Christopher Mansfield was freaking out, he said his hand was shaking, he was sitting on a high stool at the edge of the Origami Vinyl mezzanine and that was weird,.. I don’t blame him, I would have had vertigo for far less than this. When you look at him and his wall of tattoos covering his arms and neck, you would not imagine someone being nervous when playing a free acoustic show in front of just a few people. And I’m not sure that his nervousness was only coming from the hole in front of him, Mansfield doesn’t seem to be comfortable with his recent success, ‘I have a fucking sold-out show with 1200 people!’… He said a little later, hardly believing it. He had kindly accepted to do this short set at Origami just before his show at the Music Box where he and his band, Fences, were opening for Against Me!
The acoustic versions of his songs were drunk to the last drop by the Origami audience, which was much bigger than usual. It was a quiet performance, him sitting and hardly moving his right foot, although his voice was strong and you could hear every single word he was saying.
With a lot of self-deprecating lyrics that he has the tendency to repeat many times as if he was digging into his own wounds (‘I fucked it up everything’ he repeats many times in ‘Girls with Accents’), he tells, with a real melancholy, sad stories about auto-sabotage, like ‘And now’s my chance to finally kiss you/but I got drunk and I passed out’.
When I did some research about him, I saw that Elliott Smith was mentioned in about every single thing I was reading about him, and with lyrics like ‘It’s not like you were really gone gone gone gone/But you were/And I never felt love’ or ‘Somewhere there’s an in between place/A place where my face hasn’t been erased’, I can totally understand why. Add to this a period of depressive drinking (that is reflected in his lyrics), and a stay at a rehab facility for his excessive consumption of alcohol and it is more than enough to build a cliché comparison,… But how many other songwriters have already been compared to Elliott Smith? And Elliott was compared to Nick Drake all the time, something I never really got. Comparisons are never fair, but I would say that Chris’ lyrics are far more direct and literal than Elliott’s, which were building metaphors over metaphors.
Last year, his self-titled debut album was produced by Sara Quin (from Tegan and Sara), who described Mansfield’s songs as a ‘rare balance of patience and urgency’, and ‘honest, haunting pop songs’
When listening to his songs on his my space page, the subtle melodies that were completely stripped down at Origami, sounded much more upbeat when played with a full orchestration, so yeah these are depressing songs but they have the upbeat feeling of someone who has just enough hope in life to write catchy choruses like the ones of ‘Girls with accents’ or ‘Sadie’, or ‘The same tattoos’.