There is a specific kind of musician who structures their entire life around the music. Not the kind who talks about it at parties. The kind who takes a job they hate because it leaves enough mental bandwidth to play, who keeps rent cheap, who mails vinyl records to Madrid by hand. Charlie Weber is that kind. And it shows.
Weber picked up a guitar in 2003 — birthday present, acoustic — after watching Bart Simpson get one, immediately quit, and somehow still make an impression. His attention span outlasted Bart's. He spent his high school years at South Huron District High School in Exeter, Ontario cycling through bands: third-wave ska, acoustic pop punk, metal. None of it stuck long enough to matter. What stuck was the guitar.
Solo work came later, during a radio broadcasting program in Welland. He started doing open mics in St. Catharines in 2013 and found that talking about other people's music felt wrong. "Something about talking about other people's music never really sat right with me," he says. "I wanted to do more creatively." A couple of bad band experiences helped clarify things — either the people weren't who he thought they were, or the dedication wasn't there. "People grow up in different ways and grow apart," he says. "It's a bummer but it's also just a fact of life. I just wish I didn't still have all the CDs stashed away in my closet."
So he went alone. Deliberately, almost defiantly. "I wanted to see what stories I had to tell," he says. "It's a scary thing to do — not only write songs about your struggles and fears and insecurities, but also to realize in your second year of college that you're probably not gonna use your fancy diploma for anything more than a wall decoration." The solo project wasn't a fallback. It was a test he set for himself: build something from nothing, put it into the world, see if it holds.
The result is Old Habits, his debut full-length under his own name via Forest City Records, a small indie operation out of London, Ontario that came to him after hearing a track he'd recorded under the band name Major/Minor. The record is, by his own admission, all over the place — Americana bumping up against pop punk bumping up against outlaw country. His reference points are Frank Turner, The Gaslight Anthem, Tom Petty, The Offspring, Into It. Over It., Blink-182 and Townes Van Zandt. The elevator pitch: "It's like Tom Petty if he grew up on punk rock." The longer answer: "It's kind of a mixed bag, and I think Old Habits as a record reads that way — it's very much a reflection of my attention span."
Frank Turner's name comes up more than once. Weber saw him open for The Offspring at what was then the Molson Amphitheatre — his dad had gotten them tickets — and the image of a skinny British guy with an acoustic guitar screaming folk songs with more intensity than most full bands landed hard. "I instantly felt a connection and it was at that point that I thought: I could do that." His dad bought Love, Ire and Song on the way out. They played it the whole way home in bumper-to-bumper Toronto traffic. Weber credits his dad for most of what he listens to, directly or otherwise.
Writing, for Weber, is autobiographical by design. No metaphors, no literary distance. "Basically what you hear is what you get," he says. It makes him self-conscious sometimes — comparing himself to artists who write like they're going for a doctorate in literature studies — but he's made his peace with it. The process goes: he writes the main idea, gets it roughly three-quarters finished, then brings it to his backing band The Glorious Failures to fill in the instrumentation. Then a producer tells him it's crap and he starts over. He describes this without any apparent bitterness.
I’m an autobiographical artist, so when I write a song it’s generally about a feeling or an event that I’m going through or more likely have gone through and come out the other side. ... I had to learn the hard way that you have to be true to yourself, nobody wants to sound like a carbon copy of a better band.
The biggest technical obstacle in his career has been ADHD, specifically its effect on his relationship with click tracks. He can't use one — not as a discipline issue or a preference, but as a neurological fact. The way his brain processes rhythm and divided attention simultaneously makes the standard metronome beep actively counterproductive. "Most people think I'm being lazy or faking it," he says. "If they can't understand it, it doesn't exist." The fix — swapping the click for a programmed drum beat in his headphones — works fine. Getting producers and bandmates to believe him before they try to fix him first is the part that doesn't. "I've always played by feel vs. 'how many beats are in this measure,'" he says. "It's frustrating for sure, but if that's the worst thing I have to overcome then I think I've lived a pretty charmed life."
As of now, the sophomore LP is in demo stages with funding from London's Community Arts Investment Program behind it. A lo-fi folk punk EP written during quarantine is already out on Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-can basis. A full-band livestream — a ticketed farewell show for Nich, the departing drummer of The Glorious Failures, before he moved 20 hours away — is sitting in the can, set for public release on YouTube. And Weber has been quietly booking socially-distanced house concerts across Ontario: fans hire him, invite 10 to 12 people they trust, and he plays. He'd rather be touring. But he'll work with what the moment allows.
"You need to have that DIY mentality because no one is going to do it for you," he says. It's the most straightforward thing he says in the whole conversation. And it's obvious, listening to him, that he actually believes it — not as a slogan but as operating procedure. The job he hates. The low expenses. The vinyl to Madrid.
All of it, on purpose.
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Web: charlie-weber.ca
Music: Charlieweber.Bandcamp.com
Facebook: CharlieWeberMusic
Instagram: @CharlieWeberMusic
Twitter: @GloriousFailure
Email: CharlieWeberMusic@gmail.
