Goodnight, Charlene is the writing and recording name of Chris Zuhdi. The roots of the music stretch back to 2009, when Chris was a seminary student living behind train tracks in Fort Worth, Texas. “There was this train that ran like thirty feet behind my bedroom”, recalls Zuhdi, “it was the California Highball or something and it ran all night every night. Maybe it was insomnia that got me into music”.
Whatever the cause, it was then that Zuhdi began taking songwriting seriously. “I’d always loved music. And since I was 15 I’d sit around at night on the couch with an acoustic guitar and just make stuff up while I watched TV. But, there was something about 2009, and that house I was living in. It was owned by the seminary and was like this cool little 1950’s artist bungalow. At one time it was pretty nice but the years weren't kind to it. The roaches were so big there they’d wake me up at night. Seriously. But, it was a special place, and I guess it was there it all started.”
Zuhdi discovered sound engineer Bart Rose that same year and began recording in his studio in downtown Fort Worth between classes. “I just had this sense that I needed to start recording the stuff I was tinkering around with. Really record in a studio and everything. I looked at one other place in Dallas, had a couple of people offer me time in home studios, but I really digged Bart and his studio set-up was perfect.” Zuhdi spent much of the spring of 2009 recording in Bart’s studio. Bart Rose had, at the time, just finished turning the recording nobs for ubiquitous act The Toadies on their 2008 album No Deliverance. Then, according to Chris, “life sorta happened.”
The music went dormant and almost five years passed before Zuhdi returned to Bart’s studio. “I was reading recently about how Damascus is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. How each new city was layered onto the foundation of the city before it. I think art is kinda like that. At least my art has been. I laid a foundation in 2009. That was like one city. Life brought me back five years later and I added another layer. That’s how it’s been for me.”
Goodnight, Charlene is a self-titled debut EP and offers a four track sampling of Zuhdi’s 2009 recordings along with new material. It fuses folk, pounding acoustic riffs, and college radio rock with tight vocal harmonies and at times brooding, ambient keyboard. The EP achieved a peak chart position of #11 on the college radio top 30 and was added to CMJ “Core 50” station WMSE of Milwaukee.
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