The Bittersweets
Bio
The Bittersweets are Chris Meyers (guitar, keyboards, vocals), Hannah Prater (vocals, guitar) and Steve Bowman (drums). And—to put it simply—they live up to their name. They join together yellows and blues, sunniness and melancholy with evocative song lyrics and lush arrangements, and lift it all to epic heights with transcendent melodies and Prater’s gilded voice. On every track of their new album, Goodnight San Francisco, their recent live set, Long Way From Home, and their 2006 full-length debut, The Life You Always Wanted, the Bittersweets weave a captivating tension between hope and poignancy that rings true.
“I think the name fits us because a lot of the songs talk about life’s tensions and that you can’t just have happy or just dwell on the sad,” Prater explains. “I feel like a lot of the songs embrace both, the beautiful and the ugly, happy and sad—life’s paradoxes.” And the Bittersweets are well-equipped for that sort of musical alchemy.
There’s a reason why Prater’s singing is such an effortless pleasure. Both of the California native’s parents are music teachers, and she sang in jazz groups and musical theatre productions and pursued a degree in vocal performance, before discovering a different style of vocal expression in Joni Mitchell and Over the Rhine. Prater drew the best from each approach to hone her sumptuous vocal instrument.“Hannah has so much vocal control,” says Meyers. “That’s a rarity for pop vocalists. The technical stuff just seems like second nature to her.”
Before the Massachusetts-born Meyers even picked up a guitar in his late teens, he was an accomplished jazz pianist. His musical epiphany came during college: as he dug deep into the history of American roots music in his studies (he wrote at length about how country music made its way from front porches to radio airwaves), it forever changed his musical palette. “It turned me on to a bunch of artists that I never really listened to before—everything from bluegrass to Johnny Cash or Gram Parsons, the whole spectrum,” Meyers recalls.
Meyers is the Bittersweets primary songwriter, and he crafts poetic, often abstract lyrics and the kind of melodies that send shivers of sensory pleasure down the spine. “He keeps everything so interesting,” says Prater. “He keeps me thinking, he keeps me on my feet and having to interpret, and that’s something I’ve always loved to do.”
Bowman—a drummer since grade three and a native of Oakland, California—has an impressive rock and pop pedigree. With an approach to playing that’s remarkably sensitive and dynamic, he’s logged time with Counting Crows (during their seminal album August and Everything After), Third Eye Blind, the Avengers’ Penelope Houston, San Francisco rock band Luce and plenty of others.
“He was the first drummer that I’ve ever played with that asked me for lyric sheets,” Meyers recalls. “Steve’s drumming is not about what he can do technically. He supports the song. I really feel like he’s thinking through when to put a fill in when to put an accent in and when to just sit back.”
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