Chuck Becomes Big Winner ^Featured

Big Winner is the new musical project from Charles Griffin Gibson, an American filmmaker and musician based in Oslo, Norway. Previously releasing music as Chuck, Gibson worked with cult label Audio Antihero (home to Frog). After leaving New York City, taking a musical hiatus, and becoming a father, it felt natural to start fresh as Big Winner.

An artist who once made anxious songs about dating and heavy drinking in NYC is now writing reflective songs exploring the private emotional complexities of parenthood and growing older. Big Winner’s debut album, Dinosaur, arrives November 13.

“I’m Chuck, an American filmmaker and musician based in Oslo. I used to live in Brooklyn and release music as CHUCK. Now I make music as Big Winner, and my debut album is Dinosaur. In 2019, I was in the process of moving from New York City to Norway with my wife, and I decided it was the right time to stop making music. For me, songwriting is a compulsive behaviour that requires a lot of emotional, mental, and logistical resources. At the time, giving those resources to music didn’t feel healthy anymore. I sold all my equipment before leaving behind the Big Apple and the social anxieties of my 20s.

Five years later, I found myself integrated into Scandinavian society with two kids and zero swag. I was an alien in a strange land, cleaning what felt like an endless conveyor belt of oatmeal-stained dirty dishes. I stood at the sink, exhausted, getting lost in thoughts of secret fantasies, lingering regrets, and reflections on my own childhood, which felt like it happened on another planet - back home in the US, a country I still felt deep in my bones, although, as I squinted at it across the Atlantic, I couldn’t really recognize it anymore.

One day, I bought a cheap classical guitar from someone in my neighborhood, and before I knew it, new songs started coming. Compulsions die hard. It wasn’t long before I was Big Winner, and I had to start recording the tracks.

But I didn’t want to let music take over my life again. So instead of buying a bunch of new gear, I decided to set a limitation on myself: the only physical instruments I was allowed to use on this record were the cheap classical guitar and an egg shaker I got from a Norwegian pop star. To complete the puzzle, I also used MIDI instruments, freelance musicians from Fiverr, and tons of Creative Commons sound effects I found online.

The title of this record comes from my son’s endearing obsession with dinosaurs, as well as my own feeling of slowly going extinct. Dinosaur is ultimately a record about ping-ponging back and forth between many contradictory feelings — the joy I feel when I’m playing with my kids, the way their eyeballs on me make me hate my bad habits, the hazy nostalgia of remembering my youth back in America, and the creeping realization that my (our?) time is running out.”