Chris Herin (US) - Crossover Prog?

Chris Herin (Tiles, Discipline) is a songwriter, guitarist and keyboard player based in Trenton, Michigan, USA.

Chris co-founded the heavy prog band Tiles back in 1993, as well as occasionally working with another local Detroit area band, Discipline over more recent years. Despite being involved with two entirely separate bands, he has managed to balance his musical activities with his day job as a senior commissioner's representative with the Internal Revenue Service.

His first solo album 'Hiding in Plain Sight' is a dark conceptual work about how he coped with his father's 10-year struggle with Alzheimer's, and was released via The Laser's Edge on 1st November 2024, with sales proceeds being donated to Alzheimer's nonprofits in honor of his late father's battle against the condition.

'Hiding in Plain Sight' consists of 11-tracks co-produced with longtime Rush producer Terry Brown and Canadian producer and mastering engineer Peter Moore. The album features guest contributions by Alex Lifeson (RUSH), Peter Frampton, Martin Barre (JETHRO TULL), Kim Mitchell and members of Porcupine Tree, Spock’s Beard, Saga, Crown Lands and Tarja amongst others.

Over the years, Chris had demoed songs with Terry Brown as they cropped up, and he wanted to record them in some form or other so that they didn't slip through his fingers. After Tiles went on hiatus in 2018 following the band's 2016 double album 'Pretending 2 Run', and the retirement of their vocalist Paul Rarick, he decided to seize the opportunity to do something of his own.

The songs on 'Hiding in Plain Sight' had already been developed up to a point, with guitar and bass parts plus some basic drum patterns having already been written and recorded, so Chris decided to finish them off and put them out to the public, though he has made it clear that he "never necessarily set out to do a solo album".

Not rating himself particularly highly as a vocalist, Chris began recruiting singers to be part of the project, an exercise which eventually led to him expanding the outreach to other potential contributors, with around 30 guest musicians eventually becoming part of the album. The fact that many of the songs reflect on his late father's battle with Alzheimer's disease during the 2000s was one of the factors that helped convince these other musicians to contribute to the album.

Almost everybody who participated in the album had some close family member that had suffered from vascular dementia or Alzheimer's, so this was a strong motivating factor for people to get behind the cause.

Chris has stated that it was not his intention to create a progressive rock album of the kind that Tiles has previously released, but he deliberately set out to introduce some variation into the overall style of the album. Musically, the songs range from hard rock, to prog, some gentler and quite laid back material, and even a few jazzy touches.

Due to the number of musicians involved, Chris has said that any kind of tour or live performance is highly unlikely, but videos for some of the album's songs have already been done, and some acoustic dates with a selection of the guest musicians who contributed might be arranged in the local area. He is also planning to release alternative mixes of some of the songs to highlight different aspects of these guests' contributions to the album.

Thought the timing is uncertain at the moment, following the release of the solo album there has also been some talk of getting Tiles up and running again, with a couple of tracks already written, and a huge backlog of ideas ready to be turned into songs.

CD The Laser's Edge - LE1082 (1st November 2024, US)

Digital album 1st November 2024

https://lasersedge.bandcamp.com/album/hiding-in-plain-sight.

https://open.spotify.com/album/4FQ91XgUEqOMnvRvmPghQ1.

https://awesomeprog.com/releases/75192.

I've already asked the Crossover Team to start off the evaluation.