#mlive.com

Coming back to town

AAN: You’ve been pretty open about your love for your alma mater and Ann Arbor, in general. What keeps you coming back?

CRISS: I go back once a year, usually in tandem with some sporting event of some kind, or some event that I’m involved with. I jump at any opportunity to go back to Ann Arbor.

It’s the roots of a lot of important and dear things in my life. It just has an energy that, anyone who is lucky enough to feel it, wants to check in with that energy every now and then. Ann Arbor is a really special town for me that holds a lot of special memories.

Preparing for Computer Games

AAN: For those not familiar with your band Computer Games, what can they expect on June 1?

CRISS: I’ve played music with my brother my whole life. One of the first records we ever made together was made in Ann Arbor. Chuck wanted to record some songs with me one summer and there was a new, at the time, studio at the Duderstadt Center, that was one of the most professional work stations we could have asked for at that point in our lives.

We were always saying to ourselves ‘We’ve really got to get back to the songs we had when we were teenagers. I think two years ago, we had an open window of time so we decided to put some of our old songs together and kind of form this new group called Computer Games.

It sort of hearkens back to what we did as kids, which was play a lot of computer games. The music is heavily electronic and is very playful. It doesn’t take itself very seriously at all. We kind of wanted to give it a name that fit the tone of what we were doing. When we were kids, the games we were playing were actual computer games, but as we got older, they turned into digital music production software like FruityLoops and Logic and Pro Tools and those became our (new) computer games.

Meteoric Rise

AAN: While you remain committed to a lot of different aspects of entertaining, your acting career has really taken off over the past couple of years, earning Emmy and Golden Globe awards. Are you at all surprised that you’ve received these types of accolades so early in your career?

CRISS: It’s a difficult question to answer, because if you say “No, I’m not surprised,’ you sound full of yourself that you expect these things, which I obviously don’t. I will say I’m thrilled and honored that things from the outside have come my way and bestowed me with things that are incredibly validating and very humbling, but that’s not the end game.

I know very well it doesn’t necessarily last forever, and it doesn’t come around all of the time. Much like playing in a band, having a sustainable acting career is a lot like a team sport. Between my manager and publicist, we really work hard on the collective career of this thing that is much bigger than itself. It’s a team sport getting all of these pieces together.

Reflecting Vulfpeck’s rise

AAN: You obviously had a lot of experience playing live music during your time at UM and since in Ann Arbor, including a number of occasions with the guys from Vulfpeck. Is it gratifying to see their careers blossom to the point that they are playing places like Madison Square Garden at a time when yours is doing the same?

CRISS: I’ll never forget, I was in the basement of some frat house playing music. My friend was nice enough to let me play drums, which at a house party, is kind of a gamble. When you have kids partying, ‘Yo can I play your instrument?’ can go in many different directions. It’s common protocol to just not let the guy at the party play your instrument, but he trusted me to play and I was having a great time playing with this bass player. That was how I met Theo Katzman. I’ll never forget seeing Theo around town playing a lot of the same open mics, going to a lot of the same parties and had similar friends.

I would meet guys like Theo or Tyler Duncan and all of these people I would meet, I was so wildly intimidated by. They were my friends, but it was so frustrating, because I would think ‘Is this what it’s like everywhere? This must be what it’s like to go to a music school, because you meet all of these people who are so talented, and I think they are so good.’

You see these guys and think, ‘I think you’re awesome, but I know my tastes are pretty insular and I don’t know if there’s an accessibility for the rest of the world outside of my nerdy appreciation for my brilliant friends. Cut to however many years later, and things are coalescing for Vulfpeck, it’s such a heartening feeling to think 'Thank God, I’m not crazy. These guys are amazing, and this is cool. There is something special and unique here that people really like, outside of my head.’ That is so encouraging to me and the really special part about it is it’s more or less the same group that is more or less doing the same thing they did in college.