Chores is well aware that its name, at least when applied to the daily drudgery of real life, isn’t going to put a smile on anybody’s face. With that simple fact in mind, the Portland band gets together twice a week to write and rehearse songs to change the common perception of “chores.”
When asked about how they chose such a name, guitarist and singer Lou Thomas was quick to explain.

“I think part of the name,” Thomas said, “besides that we all liked it for being a catchy name, was that so many things in life are a chore – jobs you have, relationships, family – and we were trying to take that negative energy and turn it into positive energy through rock ‘n’ roll.”
Fellow singer and guitarist Jada Pierce concurred.
“I also think it’s something about embracing the mundane,” Pierce said, “and just trying to take the monotony of life and see it as something to celebrate more than to look at as ‘just a chore.’”
With these things in mind, Pierce, Thomas, bassist Eric Mellor, and drummer Matthew White got to work crafting the infectious, slow-churning songs found on their debut EP, “Life is Hard.” The EP’s title fits perfectly with the tongue-in-cheek attitude Chores takes to its plight as a band made up of people who, at Chores’ inception, were on the brink of feeling too old to keep playing in bands, and deeply entrenched in a world of day jobs and landlords.
Chores got together in Portland after each of the members moved, having played in bands in the towns where they’d previously lived, and found themselves grasping at what was most important.
Their collective answer became the music.
Mellor, Pierce and Thomas found White through an ad posted on Craigslist, and had no trouble deciding he was right for the part after they heard him play.
“He played our songs better than we do when he auditioned,” Thomas said.
“But the feeling was mutual as well,” White said. “I mean, it didn’t feel like we’d been playing together for years or anything, but maybe a couple weeks.”
From there, the band began building its body of work as a group, using a method Thomas described as “like sculpting.”
“I think as a band we really have a fairly non-traditional way of writing our songs because we write them collaboratively,” Pierce said. “More often than not we’re sitting down there together and just spontaneously coming up with things and then other people coming up with spontaneous things to go with them and then taking that and continuing to work with it and writing lyrics to it, what feels right.”
With an ever expanding and evolving catalog of songs, including “New New Deal,” which the band says has lived through at least three incarnations, Chores is coming to the West Coast on its first tour ever.
“None of us has ever been on tour,” Mellor said, “so this’ll be our first time actually getting in a van and playing our songs out to people that… there’s not a single person in the audience that we’ll know.”
That particular adventure begins Jan. 23 at Luckey’s in Eugene. The live set, according to the band, has more energy than the recordings can capture, and it promises to be fun a Wednesday.
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