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Catching up with Jocelyn & Chris before Vail performance

Alan Sculley
Special to the Daily
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Jocelyn & Chris will take the Hot Summer Nights stage on Aug. 23
Courtesy photo
IF YOU GO...
  • What: Moe’s Original BBQ Hot Summer Nights featuring Jocelyn & Chris
  • When: August 23 at 6:30 p.m.
  • Where: The Amp, Vail
  • Cost: Free
  • More information: Visit GRFAVail.com

In a do-it-yourself career that goes back about a decade, Jocelyn and Chris Arndt, who front the band Jocelyn & Chris, have never been ones to sit idle for long.

“We’re always racing ahead and looking for the next thing to do,” Jocelyn said in a late-July phone interview.

But a pandemic can stop just about anything. And that’s what happened in March 2020, just as this brother and sister from Fort Plain in upstate New York were finishing a new album planned for release ahead of a summer tour.



The band had seen their career gain momentum in 2019 when Jocelyn & Chris made their national television debut, performing the song “Outta My Head” on the “Today Show,” while seeing the song “Kill in the Cure” chart at AAA radio. So it wasn’t great timing to see a major tour get canceled and the new album put on hold.

But the album, “Favorite Ghosts,” benefited from the pause.

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With everything at a standstill, the Arndts stepped away from rushing to finish “Favorite Ghosts,” came back to the project a short time later and realized some songs weren’t everything they could be. And now that “Favorite Ghosts” is out, they feel things worked out for the better.

As their musical careers took off, the siblings continued in school, eventually earning degrees from Harvard University.
Tina Pelech/Courtesy photo

“Honestly, I’m thankful for the album being the way it is,” said Chris, who joined his sister for the interview. “I’m more proud of it than anything else that we’ve ever made. But it’s a little bit funny to think about the fact that the version that the world almost got (two years ago) is so different from the version that the world ended up getting.”

The Arndt siblings are justified in being pleased with “Favorite Ghosts.” Produced by their drummer, manager and co-owner of their record label, David Bourgeois, and seven-time Grammy winner Joel Moss, the new album is a potent and varied showcase for their considerable songwriting skill, Jocelyn’s powerhouse vocals and Chris’ tasteful guitar work. The album rocks on “Sugar and Spice,” a sassy tune with a big groove, “Skeleton Key,” whose heavy guitars and galloping beat highlight this tasty track,” and “Break Me Down,” a particularly stormy tune. But there are lighter moments as well. “Run Away” is an inviting pop-rock tune, and “So Far To Fly” adds a folk element to the mix, while things get downright delicate on the quasi-title track, “My Favorite Ghost”.

Chris said he sees “Future Ghosts” very much as a musical step forward.

“Everyone says about every album they ever release, but this album for us, more so than anything we’ve ever made, it is right down the line where we see ourselves musically, and I think a lot of the songs are songs that we would not have had the musical maturity to actually record and write and do the way that they are, even just a few years ago,” he said.

The title song is a prime example of the songwriting and performances reaching a new level. 

“I don’t think even when we were recording our previous album, which was ‘The Fun in the Fight,’ I don’t think we’d have been able to pull that off,” Chris said. “It’s so stark and intimate and just like, I think it took us growing into who we are in the past year or two in order to be able to make that work as a song. I mean, I think that’s probably the most salient example, but the whole album is like that.”

Such observations might be true, but the talents of Jocelyn, 26, and Chris, 25, have been apparent pretty much since they picked up their instruments – Jocelyn the piano in fourth grade and Chris guitar a short time later. By middle school, they had formed a band called “The Dependents” and were writing songs together and performing around upstate New York.

A pivotal moment came in 2013, when Bourgeois saw Jocelyn & Chris at Fonda Fair in Fonda, New York and signed them to an artist development deal with his Bridge Road Entertainment label and became their manager. Even with that deal in place, the siblings continued in school, graduating from high school and then attending Harvard University where Jocelyn earned her degree in English and Chris did the same in computer science with a music module.

The entire time, they were getting their music career off and running. In 2016, they released their stirring full-length debut album, “Edges,” followed a year later by the live album “30,000 Miles.” By this time, they were touring extensively and building relationships with radio programmers.

Those efforts began paying dividends with their next album, 2017’s equally strong “Go,” as the single “Red Stops Traffic” charted at AAA radio. The 2019 album “Fun in the Fight” and now “Future Ghosts” have produced four more singles that have cracked the top 40 at AAA.

Writing music and performing together since they were pre-teens has obviously created a unique bond between the siblings that has also benefited their music. They share an innate songwriting chemistry, while the family ties have only reinforced their commitment to building their music career together.

“It (being siblings) makes it so easy to communicate (as co-writers) and we can get ideas out and it’s really just seamless working with one another because we know each other so well,” Chris said. “We’re also roommates, so if we ever get angry with each other or have a creative dispute, you kind of have to solve it because it’s not like you can stay angry at each other for more than a very short amount of time when you have to go eat dinner and cook in the same kitchen.”

“Like basically there’s never going to be any argument where we can get so mad about something that we can just leave,” he said. “It’s not really an option. So ultimately, we just have to figure it out and work through it all and it just works out that way.”

Things are definitely working for Jocelyn & Chris as the band begins touring to support “Favorite Ghosts.” Fans can expect the new songs to figure prominently into the band’s shows this summer.

“This record’s been a long time coming and much anticipated, so it’s nice to finally have it out and be able to celebrate it with everybody,” Jocelyn said. “It’s very cool.”

What fans can also expect are some songs will be notably different live than the recorded versions.

“It’s always really, really fun to just try to reimagine and take these songs that we wrote when we were at a different point in our lives and try to do something different with them or try to take them where we are at musically now,” Chris said. “We have ‘Witness’ in the show right now, which is like a rock song from two albums ago, and it starts off with this big epic guitar solo that’s not anywhere on the record. That’s a personal favorite of mine as the lead guitarist. But (we have) a bunch of moments like that. Honestly, it’s really fun to try to adapt these songs from the studio to the live performance and see how they kind of like live with the energy of the live space.”

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