your life? You’d just come off this major success with the first Spin Doctors album, and a little while before that, you were still a New York-centric band. So much happened so fast. 

CB:  It was great. Two or three years before that song came out, we had been playing at the Nightingale Bar on Second Avenue. No bigger than the coffee shop that we’re sitting in right now. The stage was the size of the counter those people are behind, and it was six inches off the ground. So when the show was over, we stepped down six inches and we were hanging out with the audience. We knew everybody. We didn’t have cell phones. We didn’t have the internet. But somehow, we found each other and we would hang out all the time. “Oh, it’s Monday night. Blues Traveler is playing at the Nightingale.” So we’d all go see them on Monday.

MB: Blues Traveler! Is that how you ended up playing on the H.O.R.D.E. tour with them? Because you knew them from that scene?

CB: You know, I went to high school with those guys. Trey Anastasio from Phish. All of the Blues Traveler guys. We’re from Princeton, New Jersey. The Blues Traveler guys and I went to Princeton High School, which was the public school. Trey went to Princeton Day School, which is one of the prestigious private schools in that area. I used to say that when you got thrown out of Princeton Day School, you went to Princeton High School. Bobby Sheehan, the bass player of Blues Traveler, went to PDS and got expelled. So he ended up at Princeton High School. He taught me how to play “Daytripper” on the guitar. 

And then after high school, I had gone to Bennington College in Vermont for one year. My stepmother – she’s Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong – spent all of my college money on a Ferrari Dino and a mink coat and about a dozen Saks Fifth Avenue suits, so there was no money for me to go back for my sophomore year. I came home to Princeton and worked in a kitchen. And the year I went to Bennington, those guys went to New York to do Blues Traveler. And that following summer, I’m back in Princeton, and those guys came to visit me. I played them “Two Princes” and “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” and a couple of other things I was working on, and they said, “Dude, you’ve gotta move to New York City.” Later that night, Bobby and I were at this fountain in Princeton. He said, “I dare you to take all your clothes off and jump in the fountain.” I said, “Okay!” So I dropped trou and jumped in the fountain. Then he said, “Now, I dare you to move to New York City.”

MB: And eventually, you got integrated into this rock scene.

CB: Right. A little while later, I’m the lead singer of this band in New York City, and this woman and I were dating. And we’re the power couple of our tiny little microscopic scene. She and I break up, and we’re cool. But then [my manager] enters the picture. It’s a little bit of a love triangle. 

MB: And from there, you get “You Let Your Heart Go Too Fast.” I appreciate that the intent of the song is legible even for people who don’t know that story. But with this information, I can see exactly what you’re talking about.

CB: I think one of my strengths as a lyricist is my ability to put a real story in the background of a song. If you were there, it’s very accurate, but if you weren’t there, it’s still vivid. I love to write a lyric that completely works as a song, but if you were there, it’s like reading the book of the experience. I always joke – I have this spiel on stage, “Don’t fuck with me, because I will write a song about it.” I will abuse the power of song.

MB: I mean… fair warning. And to go back to your work as a songwriter and a musician: Do you feel like your process is more defined now than it was back then?

CB: What I’ve realized is that I spend an hour and half on stage, and that’s only on the days I have a gig. The rest of my work is the process. The job is all the stuff that isn’t on stage. My job as a singer is getting enough sleep so that my voice recovers after a gig. My job is going to my voice lesson. My job as a guitar player: I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and generally have a less sleepy hour. Like this morning I woke up at 3:45 and practiced the guitar for an hour. The cat comes and thinks it’s really about him. We’ll snuggle for a while, and then he’ll walk over to the guitar. That’s his way of saying, “Okay, play the guitar now.” Mathematically, those hours in the middle of the night are the biggest part of my job. I take it seriously. I don’t take myself seriously, but I take the fact that somebody bought a ticket to see me very seriously. I have to commit to the process of being able to do what they’re coming to see me do. 

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.