Interview: Chester French

The Milwaukee-ish band preps for its debut album on Pharrell Williams’ label

D.A. Wallach (left) and Maxwell Drummey are Chester French
by Steven Hyden April 8, 2009

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Chester French started out as a dorm-room project for Harvard University students D.A. Wallach and Maxwell Drummey, who spent their college years perfecting a hooky pop-soul formula that drew equally from classic rock and the latest hip-hop and R&B sounds. As Wallach, a Milwaukee native, and Drummey approached graduation, their demo somehow reached a who’s-who of super-producers, including Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, and Jermaine Dupri. Williams and West ended up in a bidding war over the group, with Williams eventually winning. In advance of Chester French’s full-length debut, Love The Future, released on Williams’ Star Trak label April 21, Wallach talked with Decider.

Decider: How exactly does an unknown band end up in the middle of a tug-of-war between Pharrell Williams and Kanye West?
D.A. Wallach: It was a matter of making as many people hear us as possible. And we spent a lot of time making this music before we sent it out. You have to really believe in it—I really believe this album is going to be one of the best albums of the year, if not the best album of the year. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, but it’s something we’ve worked really hard on. You have to believe in it in order to bring it to other people and expect them to pay for it. At that point, you’re either crazy or there’s some amount of truth to it, and people will like it.
D: Why did you go with Pharrell?
DAW: Pharrell was the one that liked us for who we were and wanted us to keep doing what we did. His approach was, “I like how you guys produce these records yourselves, and I just want you to keep going. I want to make it easy to put this stuff out and expose it to the world.”
D: Bands traditionally tour for several years before getting signed, but you guys concentrated on making Love The Future instead of playing shows. Is creating a strong demo a better way of getting a label’s attention than touring?
DAW: I think now it is in a lot of ways. There’s a trade-off—if you do it in the meat-and-potatoes touring way, the relationships you’re building with your supporters are so strong. They’ve seen you, and enjoyed the music up close, first hand. Our approach is more following the steps of a lot of hip-hop artists, using the power of the Internet to connect to those folks who we thought would really respond to what we did. We were in college, and we didn’t have the luxury of touring, so we did it however we could.
D: You still live in Fox Point when you aren’t busy with Chester French. Has Milwaukee become a haven for you away from the music business?
DAW: Yeah, it’s great. I also love the music scene in Milwaukee, which is a little under the radar. There’s a rapper I’m cool with named Prophetic who I think does some nice stuff. I met these guys the other night, Fever Marlene; I didn’t see their set but they were really nice dudes. It’s important that we get recognized and expose ourselves in our hometowns. Max is from Boston and I’m from Milwaukee, so whenever we’re in either city we want to make sure that we go out and meet people and they know what we’re doing.
D: Chester French has garnered lots of support in the hip-hop community despite not being a hip-hop group. Why?
DAW: Growing up in Milwaukee and Boston, they’re both incredibly multi-cultural cities, where there’s a lot of different stuff going on. In Milwaukee, especially, the segregation just compounds how obvious the diversity is because you know there are these different worlds in the walls of your own city. It was never that we wanted to consciously fuse rock and hip-hop—it was inevitable. We grew up listening to Dr. Dre and Pharrell and Outkast. These guys are just among the geniuses you could learn from. It was very natural for us to incorporate that music in our production style, and I think that shines through a little bit. One thing that Pharrell said to us, that we remember almost as a motto, is, “Music is music and people are people, and people like music.” We like a lot of different stuff and a lot of different kinds of people.

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