After two decades in the shadows with Pela and Augustines, Chris Arthur steps into the light. Underneath The Scar is a debut forged in heartbreak. songwriting as survival.
Produced by longtime friend and Augustines co-founder Eric Sanderson, the album turns Arthur’s raw voice memos into intimate acoustic recordings while preserving their vulnerability.
Its ten songs remain in the order they were written, tracing his journey from emotional collapse towards resilience and hope.
In this FM Pro 10Q, Arthur discusses overcoming imposter syndrome, preserving fragile performances in the studio and why he remains committed to the album format in an industry increasingly driven by playlists and short-form discovery.
…Hearing it changed how I heard myself, and it was just enough to allow the word ‘maybe’ into my vocabulary.
Q1. Underneath The Scar came out of a period when songwriting became almost a survival mechanism. At what point did you realise these private songs were becoming an album?
When the songs started reflecting my life back to me and kind of showing me how I was moving through the stages while processing it all. When you’re going through something like that you start looking for any sign of a turning point or a light at the end of tunnel.
I learned you’ll cling to any moment that gives you a sense of that relief and completely ignore rational doubt, trying to propel yourself quickly to the next phase of getting through it.
In My Veins was the gut punch that told me there were no short cuts here. It was my rock bottom that came after thinking I might be starting to climb out of it. I saw her at a concert and it destroyed me in a way I wasn’t expecting.
My brain was trying to find a way out of the mess and my heart violently stepped in to say “no way, not so fast, I’m in charge here”. But when Go Ahead and Go came along I saw myself stop taking all the blame.
For whatever reason you attack yourself first. They’re perfect and you’re the problem. But you slowly realize there’s two people involved and it’s not all on you. Up until this point the songs were like journal entries. They were just emotional reactions to actual moments that happened.
This song showed analysis and movement. It was where I saw a story unfolding and not just singular, isolated feelings on a page. This is where I thought for a brief second that this could get interesting if, in fact, the songs kept coming. But i was never going to say it out loud.
Q2. You kept the songs in the order they were written, allowing the record to follow the relationship breakdown and recovery chronologically. Why was preserving that emotional timeline so important?
It was just honest. It’s the way it happened. If you listen to All That Glitters Isn’t Gold and Strangers Now, the first and last songs on the album, I think you’ll hear two very different people there. You can hear and feel the vulnerability in both but in vastly different ways.
If I were to stand them up side by side, one blows over like a feather and the other seems like an immovable object. To me anyway. That’s transformation. That’s evolution. That’s an emotionally authentic human experience that happened in real time and captured in art. Preserving it or capturing it, however you want to say it, the important part to me was just getting out of its way.
Q3. You spent years working around artists and touring rather than putting yourself at the centre. What was hardest about finally allowing yourself to step forward as the songwriter and performer?
By the time I started playing music in high school my best friends were already all super talented and were way ahead of me in that department. It just seemed like I didn’t really belong there with them and by natural process I kind of ended up being the guy that was just hanging around but not really asked to play. I think it’s safe to assume I wasn’t good enough. That “not good enough” seed was planted early on.
Fast forward a few years and one of those friends asks you to help out as a tour manager instead of playing and that “not good enough” seed that was planted years earlier that you’ve been watering over the years, telling yourself you’re not good enough while playing in bands, has grown roots and really starts to grow.
Now you’re around professional musicians and the talent level gap that you clearly see and naively compare yourself to, seems insurmountable. So you adapt and try to become helpful in other ways and just be thankful you’re still around it all and around artists being artists.
Oddly enough, you feel at home in that environment but you always feel like just a guest. But you see everything, hopefully absorbing things and you pay attention to the details and learn. So when you’re struck down in life and you start writing songs because you have to, to get through it or survive it, you do it without really thinking and just go with it. But sharing them?
That was the hardest part. That’s where you feel like the imposter, the fraud, the unwelcome guest. You’ve trained yourself to believe you weren’t good enough for years and years because that’s what you always told yourself. Sharing them with professionals, people you’ve looked up to and admired for so long, that was really hard for me. I was really scared.
Q4. Eric Sanderson believed in the project before you fully did, and your friendship goes back more than 25 years. How did that level of trust change what you were willing to reveal in the studio?
I first sent Eric a voice memo recording of some music I had written a guitar part for but couldn’t come up with a melody so I used the lyrics of an old Grandaddy song we all loved, bending their melody into something manageable.
That’s the long way of saying a cover song. But to me it was something sneakier. It was something musically I came up with masked as a cover song. Somehow it relieved the pressure a bit and the burden of it having to be good. I sent it to Eric who never even responded that he got it.
After a few days had passed, I got a text message from him with an audio file. I played it and was shocked. Eric had somehow mixed it and made it sound like a credible recording. My voice, my harmony, my guitar sounded credible to me for the first time.
He did that without being prompted or asked. He just did it. Hearing it changed how I heard myself and it was just enough to allow the word maybe into my vocabulary.
Q5. FM PRO TECH Q: The album favours acoustic-driven songwriting and organic performances over heavy polish. What recording and production decisions helped preserve that vulnerability without making the record feel unfinished?
When I wrote the songs and recorded the original voice memo demos I was just utterly ruined. They are really raw and emotional. There’s a real frailty about them that actually made them really special. We wanted to duplicate them as best we could just with better production and equipment.
Lots of room mics creating space and texture. The goal was always guitar and vocals. Of course things get added because you get excited at the possibilities and potential of things but we really tried to keep it as simple as possible.
Q6. All That Glitters Isn’t Gold begins the album at the point where everything starts collapsing. Looking back now, what do you hear in that song that you perhaps could not recognize while writing it?
Ouch, that’s a rough one. I would say when I wrote it I was clinging to some blind hope that there was still a chance she would come back. When I recorded it, I knew that any of that hope was dead and buried. It was a tough song to get through.
Q7. You have described dealing with self-doubt and imposter syndrome during the process. Did finishing the album actually quiet those feelings, or simply teach you how to work through them?
I could talk about this subject for hours but in short I’ll say they were quieted at times but can’t say silenced. As I go through putting them album out and deal with the phases of a release there’s things that come up that bring out those feelings. I’ve definitely come a long way with it all, no doubt, but compliments can still make me uncomfortable.
I’m still a work in progress but now I have some tools to pull out to kind of deal with those feelings. Staying at Eric’s studio in Brooklyn when we were making the record really helped me along. There’s something really special about that environment and tapping into the creativity.
It definitely helps you combat the doubt when you’re able to focus, put all the work in and walk away with something you’re really proud of.
Q8. Your history with Pela and Augustines meant you had already experienced the realities of touring and the music industry from behind the scenes. Has becoming the artist changed the way you understand those years?
I just know now that you really better love making the art. I’m not sure any artist likes the business side of it.
Q9. The record moves from heartbreak towards resilience and hope without pretending recovery happens neatly. What did you want the final songs to say about healing that the earlier tracks could not?
That the heartbreaks and those moments of solitude, questioning everything about yourself are just as important to the human experience than the wins are.
They’re awful to go through and sometimes they can get really dark but hopefully you come out the other side with a better understanding of yourself and the experience makes you grow. There’s no shame in having scars.
Q10. FM PRO TECH Q: In a music environment increasingly driven by individual tracks, playlists and short-form discovery, what made you commit to a ten-song album designed to be heard as one complete emotional story?
I’m old school. Albums are just embedded into my heart still. Nothing wrong with EPs or singles but for me personally, having an entire album was a really big deal.
Giving people a little incentive to listen to a whole album again feels like a good thing to me. Everyone needs to slow down more and take some time for themselves. I still love the idea of throwing on headphones and listening to album.
I hope people can escape in that way and connect with the story in my songs. It makes me really proud.
©fm