Meet Chris Kerrigan | Lead Singer and Sole Member of COMPASSION FATIGUE, Musical Theatre Composer, Podcaster

We had the good fortune of connecting with Chris Kerrigan and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Chris, why did you pursue a creative career?
To be honest, I did everything possible to avoid pursuing one for years. But the art kept on pursuing me, and pretty relentlessly! I was way too self-conscious to ever even identify myself as an “artist” until maybe two or three years ago. When I turned thirty, I got promoted to a full-time position at the nonprofit I worked for (the first real job of my adult life) and so I made this ridiculous grand proclamation that my starving singer/songwriter days were over and I would henceforth be suburban, safe, and serious. After about five years of trying at this, something interesting happened: the songs began to muscle their way out of me. It was like they kicked me in the insides until I wrote them and they assured me that if I didn’t comply they would cause all kinds of problems for me in my life. This sounds extremely pretentious but it’s genuinely how it felt at the time. So out of nowhere in 2019, I started to just write songs that were important to me, unceremoniously film myself playing and singing them, and upload them to YouTube and Facebook without doing any sort of meaningful promotion to draw attention to them. Now that I’m a little bit older, I’ve noticed that regardless of the quality or viability of the work, some of the most valuable artistic experiences are made under these conditions. The art is made spontaneously and irrationally by desperate people with no other choice but to do it.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I usually describe my stuff as “indie folk sad-white-guy music that accidentally sounds like musical theatre.” The original mission statement was to approach songwriting in the same way one might approach a craft hobby like pottery or whatever: I’d do it as a self-enrichment exercise and casually share it online without any big effort to promote it (although I admit now that was slightly in denial when it came to how much I actually cared how many people were listening). For the first four years, I slowly built a modest following on YouTube and the occasional encouraging feedback from strangers felt like enough to keep doing it without feeling too pathetic. Eventually I joined TikTok and began to post the videos there simultaneously. The first 28 videos I put up got around 200 to 300 views. Then I uploaded a video of my song “Gluttonous Soul” in August of 2023 and for reasons I still don’t understand, I woke up the next morning to a mind-blowing number of likes and comments. People told me how much they identified with the story of the song (which had to do with overeating and ADHD medication in adolescence). This felt great but also complicated things. I had friends who had gone viral on the platform who gave me advice on how to capitalize on this small success I’d. had (engage with comments, post on a regular basis, etc). I tried to milk it for a while but it began to feel kind of strange and empty. I realized it felt this way because I wanted to be a songwriter and not a content creator. Since this experience, I’ve gone “viral” two more times (with a silly song about how there are twenty-one 7-11s in North Hollywood and with the series I’m working on now in which I’m musicalizing famous political debates). It’s definitely a challenge to balance the feeling of validation you get from people liking what you do and the necessity to be vigilant enough not to turn it into a pandering “look-at-me” sort of thing. I want to make things that matter, and the lesson I learned very recently is that if something matters to you, it almost definitely matters to somebody else. For instance, when I had the idea last month to take a transcript from a 1968 debate between Noam Chomsky and William F Buckley and set it to music, I didn’t’ think for a moment that something like this would have any kind of audience. Then when I put the video up, it caught on very quickly and it was shocking to me how many people said some version of “this feels like it was made exactly for me” or “I have nobody to share this with!”

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I feel like Griffith Park is the unsung hero of our city. There is so much to explore there: the Fern Dell, the public fountain, the old zoo, Amir’s Garden, Travel Town, pony rides…we should all be ashamed of ourselves as Angelenos for how little time we spend in that park. Take your east coast friend and show them how much better it is than Central Park.
Obviously in the summertime the beach is a no-brainer. I have a sentimental attachment to Will Rogers State Beach because I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth in the seaside community of Pacific Palisades right near one of the bluffs that overlooks it. You could make a day of it with a morning hike in Griffith Park followed by a relaxing day at the beach, maybe with a visit to one of the two Autry Museums in between.
I’m going to recommend you eat dinner at Miceli’s Italian restaurant, their second location on Cahuenga. They have singing waiters and a charming old-timey vibe, they’ve been around since `1949 and they even taught Lucille Ball how to spin pizza dough. I should disclose that this is not a fully disinterested recommendation on my part because I am currently employed as a singing waiter at this restaurant. Make sure you order the scampi or the chicken marsala.
Roman Polanski said Los Angeles is “the most beautiful city in the world, as long as it’s seen at night and from a distance,” so it’s generally a good move to take an out-of-town friend to the Griffith Observatory when the sun goes down, especially on those monthly nights when the independent astronomers all come out with there telescopes. They’ll appreciate it even if they don’t care at all about celestial bodies because the view of the city itself is pretty breathtaking.
One important thing to keep in mind: if your out-of-town friend makes a single La La Land reference at any point during this tour, you are morally obligated to pull the plug on the whole thing because they no longer deserve it.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I think if it weren’t for my old friend Sam Payes, not only would I not be a songwriter but I would probably have no musical literacy outside the realm of Broadway musicals. When you’re young and you live in a world of “friends with bands,” it’s an anomaly for one of them to be writing songs that are actually good. Being exposed to Sam’s searing and honest songs at the age of seventeen was extremely inspiring to me and he’s still the best songwriter I know personally. He releases music under the name Super Glass Houses (and he does all of the cover art for my Compassion Fatigue releases). I also want to shoutout my friend Vadim Taver who releases complex and haunting original music under his own name and my friend Tim (goes by “mothy”) who makes passionate, revealing folk songs that could power a train. It feels like a unique time to be making music at home and putting it on streaming services. Musical tastes get more and more fragmented and less and less people have even heard of each other’s favorite artists. To create something that matters to you and put it up as a little signal flare on Spotify for people to find and connect with (because somebody always does) is a really beautiful thing and I admire anybody willing to take the emotional risk required to do it.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compassionfatiguemusic/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@haterchris2011?si=I2RD-vvPYuy_xs68

Other: https://compassionfatigue1.bandcamp.com