“When even a handful of people truly listen, it’s a sacred gathering.
I’ve never believed in numbers — only in the current that moves between one soul and another.
Music, like love, is an act of attention. It’s presence, not performance.
Whether it’s a piano in a quiet room or a stage filled with light, the meaning is the same:
something unseen passing between us, alive for a moment, then gone.
That’s where the magic lives” - Chris Braide
Life in Music:
I have spent my life chasing the mystery that sits behind melody — the invisible hand that moves a chord change, the flicker of memory that turns into a lyric. For me, songwriting has always been less about craft and more about excavation — a kind of Jungian descent into the unconscious, where fragments of childhood, love, shame, beauty and death are all waiting to be understood, rearranged and redeemed through sound. Every song I’ve written has been a small act of self-analysis, an attempt to find the pattern inside the chaos.
Music, when it’s honest, is psychological work. It’s the bridge between the shadow and the light — the reconciliation of opposites. I’ve never trusted the purely commercial impulse, the pop confection designed to distract rather than reveal. I’ve been drawn instead to the artists who risked self-revelation: Talk Talk, Cathal Coughlan, Kate Bush, John Lennon. The ones who didn’t just perform life, but interrogated it.
Through every chapter — the studios in London, New York and Los Angeles, the long nights with people like Cathy Dennis, Stephen Lipson or Sia, the quieter collaborations with lyricists like Chris Difford or Dean Johnson — I’ve learned that creation is communion. You sit at the piano, you wait, and if you’re lucky, something larger than you arrives. You touch the numinous for a moment, and then it’s gone. All art is that — the pursuit of something fleeting and eternal.
I have seen the arc of fame, the way it lifts and devours. I’ve seen good men lose themselves to applause, and others become ghosts long before their bodies give out. I’ve sat beside some of my heroes and watched the light go out of their eyes when the cameras stopped. It made me realise that what truly endures is not the illusion of importance, but the sincerity of the work. You leave behind songs like messages in bottles (to coin a great song) — little sonic testaments that say, I was here, I felt something, I tried to make sense of it.
The older I get, the more I’m drawn to stillness. The applause fades; the noise recedes, our bodies age. What remains is the work itself — the albums, the words, the people I’ve made them with. I feel most alive when I’m in that private, unguarded space with a piano or a friend who understands the same ache. There’s a line from Jung that has always stayed with me: “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” I think that’s the work of every artist — not to accumulate trophies, but to approach the truth of one’s own being.
I’ve come to believe that songs are the psyche made audible. They hold our secrets, our contradictions, our longing to belong and our fear of being seen. Each time I finish one, I feel like I’ve shed a layer of misunderstanding. It’s how I’ve learned to live — by listening inward and turning the sound of my confusion into something melodic, something that might console another person in their confusion.
I was never drawn to being a celebrity entertainer . In fact, I always felt a quiet mistrust of it — as if that demanded something I could never give without losing something precious. My time felt sacred, and my peace was rare.
From an early age I was driven, but not by the usual ambitions. I wasn’t chasing fame or money. What I really wanted was to inhabit the world I heard in the records I loved — to step into that atmosphere of sound and feeling. My idols weren’t celebrities to me; they were portals.
I fell in love with the act of making records — that alchemy of song and sound. When studio time was expensive and hard to come by, I’d ache for it. Lol Creme once said, “Chris Braide lives to write songs.” And it was true — I still do. That’s always been the pulse that runs through my life, since as far back as I can remember.
Whenever I was signed as an artist — from Anxious to Atlantic — I felt the machinery of it all closing in. The styling, the posing, the pretence. I was often packaged as a sort of poppy, glam boy, probably because of my obsession with Marc Bolan, but my heart was somewhere else entirely. My music leaned more toward the introspection of Paddy McAloon than the glitter of glam rock. I wanted to be taken seriously as a musician, a writer — not a performer in costume.
Every time I was told to “play the part,” something in me recoiled. Performing to backing tracks, or trying to be all sexy in videos felt cheap compared to the intimacy of a piano and a real song. I could sit and play and sing anything from the age of ten — why should I pretend otherwise? The piano was and always will be my anchor.
The truth is, the studio was my stage, and it still is. That’s where I feel most alive — surrounded by sound, lost with my headphones in that dialogue between emotion and melody. Fame always felt like a distraction from the real work, the quiet magic that happens when you touch something invisible and turn it into song.
Music has given me everything, and at times it has extracted its toll with equal precision. The industry can be both seductive and inimical — a labyrinth of acclaim and amnesia — but I’ve learned to find meaning beyond its theatre. The work itself became my compass, my quiet act of defiance against transience. I’ve been fortunate to build a life from these frequencies — songs that slipped beyond the self and took on their own sentience in the world. If I hear 80 thousand people singing one of my songs in an Arena or a radio station blaring out one of my anthems like Unstoppable, Invisible or Flames it is still a profound feeling, because I know the stillness and solitude from where it came.
After all these years, I still find that moment miraculous — to dream about writing songs the world might one day know and love… and then to see it happen.
In time, I came to see fame not as a summit, but as a distortion — a mirror that fractures more than it reflects. Around me, I’ve watched its casualties: once-radiant figures hollowed by the echo of their own mythology. Yet through it all, I’ve held onto something untouched — the quiet, almost childlike wonder that first drew me to sound. That innocence isn’t naïveté; it’s the one part of the self the world can’t commodify. It’s where the music still feels new.
If there’s a legacy I’d want to leave, it’s that — not fame, not fashion, but feeling. To have written music that allowed people, even for a few minutes, to glimpse the beauty and the fragility of their own inner world. To have told the truth in melody. To have walked through darkness and returned with something worth sharing.
Art, at its best, is empathy made manifest. And empathy, at its best, is love with understanding. That’s all I’ve ever really tried to do — to understand myself.